Betsy Kane
title and firm: Environmental Consultant
location: Raleigh, NC
email: betsykane at earthlink dot net

Betsy is a Community Planner with the North Carolina Department of Commerce. She helps small towns revitalize their downtowns, develop sustainably, and build excellent public places.

Prior to joining the Department of Commerce, Betsy spent several years working as a planner with local and state governments as well as consulting firms, and practicing law. She graduated with honors from the School of Law at UNC-Chapel Hill and has a master’s degree in city planning from the University of Florida. She is a licensed North Carolina attorney.

Betsy focuses on the goal of “placemaking” as she helps communities formulate neighborhood plans and downtown plans. She fixes zoning ordinances that promote oil-dependent sprawl, replacing them with rules that meet the needs of people – especially people on foot. Since nearly every zoning ordinance of the state’s 548 towns and cities is based on a sprawl-promoting template formulated during last century’s Cheap Oil era, her work is pretty well cut out for her.

Betsy’s planning approach is grounded in public participation and community visioning, and she has often worked with communities that have a “majority minority” population or that have a history of racial division and need to find ways to move forward as a community.

Outside of state government working hours, Betsy works as an art consultant, keeps her legal skills up to date with pro bono projects, co-manages an organic community garden, and confects a reasonable facsimile of French cuisine in the tiny, inadequate kitchen of her downtown Raleigh apartment.

Her favorite culinary processes are those in which production is accomplished using the assistance of rapidly multiplying microscopic creatures.