Mary Roberts

Biografía: Mary Roberts Director of Community Development City of Littleton, CO Mary Roberts has 25 years of experience in land use, transportation, housing and economic development. Her background spans the public, private and non-profit sectors. She has worked for large cities (Denver, Colorado), small towns (Aspen, Colorado) and regional agencies (San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District [BART]). She is currently serving as the Director of Community Development for the City of Littleton, Colorado. A mid-sized suburb of Denver, Littleton is home to 47,000 people. It is situated between two major highway corridors and is the end of line for the area's first light rail, which has been operational since 2000. Ms Roberts oversees building, zoning, current and long range planning, historic preservation and neighborhood services. Accomplishments during her tenure with the city include a downtown historic district, the completion of design guidelines for the downtown and redeveloping commercial corridors, and initiating a process to update to the city's 30-year old comprehensive plan. She coordinates extensively with economic development public works, traffic and engineering departments, as well as outside agencies, elected and appointed officials and citizen groups. She has been with the city since October 2002. Upon arriving at the city, she undertook a departmental assessment to ascertain how best to allocate the limited staff resources of the department to meet desired service levels and identified customer needs. This assessment has been the basis for restructuring of positions to better achieve city council goals. As the Executive Director of the Aspen/Pitkin County Housing Authority, Ms Roberts managed an inter-governmental agency charged with developing, managing and setting policy for affordable housing. She led the authority through an expansion of its development program, bringing over two hundred new affordable units into the program. She was responsible for negotiating land deals, setting development programs and obtaining project entitlements. She also secured the long-term affordability of existing housing stock by working with land owners to convert rental property to affordable ownership units. While at BART she led the organization's first strategic planning effort. This entailed examination of management as well as operational systems. She worked with the elected board and senior staff to identify core service values, create a vision for the agency's future and establish implementation priorities. Ms Roberts also has experience working with advocacy groups and citizen involvement. While at the Bay Area Ridge Trail Council, a regional non-profit group in the San Francisco area, she worked with local volunteers to achieve a regional trail system for an eight-county area. Educating volunteers, decision-makers, property-owners and donors formed the basis of her work. As a consultant in the private sector she has produced comprehensive, special area and neighborhood plans as well as environmental assessments for development projects. Ms Roberts holds a master's in urban planning degree from the University of Colorado at Denver, a master's in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and a bachelor's degree in social sciences from Illinois State University. April 2008