The Greenville Team Welcomes You
Your colleagues at the City of Greenville invite you to experience our City by attending the 2008 Transforming Local Government Conference. Early June is a wonderful time to visit Upstate, South Carolina.
The Greenville area’s lush tree canopy will be on display throughout the community’s hilly landscape. Public and private gardens will have reached their summer glory. Downtown will play host to daily outdoor concerts and
minor-league baseball games. Sidewalks will be crowded as residents, business persons and visitors sample downtown’s 85 restaurants, many of which offer outdoor seating. Runners and walkers will take advantage of the scenic riverfront trails leading to and through Falls Park on the Reedy. The weather will be warm enough to enjoy a wide range of outdoor activities in and around Greenville; but South Carolina’s midsummer heat and humidity won’t yet be prevalent. You can expect an average high temperature of 85 degrees, with mild low temperatures of around 69 degrees. Relative humidity will be low; around 69%. Rainfall will be light to non-existent.
The Transforming Local Government Conference will be held at the newly-renovated Carolina First Center, which offers some of the best convention center food available - anywhere. The Center will provide state-of-the-art meeting facilities and is located less than 10 minutes’ driving time from the official conference hotels, all of which are located in downtown Greenville: the Hyatt Regency-Greenville, the Westin Poinsett Hotel and the Hampton Inn-RiverPlace.
Greenville is an ideal site for the Transforming Local Government Conference because Greenville is a transformation success story. Constrained by the nation’s most restrictive annexation laws and surrounded by a growing, sprawling county whose population exceeds 400,000, Greenville city leaders have been forced to focus on sustainable redevelopment to revitalize the city and keep it financially viable. In doing so, Greenville leaders have created a very livable city, with a range of assets and amenities rarely found in a community of 60,000 people.
Greenville’s award-winning, much-heralded downtown is one of the nation’s greatest examples of sustainable redevelopment. Greenville’s downtown also provides a bricks-and-mortar testament to innovation. In the late 1970s, faced with a slowly declining downtown, Greenville leaders chose to begin working
closely with world-class planners and partnering with private developers to re-create the downtown through sustainable redevelopment. In addition, the City has used principles of sustainable redevelopment in projects outside the downtown, including development of an 1100-acre research and development campus as well as in mixed-use developments. In its redevelopment efforts, the City has also worked diligently to ensure that a diverse, healthy mix of people and economic levels will continue to be able to reside in the City. While Greenville has fostered development of extensive new market-rate downtown housing, the City has also successfully completed neighborhood revitalization efforts featuring affordable housing to allow low- and moderate-income individuals and families to continue to reside in the City.
The Greenville staff has worked closely with the Alliance for Innovation to plan and organize a content-rich program, leavened by a healthy infusion of networking and just plain fun. Key components of the conference include:
- Five keynote speakers on topics related to sustainability;
- Research findings on sustainability from our partners at Arizona State University;
- A panel discussion on sustainability coordinated by ICMA;
- Presentations from experts on Solutions for Local Government;
- Educational tours, showcasing the Greenville community’s success in downtown revitalization, housing creation, and university/business collaboration;
- Planned roundtable discussions on topics of interest to local government executives;
- Twenty-eight local government innovations presentations,
- Regional receptions;
- A Greenville Drive baseball game at Greenville’s national-award-winning West End Field;
- Optional community tours; and
- A riverfront food and beach music fest we’ll call “Shaggin’ On The Reedy.”
And finally, because we know our beautiful region has so much to offer, we’ve suggested some day trips to sites around Greenville you may wish to consider, including:
Visit the
Greenville Convention and Visitors Bureau
for a comprehensive description of our community’s many assets.
The Greenville Team looks forward to helping you Enjoy Greenville!