Session Title Description
Planning and AI - Ethical Implications - ETHICS This session will be an interactive dialogue about the AICP Code of Ethics and how these principles apply to use of artificial intelligence. We will explore how planners are using AI and discuss potential ethical implications.
The Indiana Road to Zero Academy: A Training Workshop model for Safer Streets The goal of the Indiana Road to Zero Academy (IRTZA) is to equip community leaders, advocates, and professionals with tools to advance traffic safety initiatives with the goal of eliminating roadway fatalities. It will showcase the philosophies and approach to developing the workshop, including materials, content, structure, workshop design, and evaluation. Workshops seek to advance the Safe System approach to prioritize roadway safety and strengthen multimodal transportation systems.
Planning for Health: Where Do We Stand? As part of the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission’s PLAN4Health – Miami Valley Initiative, staff wanted to answer the question; are communities in our region promoting and advocating for health in all plans and policies? And if not, how can they? An audit of local planning documents and subsequent survey sent to local planners, revealed the answer to that question.
Creating Safe Routes to School: Partnering with State Agencies to Provide Local Mini-Grants This session will focus on how a statewide nonprofit organization utilizes public health funding to support active transportation and the built environment through a statewide Safe Routes to School program funding through the Indiana Department of Health. It will highlight the role of mini-grants to support local community efforts to increase the number of students walking, biking, and rolling to school and around their communities. Grantee success stories from both rural and urban contexts will be shared.
Expand Your Toolkit: Design Thinking for Inclusive Planning Empathize. Define. Ideate. Prototype. Test. Design Thinking isn't just a linear series of steps, but a cyclical human-centered methodology that prioritizes growth through creative problem identification and inclusive implementation. Join us for a brief workshop where you’ll learn the foundations of the Design Thinking process while exploring issues relevant to Housing Policy.
Planning for the Digital Age: Broadband, Data Centers, and Community Capacity Join the State Broadband Directors of Ohio and Kentucky for a regional analysis of digital infrastructure growth, ranging from high-speed internet deployment to the rising demand for data centers. This panel explores how communities can move beyond reactive regulation by proactively preparing for the digital age with traditional approaches to planning as well as the non-traditional, such as the utilization of service fellowships to build capacity and drive proactive public engagement. Attendees will leave with strategies to effectively balance local land-use protections with the necessity of modern digital connectivity.
Addressing Lead in Historically Underserved Neighborhoods - EQUITY This session examines how Greater Cincinnati Water Works uses data-driven prioritization to ensure lead service line replacements reach the city's most vulnerable populations first. Topics will include development of the prioritization scoring system, how it is used today to plan efforts, and additional challenges and planning necessary improvements.
Advocating For Affordable Housing Development When The Room Is Stacked Against It (1 of 2) - EQUITY National and state policy leaders are establishing funding programs and land use policies to address the nationwide housing crisis. However, the local jurisdiction’s planning and zoning policy-making is often where neighborhood battles for new affordable housing are lost. Engage with an experienced panel to learn how to raise your level of advocacy a notch higher while staying within appropriate legal and professional boundaries. Two sessions are being offered with the same purpose; with different panelists in each.
Advocating For Affordable Housing Development When The Room Is Stacked Against It (2 of 2) - EQUITY Public participation in decision-making has been the hallmark of the planning profession for decades. However, many of us fear the dreaded “Not In My Backyard” advocacy pressure when it comes to a challenging decision for new land use policy or a specific affordable housing project. Especially when the advocacy against the policy comes from well-respected individuals or groups. Stormwater! Property values! Traffic! Every reason imaginable is raised in opposition to affordable housing; but which ones are legitimate concerns and which ones are being presented as neighborhood blockade? What individual responsibility does a planning professional have in helping solve the housing crisis? The AICP Code of Ethics tell us that Equity is “just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, prosper and reach their full potential. Unlocking the promise of the nation by unleashing the promise in us all.” The Code of Ethics requires us to simultaneously: Serve the Public Interest, Seek Social Justice, Avoid Improper Influence, and be Responsible to our Employer. Our heart wants to advocate for what we know a community desperately needs, but our mind tells us that we could lose our job or our friends. Is this a professional dilemma or are we learning more about our own professional responsibility? Is advocacy actually feasible if we are to get an affordable housing policy or project over the finish line? How do we measure the risks and benefits of which fork in the “policy road” to take? Engage with an experienced panel to learn how to raise your level of advocacy maybe just one notch higher while staying within appropriate legal and professional boundaries.
