Iffland Chosen
Executive Director
Of RAACD
By M. D. Drysdale

Former Planning Commission Chair Julie Iffland has been selected as the new executive director of the Randolph Area Community Development Corp., coming on board Jan. 21 to replace Jeremy Ingpen.

Julie Iffland Will Lead RACDC

By M. D. Drysdale

Former Planning Commission Chair Julie Iffland has been selected as the new executive director of the Randolph Area Community Development Corp., coming on board Jan. 21 to replace Jeremy Ingpen.

"I'm very happy about it," Iffland said yesterday. "You know I love Randolph."

She also knows Randolph pretty well. She presided over a multi-year process to produce a new town plan and took part in mutiple meetings between the Commission and various interested groups in the community.

"That's given me a pretty good understanding of where Randolph is headed," she said.

Ingpen is stepping down after three years on the job in order to move with his new wife to New York, where she has accepted employment.

"Jeremy's imagination and creativity will be missed," said RACDC President Marty Strange. "He got things done."

Iffland said RACDC's reputation for effectiveness is one of the things that attracted her to the job. "It's a great organization," she said, "and what a role it played at a critical tme."

RACDC was formed after the downtown fires of 1991 and 1992 and helped guide the recovery. Its development projects included collaboration with Peter Winslow on the Winslow Block on Main Street, the new downtown "streetscape," the parking lot east of Pleasant Street, the DuBois and King headquarters on Main Street, and the VTC business incubator on Route 66. It is helping East Randolph citizens with development efforts there.

In recent years, RACDC has spent most of its energy in new or rehabbed housing projects, including those on Hedding Drive, Main Street, Pearl Street, and Randolph Avenue. It owns the Joslyn House on Maple Street and a mobile home park off Thayer Brook Road.

Iffland will join the organization just as it begins work on one of its biggest projects ever—creation of a new housing development on land donated by Ethan Allen, Inc. along the railroad track and bordering Salisbury St. and School Street.

The "Salisbury Square" project is expected to create 20-25 units.

Developing projects is just what Iffland has been doing for the last 12 years with the Trust for Public Land, most of them in a Montpelier office.

She's a senior planner and team leader in the non-profit's work with conserving agricultural land, limited development, and resource protection.

She lives on Tatro Hill Road with her husband Chris Recchia, who commutes weekly to Washington, D.C. as an environmental consultant.

The RACDC board had 17 applicants for the job, Strange said. Three finalists were interviewed, each of whom would have made a good director, he said.

The board was impressed with Iffland's shepherding of the town planning effort—"The care she took with it"—even though the plan still has not been adopted.

She also had "a terrific interview" with the board, he said, "very professional and thoughtful."

"It's nice to have somebody coming on board with a lot of local history," Strange concluded.