2025 MAPA Annual Awards
Every year at its Council of Officials Annual Meeting, the Omaha-Council Bluffs Metropolitan Area Planning Agency (MAPA) presents its Regional Citizenship and Regional Service Awards to individuals and organizations whose policies and programs contribute to the region’s quality of life and help the region improve or grow.
The recipients’ positive influence on the MAPA six-county region has been extraordinary.
MAPA presented its 2025 Regional CItizenship and Regional Service Awards at its Council of Officials Annual Meeting on Oct. 8, 2025 in Fort Calhoun, Nebraska.
Congratulations to all our award recipients!
Meet the 2025 Annual Awards recipients:
Regional Citizenship Award
Kent Holm, Director of Environmental Services, Douglas County, Nebraska
Kent Holm received our Regional Citizenship Award for his work in solid waste management. Kent chairs the Solid Waste Working Group, which is part of Heartland 2050’s Natural Resources Committee.
Through Kent’s leadership the Solid Waste Working Group helped get legislation passed in Nebraska concerning lithium ion batteries and their disposal, an important piece of legislation.
“The Solid Waste Management, by itself, is a health and safety issue, and lithium ion batteries in particular, in this specific case, are causing a lot of fires in solid waste facilities, things like transfer stations, landfills, also collection trucks,” said Holm.
“But they’re also now starting to find their way into residential/commercial settings where things like e-bikes may catch on fire when they’re being charged inappropriately, things like that. So it’s definitely a public safety issue, and it’s also an issue where the local taxpayers, state and local taxpayers, are really footing the bill to take care of the problem.”
Regional Citizenship Award
Kevin Zimmerman, Mayor of Minden, Iowa
On April 26, 2024, Arbor Day, a devastating tornado outbreak hit Eastern Nebraska and Western Iowa. The tornadoes that struck Minden, Iowa, killed one resident and destroyed 40% of the homes in the rural Iowa town.
As the long-time mayor of Minden, Kevin Zimmerman’s steadfast leadership is helping his community rebuild from this devastating event.
His personal investment, commitment and partnership with community organizations and local businesses has placed Minden on a trajectory of resilience for the future, embracing the opportunity to build back better.
Zimmerman said recovering from the tornado is a challenge, especially in the beginning because there was so much damage.
“It’s brutal to figure out a plan on hour one, minute one but we threw it together. The fire department was awesome. Everyone rallied together. Everyone followed a little bit of a lead,” said Zimmerman.
We were a pretty self-sustaining town where we had a lot of the things that the big towns, the big cities have and we lost some of that, so hopefully in time we can get some of that back.”
Regional Service Award
City of Treynor, Iowa
The City of Treynor has demonstrated an incredible commitment to improving the quality of life for its residents through collaborative partnerships and engagement.
The close coordination with community leaders within Vision Treynor and then Treynor’s Tomorrow resulted in a new sports complex and housing development.
Local leaders work alongside local residents to celebrate what people love about the community, build bonds as neighbors, and inspire the work of City leaders.
“In terms of partnership, you couldn’t ask for anything more than came out of the city of Treynor. You hope to get 8 to 10 people that would come together in an assessment, and when you have more than 100 to 150 people come together and tell you what they thought were the needs for Treynor, this was beyond our wildest dreams and we are just ecstatic the way it came about and the housing is just a small part of it,” said Michael Holton, Treynor City Administrator.
“It is a large project, but there are so many other things that they’ve come together and been able to do over the last year that makes it really unique and I think there’s a lot of different communities that are looking to see ‘what is it that Treynor actually did and how can we do that as well?’”
City of Omaha Public Works Department
The City of Omaha’s Public Works Department has distinguished itself through its leadership during the development and implementation of its Vision Zero program. The Vision Zero Action Plan set a high bar for MAPA’s Safe Streets for All Comprehensive Safety Action Plan.
In just a few short years since the plan’s development, the department has developed new and innovative approaches to deploy traffic safety countermeasures in partnership with neighborhood groups and business districts.
One of those key countermeasures or tools in the Vision Zero Plan is installing roundabouts at intersections.
“The beauty of roundabouts is that we are changing the angles where a conflict point occurs so that, you know, instead of these really kind of tragic and harmful t-bone type crashes with intersections being at 90 degrees, now we have more glancing blows in the intersections if we do have a crash,” said Austin Rowser, Omaha Public Works Assistant Director and City Engineer.
“If someone does make a mistake, and we understand that mistakes happen–we all make them–to where now, you know, we’re just having property damage to a vehicle, we’re not having serious injuries, we’re not having deaths that occur in those intersections.”
The department’s work has elevated the importance of traffic safety in local conversations and developed a playbook for local officials to foster a safer, more resilient transportation system for the region.
Congratulations again to all our award recipients!!