Experience Mill Creek: Bolstering Trail-Oriented Development For All Cincinnati, Ohio is nearing a completed 34-mile urban trail loop that will transform how people experience our great city. The last major segment to be built goes through eight historically disinvested neighborhoods eager for partnership and investment that enhances their daily lives. A coalition has formed to ensure that a strong vision with articulated values and preferred development programming is packaged and used to push for desired changes across the district. Experience Mill Creek (EMC) is a campaign led by City, organizational, business owner, and resident leaders who understand the opportunities, barriers, and potential threats that can come with transformative development. Namely, how do we welcome new housing, commercial, and public space development and the new neighbors, employees, and visitors these efforts will bring, while ensuring our long-standing community members have the opportunity to ride the wave? This session’s panel represents that coalition and will discuss how EMC has navigated these waters familiar to planning professionals. We will touch on ways to avoid planning fatigue, best practices for working with a multi-committee project structure, effectively involving paid community ambassadors, and incorporating quick-build activations to build relationships and momentum for long-term implementation.
How to Provide Action-Oriented, Capacity-Aligned Specificity in Plans Describing community strengths, needs, and opportunities is where planners thrive. We’re used to teaming with designers to help dream and depict what’s possible. Oftentimes, we point to inspiring, relevant examples and incorporate lessons learned into our projects. Where final plans often fall short is in applying a variety of broad, commendable goals to specific places where the work can be started. Knowing the housing production, job growth, street, and public space needs is critical, but not the end of the story. Community change is too reliant on place-based capacity not to be addressed. How then do we incorporate specific plan implementation tactics that meet people where they are while making desired changes attainable? Yard & Company has long been focused on action-oriented strategies tied to long-term community visions. During this session, local project examples will be utilized to showcase replicable tactics. We will dig into business district revitalization strategies for Pleasant Ridge, a Cincinnati neighborhood with a typical Main Street, mixed-use format, and compare that with tactics for St. Bernard, a lower-density village community. Our tips for aligning plans to organizational capacity will leverage a recent collaboration with Price Hill Will, a community development corporation responsible for a large geographic area and a history of varying approaches toward community development. Additionally, we will highlight a resident-led neighborhood plan from St. Louis that was adopted nearly three years ago and has benefited from an implementation strategy that has stayed on track across leadership changes. Attend to learn more about how a vertically comprehensive approach to community planning can help make change achievable.
Fast, Flexible, and Visual — GIS-Centered Workflows for Planning Deliverables Planners are increasingly expected to produce a wide range of high-quality deliverables—maps, dashboards, exhibits, engagement tools, and presentation graphics—often on tight timelines and with evolving project needs. This session explores how GIS can serve as the backbone of an efficient, flexible workflow that integrates seamlessly with tools such as ArcGIS Online, Adobe Creative Suite, and AutoCAD software. Using real planning project examples, the session will demonstrate how data, analysis, and concepts can move smoothly between platforms to support multiple deliverable types. Topics will include structuring GIS projects for efficiency, syncing data between ArcGIS Pro and AGOL, exporting and refining graphics in Adobe, working with CAD-based designs, and rapidly adapting outputs for public engagement, client review, and decision-making. Attendees will gain practical strategies for streamlining workflows, reducing rework, and adapting deliverables for different audiences while maintaining data integrity and visual consistency. The session is designed for planners and GIS professionals looking to work faster, collaborate more effectively, and get more value out of the tools they already use.
