Faculty // Water Resources

Biography

Martin Pillsbury, Environmental Planning Director at MAPC, has been with MAPC since 1983. He manages all aspects of the agency's environmental and water resources programs.

Current Activities

Mr. Pillsbury currently oversees MAPC's climate adaptation planning, the Hazard Mitigation planning program, and the agency's technical assistance on stormwater management, including MS4 permits, Low Impact Development, and Green Infrastructure. He participates in state water resources policy as a gubernatorial appointee to the Water Management Advisory Committee, and was appointed by the House Speaker to the Massachusetts Water Infrastructure Finance Commission.

At the local level, Mr. Pillsbury has extensive experience in preparing groundwater and aquifer protection, and nonpoint source pollution watershed plans for several communities across the MAPC region. He managed MAPC's WaterSmart project, which produced the Low Impact Development Toolkit and the SummerSmart Guide to Seasonal Water Use. He has managed technical assistance projects to facilitate regional stormwater partnerships, as well as a project establish a municipal stormwater enterprise fund.

From 2009 to 2013 Mr. Pillsbury managed a $1million EPA Brownfields Assessment project in collaboration with the Cities of Peabody and Salem, MA, which resulted in assessments of over a dozen industrial sites, several of which have subsequently been cleaned up and redeveloped.

Past Experience

Prior to joining MAPC, Mr. Pillsbury served as an environmental planner for Wallace, Floyd Associates where he worked on the state's Long Range Water Supply Study 2020, and the New England River Basins Commission, where he produced a watershed plan for the Housatonic River basin, and assisted with a New England wide study of hydropower. He began his career at the New Jersey office of Coastal Zone Management, assisting with development of the state's first coastal zone management plan.

Education and Professional Affiliations

Mr. Pillsbury earned a Master of Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and a Bachelor of Arts in Geography and Environmental Studies from Rutgers University, New Jersey. Outside of his duties at MAPC, he has taught a college level course on water resources management for the Massachusetts Marine Studies Consortium since 1992. He was invited to present to the United Nations Symposium on Water and the City in Paris, France in 1997. He a presentation on the WaterSmart project at the annual conference of the American Planning Association in Las Vegas in 2008, and presented on the Peabody/Salem Brownfields project at the national EPA Brownfields conference in Atlanta in 2013. Mr. Pillsbury is fluent in Portuguese.


Areas of Expertise

Water resources planning and policy, watershed management, water quality, stormwater, water supply, and groundwater issues; coastal resources management; low-impact development; hazard mitigation planning, Brownfields, and environmental impact reviews under MEPA and NEPA.