Richard Reinhard

Biography: Rick Reinhard is associate of The Lakelands Institute and principal of Niagara Consulting Group, focusing on advising houses of worship, their parent organizations, municipalities, and investors on church repurposing and redevelopment. Rick focused on urban economic development for decades, then spent five years working as an executive at the United Methodist Church. Supreme Court and U.S. Capitol. For 30 years, Rick led business improvement districts and other urban economic-development organizations throughout North America and the United Kingdom, including Central Richmond Association, Buffalo Place Inc., Central Atlanta Progress, the Downtown DC Business Improvement District DC, and Ilex Urban Regeneration Company in Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland. He earned a reputation as a leader in how public-private partnerships can improve Downtowns and commercial areas. He served as chief of staff to the Mayor of Buffalo, instituting the Downtown and Neighborhood Summit process for community revitalization and initiated a successful initiative to improve the City Charter for the first time in more than 50 years. As consultant to the Mayor, he created the transformative Buffalo-Niagara Medical Campus, the Number One economic-development initiative in Western New York, today responsible for more than $750 million in public and private funding on a 120-acre inner-city campus. Rick was chief operating officer of a Toronto-based, private-sector, real-estate development corporation. He initiated the Public Infrastructure Initiative at the Urban Land Institute. He began his career covering political-corruption probes and murder trials as a newspaper reporter in his hometown of Syracuse. As adjunct faculty member, Rick has taught urban planning and public policy at five major research universities: University at Buffalo, Emory University, Georgia State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia Tech, and the University of Ulster (Northern Irelan