Gary Scott, FASLA, ASLA 2008-2009 President-Elect

Gary Scott, FASLA, director of Parks and Recreation, West Des Moines, Iowa.

The ASLA announced July 1, 2008 the election of Gary Scott, FASLA as president-elect for 2008-2009. Mr. Scott officially becomes the president-elect on October 6, 2008 at the society’s annual meeting in Philadelphia and will be installed as president during the 2009 annual meeting in Chicago.

“I am extremely honored and I look forward to working with Angela, Perry, and the executive committee,” Mr. Scott said. “Angela” is Angela Dye, FASLA, the current president-elect and “Perry” is Perry Howard, FASLA, the current ASLA president.

Mr. Scott has served as director of Parks and Recreation for the city of West Des Moines since 1990, focusing on long-range planning, partnership building, advocacy, finance and public management.

For more than 22 years, Gary Scott has had a leadership role in the ASLA. He is currently the ASLA vice president of finance and has served as president, trustee and former finance committee chairman of the Iowa ASLA chapter. In 2007, he was elected to the ASLA Council of Fellows.

Gary Scott received his bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1980, then set to work planning and designing parks and open space with HDR/Cochran and Wilken. He joined the West Des Moines Parks and Recreation Department as a landscape architect in 1984 and was named director in 1990.

“I am particularly excited about my term coinciding with the next steps in the implementation of the collaborative Sustainable Sites Initiative,” Scott said. “This is huge. My excitement about this project is one of the major reasons I opted to run.”

The final Sustainable Sites Initiative report will be released in 2009, just prior to the beginning of Scott’s term.