Lance Simmens has published about 180 articles in the Huffington
Post, but his most recent article, Why our
Children Should Hate us, was censored and pulled from this
publication.
Lance Simmens is currently the President of the Malibu Adamson
House Foundation, he also serves as Second Vice-President of the
Malibu Democratic Club, is a board member of the Southern
California chapter of the Americans for Democratic Action, and is
on the Board of Advisors for Vote Riders, a national organization
which promotes more fair and equitable voter identification
laws.
He has spent nearly four decades involved in public service at
all levels of government: Federal, State and local. In
the process he has devoted his professional career to a search for
the most effective and efficient public policies, programs, and
processes to benefit the society at large. He most served as
the California State Director for Gasland Grassroots, an
organization devoted to public education on the issue of hydraulic
fracturing, or fracking, and promotion of the current HBO
documentary Gasland 2, and was California State Director
for the Citizens’ Trade Campaign, organizing efforts to defeat the
Trans Pacific Partnership.
He served CA Governor Jerry Brown as Deputy Director of
Communications for the California High-Speed Rail Authority, the
largest public works program in the history of the U.S. In
this position he helped to steer the program forward with a
business plan that has largely been hailed as realistic during a
most difficult economic period. In addition he served as the
chief spokesman for the project, doing innumerable interviews, both
on and off camera, oversaw placement of opinion-editorials in all
major newspapers in the State, and appeared in dozens of public for
a to advance this visionary transportation option for future
generations.
Mr. Simmens has spent fifteen years in Federal service, largely
serving in senior intergovernmental affairs positions for four
Cabinet Secretaries, six years as Assistant Executive Director of
the U.S. Conference of Mayors, where he staffed the powerful Urban
Economic Policy Committee charged with setting national economic
and budgetary priorities for the nation’s largest cities, six years
as Senior Economic Counsel to U.S. Senator James Sasser on the U.S.
Senate Budget Committee, and for nearly eight years served
Pennsylvania Governor Edward G. Rendell as Special Assistant for
Intergovernmental Affairs.
In this capacity he received the most distinguished non-member
awards for public service by the County Commissioners Association
of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania State Association of Township
Supervisors, and is the only person to have ever received the
Pennsylvania League of Cities and Municipalities’ Public Service
Citation twice. He also served as the Chairman of the
Governor’s panels on development of both wind and solar energy and
engineered groundbreaking model ordinances that have been emulated
nationwide.
In 1999 Mr. Simmens served as senior advisor on the President’s
Council on Y2K Conversion and was responsible for preparation and
publication of a government-wide Scenario Policy document on the
issue at a Cabinet-level meeting held at Blair House that Fall.
In 1993 Mr. Simmens was appointed by President Clinton to help
establish the Federal government’s first Office of Sustainable
Development in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
in the U.S. Department of Commerce. Over the next four years
he was instrumental in developing and implementing programs,
policies and regulations for sustainable fisheries that would earn
him the highest award from the Department of Commerce, the Gold
Medal Award, as leader of a team of government officials who
pioneered sustainable initiatives off the coast of New England, the
Pacific Northwest, and the Gulf of Mexico.
As Assistant Executive Director of the U.S. Conference of Mayors
from 1987-1993 he was responsible for economic and budgetary
resolutions and policies on key issues facing urban America,
including NAFTA, the Census undercount, targeted fiscal assistance,
and reordering Federal budget priorities to capture the “peace
dividend” afforded by the end of the Cold War. In 1991 he led
a delegation of Mayors to Moscow to participate in a conference on
Federalism to help with the transition of government under the
collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1992 he organized an
historic meeting of Russian and American Mayors at the United
Nations where they heard testimony from major world leaders
including Carl Sagan.
During the 1980’s Mr. Simmens served as Legislative Director for
U.S. Senator James Sasser and his Senior Economic Counsel on the
U.S. Senate Budget Committee. He directed his energies to
fighting to preserve domestic discretionary spending against the
ravages of the Reagan supply-side spending cuts.
Over the years he has written extensively, drafting statements
for the Congressional Record and Committee publications, op-ed
articles, and speeches. He has published over 400 articles
under his own name, and is a regular contributing writer for
Huffington Post.
In 2006 he was chosen by former Vice-President Al Gore to be one
of the first class of individuals to be trained to deliver
presentations on the implications of climate change. As a
climate change messenger he has delivered over 100 presentations
worldwide during that time, including an invitation to present at
the London School of Economics.
He has a Master’s degree in Public Administration from Temple
University and completed courses for a doctorate from George
Washington University, served as an Executive for five years at the
Iacocca Institute at Lehigh University, has taught public policy at
Santa Monica College, and completed Executive programs at the John
F. Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Institute for
International Development at Harvard University and the U.S. Army
War College.
In his spare time he is a voracious reader and he has written a
screenplay, a novel, which is expected to be published soon that
touches on the perils of drilling for natural gas, a book of
political and personal stories, and The Evolution of a
Revolution: An Attack upon Reason, Compromise and the
Constitution, has appeared in several political documentaries
including 14 Women, Electile Dysfunction, and Gasland
2.
He is the author of “The
Evolution of a Revolution: An Attack Upon Reason, Compromise and
the Constitution” and “Fracktured”,
the definitive anti-fracking novel.