Principal / Vice President
- M.A.T. History, University of California, Davis
- B.A. History, University of California, Berkeley
- 34 Years Experience
- Qualifies as historian/architectural historian under the United States Secretary of the Interior’s Professional Qualification Standards (as defined in 36 CFR Part 61)
Mr. Herbert, a founding partner of JRP, has worked as a consulting historian on a wide variety of historical research, expert witness, and cultural resources management projects, as a researcher, writer, and project manager for more than thirty years.
In the realm of cultural resources Mr. Herbert has managed projects involving large numbers of resources, as well as analysis of single buildings. His experience includes the full panoply of cultural resources studies for history / architectural history, including research, context preparation, inventory and evaluation, assessment of effects, preparation of memoranda of agreement for mitigation of effects, and completion of mitigation measures under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act and under CEQA within the State of California. Some of the resources he has studied include military structures at more than 40 Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and Air Force facilities around the western US; powerhouses, ditches, canals, dams, bridges and other large engineering works; and a wide range of commercial, industrial, and residential structures. Mr. Herbert has prepared, and managed teams preparing, required mitigation studies including HABS/HAER recordation for historic resources being adversely affected by proposed projects. He has also led JRP’s projects related to power source Applications for Certification submitted to the California Energy Commission. In these efforts JRP works as a member of an overall environmental team, contributing to historic resources studies.
He has provided expert witness services and testimony in more than a dozen cases or administrative proceedings, in California superior courts in Sacramento, Yuba, Kern, Tulare counties, in flooding / torts cases including in the influential Paterno lawsuit, cases related to inland navigation and navigability of California waterways, and pre-1914 water rights; federal district court in San Francisco, in the Brother Jonathan marine salvage case; and before a State of Oregon Water Resources Department administrative hearing office panel on Klamath River water rights. Mr. Herbert has also provided historian expert consulting services to the US Department of Justice, Department of Justice of the State of California, and a number of law firms. He has also made presentations before a variety of planning agencies and city/county governments, and has given numerous lectures on topics related to public history.
Mr. Herbert’s academic fields of specialization were in California and Western United States history. He teaches a graduate seminar in research and public history at California State University, Sacramento (2001–present), and has taught history at community colleges in Sacramento and Solano counties. He has served the City of Davis as a commissioner on its Historic Resources Management Commission since 2003, and has been its chair since 2006. In 1990, Mr. Herbert was elected chair of the California Council for the Promotion of History (CCPH) and served a two-year term. He served as one of CCPH’s representatives on California Resources Secretary Douglas Wheeler’s Historic Preservation Task Force (1992–1994), and on the National Cultural Alliance’s Cultural Awareness Campaign, California Steering Committee. Mr. Herbert is a Registered Professional Historian (#508) with CCPH and a member of the National Council on Public History, California Historical Society, and the Ninth Circuit Court Historical Society. Mr. Herbert earned his MAT in History for the University of California Davis and his BA in History from the University of California, Berkeley. Based on his level of education and experience, Mr. Herbert qualifies as a historian / architectural historian under the United States Secretary of the Interior’s Professional Qualification Standards (as defined in 36 CFR Part 61).