Season 6: MORPC Summit On Sustainability Episodes

For most of a decade, a vision for 500 miles of connected trails across Central Ohio got the same reaction: nice idea, no money, we will be long gone before it happens. Then Franklin County voters passed a sales tax, and the math flipped overnight. The region went from spending two to four million dollars a year on sidewalks, bikeways, and trails to sixty million a year, from now on. Melinda Vonstein, the Greenways Planning Studio lead at MORPC, gets to stand up now and tell people the vision th...

Melinda Vonstein leads the Greenways Planning Studio at MORPC, where she plans and expands Central Ohio's network of trails and works to connect communities across the region. Her origin story starts with a broken glass table. When it shattered in her backyard a little over a decade ago, her family dug up the grass instead of cleaning up the mess, built a patio, and never really stopped digging. A casual hobby turned into about an eighth of an acre of intentional ecosystem: grapevines overhead, ...

The EPA can call it a good air quality day while your own street tells a different story. Residents across Franklin County kept saying exactly that, and it is why MORPC built the Community-Led Enhanced Air Quality Network, a set of sensors roughly the size of a baseball that plug into an outlet, find the Wi-Fi, and publish their readings where anyone can look them up. JR Diaz-Hernandez runs that work as MORPC's air quality and sustainability program manager, along with the daily forecasts and th...

JR Diaz-Hernandez goes by the initials of two men. The J is his great-grandfather. The R is Roberto, the grandfather who helped raise him through his first nine years. He is now the air quality and sustainability program manager at MORPC, protecting public health across Central Ohio through forecasting, alerts, and neighborhood-level air monitoring. It started in Oak Cliff, a Dallas neighborhood where everything he needed sat within walking distance, where a Salvadoran family sold pupusas two fo...

For some communities, the word "sustainability" itself is the hurdle, tangled up in politics and easy to dismiss before the real work even starts. Brandi Whetstone spends her days getting past that. As director of sustainability at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, or MORPC, she runs Sustainable2050, the framework that has 39 communities, from small villages to the City of Columbus, moving toward the same healthier, more livable future. The trick is not a louder argument. It is meeti...

Brandi Whetstone is the director of sustainability at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, or MORPC, where she has spent 16 years helping Central Ohio communities plan for a healthier, more livable future. The MORPC miniseries opens by tracing how a kid from Bryan, Ohio turned a childhood of bikes, backyard kickball, and fishing trips with her dad into a career spent protecting the places people love. Her hometown happens to be the birthplace of the Etch A Sketch and Dum Dum Pops, but it w...