The E.P. Systems Group, Inc.

Come and join The E.P. Systems Group and its President, Peter Meyer, at the 2013 Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference in Washington DC!

The conference, a project of the BlueGreen Alliance and an array of labor and environmental groups, with active participation by local government and community-based organizations, as well as members of the Obama Administration, is April 16-18, with some pre-conference events on April 15.  Check out the array of sessions, spanning everything from improving manufacturing competitiveness to community approaches to improving energy efficiency in homes. Just go to: <http://www.greenjobsconference.org> — multiple options for attendance are available.

The E.P. Systems Group, Inc.,, is a convener of the Good Jobs, Green Jobs Conference.

April 1st, 2013 | Category: News | Comments Off

EPSG, acting on behalf of the Coalition for the Advancement of Regional Transportation in Louisville, KY, completed review of the final Environmental Impact Statement and Record of Decision submitted by the Federal Highway Administration and the Kentucky and Indiana state transportation offices in support of a plan to build two new Interstate-grade bridges across the Ohio River. Filing an affidavit filed in support of CART’s legal claims against the incomplete EIS in January, 2013, Dr. Meyer found that (1) transit and street-level bridge alternatives were arbitrarily rejected, (2) no alternatives involving a combination of new roads and transit were even considered, (3) the transportation needs of 65,000 households in the area without cars were ignored, and (4) plans for placing tolls on the bridges would generate revenues of more than six times those needed for the project. The combination of flaws he identified justify a claim that the bridge proponents failed to consider and ameliorate unreasonable burdens placed on low income drivers needing to cross the river for work and on households without cars, both populations predominantly minority and protected under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act..

January 7th, 2013 | Category: News | Leave a comment

EPA’s national brownfields conference is coming to Atlanta, GA, May 15-17. This 15th National Brownfields Conference will include two and a half days of networking and educational programming. This year the conference features more than 100 educational sessions, including lively panel discussions, engaging town hall meetings, dynamic roundtable discussions, outstanding plenary sessions, special trainings, film screenings, book signings and more!

Come Join EPA and EPSG’s President Peter B. Meyer at this major event of interest to all urban developers, proponents of smart growth, and advocates for environmental protection and environmental justice. Dr. Meyer will be presenting in the Environmental Redevelopment Forum as well as participating in other educational sessions.

For more information, just log on to www.brownfieldsconference.org

We look forward to seeing you there!!

December 1st, 2012 | Category: News | Leave a comment

Peter B. Meyer, Phd, President of The E.P. Systems Group, Inc,, recently returned from a series of assignments in Europe. He worked on projects supported by the European Union and the United Kingdom and spoke at an international confer3ence on contaminated land in Poland.

Dr. Meyer first spent 10 days working on innovative solutions to scarcity and other problems of an impoverished neighborhood in the Borough of Tower Hamlets in London, UK, The initiative was part of the Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment (SCIBE) project, a trans-european initiative funded by the Humanities in European Research Area program of the EU. Working with a team of practitioners from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Russia, and Turkey he helped develop an initiative to broaden participation by women and other under-represented parties in identifying development needs in the heavily Bangladeshi neighborhood of Bromley-by-Bow.

He then participated in the 6th International Conference on Innovative Solutions for Revitalization of Degraded Areas, held in Ustron, Poland. He presented a paper to a predominantly Eastern European audience on “Generating Renewable Energy on Derelict Lands,” arguing that such efforts delivered to both the environmentalists’ dream and the economists’ policy prescriptions.

Finally, he moderated and served as a discussant at the presentation of the Final Report of the project on Suburban Neighborhood Adaptation for a Changing Climate, which he had also served as an adviser. The report, based on research in suburbs across the UK, was received by the Parliamentary Under Secretary of the Department for Communities and Local Government at a public meeting at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in London.

The E.P. Systems Group, Inc., continues to develop and draw on examples of economically efficient and environmentally protective economic development in settings across the globe as part of its core mission of correcting the misperception of inherent conflict between economic and environmental objectives.

November 13th, 2012 | Category: News | Leave a comment

The Birmingham-Hoover Metropolitan Area in Alabama is making decisions about whether or not to invest in a 52-mile highway spur that is budgeted at $4.7 Billion. The state and local contribution required to match the federal funds amounts to roughly the entire annual budget of the state’s Department of Transportation. The project was being pushed as a priority for economic development although the road was given a moderate-to-low priority ranking by the local transportation planning body.

The Southern Environmental Law Center, headquartered in Atlanta, and the Ochs Center for Metropolitan Studies contracted with The E.P. Systems Group, Inc., for the core economic impact analysis and other contributions to a critical analysis of the rationales for the road and assessment of its true economic impact.

The EPSG analysis found that construction person-years of work were claimed as permanent jobs, that the time value of money (and all costs and benefits) was ignored, and that there were more cost-effective alternatives available to address an existing highway transportation need the proposed road did not serve well. Discounting costs and benefits revealed that the present value of the cost per job created exceeded $400,000, even if the fact that the local road construction labor supply could not meet the demands of the project, so both construction and spinoff jobs would not necessarily go to Alabamans.

The full report, written to be understandable by non-economists contains methodological and data analytical appendices and is available on-line here

The executive summary is available here

June 20th, 2012 | Category: News | Leave a comment

In Fall, 2011, the EPA issued a new Handbook providing recommendations for economic analysis of land cleanup and reuse activities and programs. These activities pose significant measurement problems associated with such unique qualities as the diversity of contaminants and affected media across sites, market pricing problems such as stigma, and the impacts of significant events that transpire over the course of a sometimes lengthy time frame.

EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics and its Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response collaborated to produce the new Handbook was both economically rigorous and applicable in the real-world. The peer-reviewed Handbook reviews analytical problems, provides policy planners and evaluators with recommendations for estimating the benefits, costs, and economic impacts of land cleanup and reuse, and then highlights the many unaswered questions remain in the literature.

On June 22, 2012, Peter Meyer, President of the The E.P. Systems Group, Inc., is joining with two of the economists from EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, Robin Jenkins and Heather Klemick, to present a webinar for practitioners ojn using the Handbook

June 18th, 2012 | Category: News | Leave a comment

In a period of extended unemployment and slow economic growth, many localities and states are struggling to attract new investment in hopes of stimulating their economies.  To help economic development organizations determine where to spend their limited stimulus resources, The E.P. Systems Group offers services to determine the job, payroll, gross income and tax revenue impacts of different types of new business investments.

Businesses seeking public sector support for their new investments can utilize the same analytical capacities to help them demonstrate the value to local economies that they would bring if they located in new settings.

August 26th, 2011 | Category: News | Comments Off

August, 2011 — The E.P. Systems Group  recently completed work identifying debt financing options for a well-established recycler looking to finance a new product line taking advantage of its raw materials flow and the demand for recycled materials from many in the construction industry.

August 26th, 2011 | Category: News | Comments Off

In addition to providing financial management technical assistance to state and local recipients of  formula grants from the US Department of Energy, E.P. Systems Group staff are supporting several recipients of special competitive DOE grants for creative retrofitting of existing buildings for more energy efficient operations.  We support financial leveraging efforts of both grantees and those of the subgrantees pf state-wide award winners.

June 19th, 2010 | Category: News | Comments Off