Joseph Coomes

Biography: Joe Coomes has been a full ULI member since the mid-1970s and has served on several different product councils and week-long ULI plan analysis groups. He was instrumental in forming the Sacramento ULI District Council, and in 2013 receive its first Visionary Award, which was named after him. He was a contributing author to ULI’s 1989 book “Development Agreements, Practice, Policy, and Prospects" and to its most recent publication "Successful Private/Public Partnerships: From Principles to Practice" by the Public-Private Partnership Council. After serving as Sacramento’s first staff redevelopment attorney and then its City Attorney, Joe joined his former law firm, McDonough Holland and Allen, as a partner and developed a state-wide practice in redevelopment, closed military base reuse and land use, representing both public entities and private developers. He is credited with creating the model used in California to bring major retail shopping malls back into downtowns, and has negotiated other major projects, including San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens, San Jose’s Silicon Valley Financial Center, Portland’s Pioneer Square, sports arenas in Sacramento, San Jose and Portland, and base reuse developments at Mare Island, Hamilton Field and Fort Ord. In a civic capacity, he help create and served as first chairman of a state-city joint powers authority, the Capitol Area Development Authority, to develop a forty block area of state-owned property in downtown Sacramento into a vibrant community with new state office buildings, which a ULI panel described as “An experiment of national significance.” During a sabbatical from his law firm he was invited to create and teach a graduate semester course on land use planning and redevelopment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2008 he received one of the first Lifetime Achievement Awards given by the California Community Redevelopment Association. In 2013 the Sacramento ULI Chapter awarded him its first Vi