Ohio Land Use Law Update - LAW This would be a repeat of the law update I did at the APA Ohio conference in Toledo. It could be tailored more closely to Southwest Ohio for this conference.
Disconnected Communities: Why Some Residential Neighborhoods Resist Pro-Density Zoning Reform During the past two years, Cincinnati's neighborhoods (and especially its community councils) have actively resisted the city's "Connected Communities" zoning reform. While reform proponents dismissed this pushback as NIMBYism, it is in fact a much more nuanced and thoughtful opposition with disparate neighborhoods sharing similar concerns. This presentation would present a community-level view of this opposition and how cities can better develop zoning reforms which address these concerns.
Real Life Infill Housing Examples - Tales from an Accidental Developer This presentation will provide easy-to-follow methods to quickly identify areas for infill residential activation in your community, regardless of population size, politics or current housing situation. The ideas, thoughts, concepts and projects shared are through the direct experience of an "accidental developer" who also happens to be an AICP.
Solutions to Grant Inequities in Urban Revitalization Nonprofits This presentation examines the persistent funding inequities and capacity barriers that emerging nonprofits face in housing and neighborhood revitalization. Explore the self-perpetuating cycle: without funding, organizations cannot develop projects to expand their portfolios, and without portfolios, they struggle to secure grants. Emerging nonprofits and community development organizations face a dilemma that limits their ability to contribute to housing and urban revitalization solutions. Through findings from a qualitative research study, learn practical strategies that smaller organizations use to overcome funding and capacity challenges. Get actionable tools to foster equitable partnerships, integrate emerging organizations into planning processes, and identify funding mechanisms that support inclusive, community-driven housing initiatives. Gain insights into assessing grant criteria, designing capacity-building interventions, and promoting equitable funding practices that elevate underrepresented voices. By understanding both barriers and potential solutions, you will be able to implement strategies that break the grant cycle, strengthen local nonprofit capacity, and drive sustainable neighborhood revitalization. Leave equipped to create more inclusive, effective, and equitable housing and community development strategies, ensuring that revitalization efforts reflect the needs, knowledge, and contributions of diverse communities.
Planning to Age Well: Using Asset-Based Community Development to Build the Kenton County Aging Readiness Plan This session shares insights from the Kenton County Age Well Initiative, a one-year, asset-based community development (ABCD) process that resulted in a five-year, multisector Aging Readiness Plan for Kenton County, Kentucky. As Kenton County prepares for a demographic shift in which nearly one in five residents will be age 65 or older by 2030, local leaders recognized that traditional needs-based planning alone would be insufficient. Instead, the Initiative intentionally centered resident voices, existing community strengths, and cross-sector assets to inform long-range planning. The Initiative engaged more than 400 residents, caregivers, service providers, and stakeholders through surveys, focus groups, community conversations, and facilitated workshops. Rather than asking solely what was lacking, engagement was structured around three guiding questions: what residents value about their community, what they want their community to look like as they age over the next five years, and which local groups or institutions could help achieve that vision. This approach shaped both the assessment findings and the eventual goals, grounding the plan in place-based assets such as community hubs and transportation networks. Planning and Development Services of Kenton County partnered with the project to assist with data collection, mapping analysis, and planning and zoning insight. The session will walk participants through how ABCD principles were adapted for a county-wide planning effort, how qualitative findings were translated into actionable goals across housing, transportation, community life, and long-term care, and how goal prioritization balanced community urgency with readiness and existing capacity. Attendees will leave with practical tools for integrating asset-based engagement into planning and zoning processes, particularly as communities support increasing longevity, housing affordability, and infrastructure needs.
The Road to AICP - Process, Preparation and Passing Taking the AICP (American Institute of Certified Planners) exam is the first step to become a certified planner. To qualify, one must be a current APA National member, pass an examination, and submit an online application meeting certain education and experience criteria. This session will cover the basics of the AICP application process, offer tips to help you can prepare for the AICP examination, and we’ll discuss how to maintain your credential after becoming certified. AICP’s will also offer their experiences prepping for and taking the exam.
