Egon Terplan is the Robert S. Cornish Endowed Chair of Regional Planning and Lecturer in City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. He is a specialist in regional economic development, land use, transportation, government reform and regional policy and currently writes about and advises on infrastructure, urban revitalization, economic development, region policy, and other topics.
From 2019 to 2022, he was a Governor appointee serving as the Senior Advisor for Economic Development and Transportation within the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research and the California Strategic Growth Council while also supporting the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development and the California High Speed Rail Authority. In that role, he helped launch and manage “Regions Rise Together,” a statewide inclusive economic development and sustainable growth initiative. Through that effort, Egon helped design and create two innovative regional implementation programs – the $600 million Community Economic Resilience Fund and the $600 million Regional Early Action Planning Grants of 2022. He was also the project director for the California Transportation Assessment (AB 285), a review of the state transportation planning and funding system developed, working in collaboration with UC ITS, and also relaunched and coordinated a working group of the 18 metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) with senior staff across eight state agencies.
Prior to joining the Governor’s office, Egon was the Regional Planning Director at San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR), the Bay Area’s urban policy think tank. While at SPUR, Egon authored or co-authored dozens of reports and policy studies on the intersections of economic development, regional planning, workforce preparation, land use, transportation, and governance. His published reports include Harnessing High-Speed Rail, The Urban Future of Work, a Bay Area Economic Prosperity Strategy and the first-ever report on the Northern California megaregion. He also served on the San Francisco Workforce Investment Board, the Regional Planning Committee for the Association of Bay Area Governments and was Vice Chair of the Policy Advisory Council of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.
Prior to joining SPUR, Egon spent more than five years with ICF International managing regional economic development strategy projects and advising cities and regions throughout the world on economic development and competitiveness. His work included managing and writing collaborative regional economic strategies throughout California and in Alberta, British Columbia, Connecticut, Louisiana, Ohio, Ontario and South Carolina. His international work included designing and implementing competitiveness programs in Argentina, Bosnia & Herzegovina, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Nigeria.
Egon received a Master of City Planning from UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. In addition to teaching at UC Berkeley, he has also been an instructor at Stanford University, the University of San Francisco, and San Jose State University.
