2026 Session Descriptions
Session descriptions are being added on a rolling basis. Check back to see what’s new!
planning track
Placemaking as land use: coordinating growth and investment across rural communities
Stacy Henderson, Josh Nease, Kenzie New, & Bill Woodrum
Communities across West Virginia are proving that placemaking is far more than a marketing effort, it’s a practical land use strategy that helps small towns make smart, coordinated decisions about their future. When done with intention, placemaking guides how communities address vacant properties, connect trails, activate public spaces, and set redevelopment priorities. This session draws on lessons from regional collaborations such as NRG Towns, Mine Wars Towns, and Mon Forest Towns Partnership, each at very different stages in their journey. Learn how shared visioning across multiple communities can shape site selection, attract investment, and encourage the reuse of buildings and land. Participants will explore how coordinated wayfinding systems, shared storytelling, and aligned planning for outdoor recreation, conservation, and economic development can strengthen local identity while boosting long-term economic stability and opportunity across rural Appalachia.
Hazard-mitigated open spaces require inspections every three years. Monitoring thousands of scattered-site mitigation properties requires more than just spreadsheets; it requires a robust geospatial and data-driven strategy. This presentation highlights the West Virginia Emergency Management Division’s (WVEMD) NEW “Open Space Tracker,” a suite of integrated tools including mobile inspection forms, violation reporting portals, and interactive dashboards. We will discuss integrating the WVU GIS Tech Center’s WV Flood Tool to validate local monitoring efforts. Participants will gain insight into creating a “color-coded” compliance dashboard that prioritizes inspections, flags prohibited uses, and documents open-space use requests between subrecipients and FEMA Region 3.
Mitigated Open Space Tracking: A Proactive Approach to Open Space Mangement & Enforcement
William “Bill” Kuhn & Nuvia Villamizar
Community & Stakeholder Engagement Workshop
Carly O’Dell Jones, Breanna Shell, Becca Phillips, Anna Leisher, & Lydia Work
During this interactive session, participants will work together in small groups on a scenario of a real project in Fairmont, West Virginia — a proposed recreational development on a site with legacy brownfield issues. After an overview of community and stakeholder engagement and some new tools of the trade, each group will create a community and stakeholder engagement plan for the project using the content presented and creativity from their individual experiences. Participants will then brainstorm and discuss ways to incorporate lessons learned into their own project challenges in real life.
Brownfield redevelopment is complex and multi-faceted and can be difficult to navigate when you’re just getting started. Coming to a major event where everyone seems to know all the jardon and shorthand can be overwhelming and disorienting. Brownfields Bootcamp is a basic training on brownfield topics, where participants will learn a brief history and background of brownfields, a crash course in key acronyms and programs, an overview of all appropriate inquiry, and a quick look at key state and federal resources. Mid-Atlantic TAB will share resources and opportunities for new recruits and arm them with a plan of attack for understanding the environmental, economic, and human aspects of brownfield redevelopment. Brownfields veterans from the Kanawha County Commission will share stories from their work to implement EPA Brownfields funding as part of a plan of attack for long-term, place-based community development and economic revitalization.
Brownfields Bootcamp: Starting on the Right Foot
Carrie Staton, Katie See, Sam Wilkes, & Amy Petry
Land Banking Track
Beyond Buyouts: Planning Productive
Cally Lange, Kim Reed, & Ray Moeller
Across rural America, communities are grappling with the aftermath of repetitive flooding and federally funded property buyouts that permanently restrict development. Under FEMA’s Model Deed Restrictions, acquired properties must remain as open space in perpetuity, limiting future uses to parks, wetlands, or agriculture. While these rules reduce flood risk, they often remove parcels from the tax base and leave rural governments managing fragmented, underutilized land with few clear pathways forward.
This presentation examines how FEMA-restricted and floodplain properties can be repositioned as community assets through informed planning, regulatory literacy, and local initiative. The session sis anchored by two West Virginia case examples. In Nitro, City Planner and Land Bank Director Kim Reed led the successful transformation of a FEMA buyout parcel into a community-serving apiary, demonstrating how low-impact agricultural uses can comply with deed restrictions while generating economic and ecological value. In Marlinton, Ray Moeller of WV Brownfields will share his experience navigating history registry status to secure variances that enabled the preservation and restoration of a landmark structure located within the floodplain, highlighting the nuanced interplay between historic preservation, local ordinances, and hazard mitigation requirements.
Drawing on comparative case study research by the Brownfields Assistance Center at WVU, including policy analysis, GIS mapping, and practitioner interviews, the presentation reframes post-flood landscapes not as permanent losses, but as places where planning judgment, flexibility, and stewardship can unlock resilience and opportunity.
The Charleston Land Reuse Agency has been working since 2019 to recycle land in residential neighborhoods, especially the West Side. While the work of land banking is often dispersed across a community, each lot we put back into productive reuse has a tangible, positive impact on neighbors.
Modest by themselves, new construction, home rehabilitation, side lot, and food access projects are each small steps toward a more livable community. Come along with us as we see why many small changes are having an impact larger than the sum of their parts.
This mobile tour will introduce participants to project ideas that can work in most any community and show how collaboration with partners is the most effective way to bring projects across the finish line.
Space is limited. Additional registration required.
little by little: Incremental Change to Build up Neighborhoods
John Butterworth & Khrista Messinger
Conservation & Agriculture Track
Seizing the Means of Forest Carbon Production: Landowners, Land, and Labor
Dylan M. Harris
As the ‘new’ carbon economy — the production and selling of carbon as an abstracted commodity — emerges in the presence of the ‘old carbon economy (e.g., fossil capitalism), what insights may be relevant regarding the role of labor power in determining the contours, trajectory, and potential outcomes for the Just Transition away from fossil fuels towards a more equitable society? What are specific practices — or chokepoints — where ‘new’ carbon is susceptible to labor power, and how might these be engaged to create better conditions for workers and their communities rather than retreading the inequalities of the old carbon economy? This presentation addresses these questions by identifying the labor power of small landowners involved in the forest carbon projects, that is then bundled with other parcels and monitored by third parties to produce additionalities, that are then sold as carbon credits to corporate buyers. What is landowners agglomerated their parcels to demand a higher price, rather than having their carbon aggregated and monitored by a third party? By conceptualizing landowners as workers, and their forest carbon management practices as labor, this presentation argues that landowners can organize the demand better contract conditions. Combining insights from forest site visits and semi-structured interviews with landowners, this presentation makes the case for seizing the means of forest carbon production to shift the ‘new’ carbon economy away from historical patterns of resource dispossession toward a more equitable Just Transition.