Lessons Learned: Wisdom from Seasoned Planners The Cincinnati region is fortunate to have so many seasoned planning professionals who are still actively involved in both the professional world and have dedicated their time to APA. These professionals have spent years carefully cultivating their technical expertise, they have been in leadership positions, and they have taught and mentored the next generation of planning professionals. They are not only good at the work that they do, but they are dedicated to ensuring that the Cincinnati region’s strong history of exceptional planning carries on. These leaders in the Planning field will talk about their own experience in the profession. They’ll explain how the profession has changed over the past 20-30 years and how they expect it to change in the future. They’ll talk about the challenge of maintaining integrity under political pressure. They’ll relay their experience with the skills that are most needed for long-term success in the profession. They’ll also share challenges they’ve faced over the years, the mistakes they’ve made, and the lessons they’ve learned. These issues will be addressed in this session by a number of planning leaders in Ohio, all of whom have successfully navigated the evolution of their career, and who are generously passing their knowledge along to the planning professionals who are readying to take their places. There will also be plenty of time for questions from the audience. Ultimately, all participants will learn from each other. The conversation will be designed and facilitated by Eric Anderson, AICP, KZF Design; Greg Dale, FAICP, McBride Dale Clarion; and Katherine Keough-Jurs, FAICP, City of Cincinnati, but several other seasoned planners will join them in tackling this topic.
So you want to be a transit planner? Metro shares what it takes Cincinnati Metro has been busy expanding service since 2020. The Reinventing Metro Plan, which was completed in 2018, provided the initial vision for growing service after the Issue 7 levy passed. However, after the COVID 19 pandemic, regional travel patterns changed significantly, resulting in the need to re-evaluate Metro’s expansion plans. In this session, Metro’s transit planning team will discuss the basics of transit planning and analysis. Metro staff will describe recent planning efforts including planning for the Bus Rapid Transit Service, Metro Rapid, as well as the new mobility on demand service, MetroNow! In addition, The Short Range Transit Plan (SRTP) was completed by Metro staff in 2025 and provides the new vision for Metro’s service expansion through the year 2030. In this session, planners will provide a detailed look at the analysis and key findings of the Short Range Transit Plan and ongoing efforts to create a Long Range Transit Plan (Metro 2040) to guide Hamilton County Transit services through 2040. Finally, Metro’s transit planning team will provide insights into how local communities can help provide better integrations with transit within local developments. By planning for transit at the onset of developments, Metro can provide better service and more comfortable places for riders, which will help grow transit usage in our region.
Story-Powered: Tailored Presentations that Drive Project Success and Defuse Angry Audiences Stop simply presenting data; start engaging your audience and managing expectations and objections. This session focuses on how engineers, government officials, and planners can use storytelling as a powerful tool to convey their message and proactively defuse conflict. Learn to analyze your audience, anticipate their key questions and potential pushback, and then craft narratives that thoughtfully address these points within your core message. The result? More persuasive presentations, fewer surprises, and a clearer path to stakeholder agreement and project success.
Planning Commissioners' Training This year’s Planning Commissioners training will focus on two common challenges:
1. Understanding the powers of the planning commission.
2. Managing effective meetings during a time of increasingly strained civic decorum.

First, the training will explore where Planning Commission powers lie in relation to the quasi-judicial Board of Zoning Appeals and the legislative council.  Second, the training will examine meeting management techniques to ensure respectful civic discourse, public hearings use time efficiently, and everyone’s voice is heard.  
A Slippery Slope: Working Together to Protect Sensitive Areas A Slippery Slope: Working Together to Protect Sensitive Areas is an environmental planning-focused session on coordinating watershed protection, hillside safety, and land use policy to promote resilient community growth and the conservation of natural areas.

None at this time.