Tag: City of Madras Comprehensive Plan

Top 3 Lessons Learned Throughout the CPW Process

Posted on by Julia Havens
Team Madras Hazards Plan Integration OPDR Oregon Partnership for Disaster Resilience CPW Community Planning Workshop
Team Madras: Sarah Allison, Project Manager with team members: Emily Kettell, Laura Stroud, Elizabeth Miller, Drew Pfefferle, Ross Peizer (photo taken at Smith Rock State Park, Terreborne, Oregon)

Team Madras (Madras Hazards Plan Integration) is made up of five first-year Community and Regional Planning graduate students enrolled in the Community Planning Workshop (CPW). The team’s project consists of taking Jefferson County’s Natural Hazard Mitigation Plan (NHMP) and integrating it with Madras’ comprehensive plan, the City’s regulatory planning document. For most of us on Team Madras, we came into the project knowing next to nothing about natural hazard planning. Some people devote their entire careers to hazard planning, and we were just taking on a six-month project. So, how were we to catch up, or at least begin to learn the basics of hazard planning and completing such an important project? This blog provides insight into some key lessons that our team learned about the project we have been working on.

1. Case Studies Can Provide a Huge Base of Knowledge
Aside from reading information from FEMA, and some pretty lengthy policy documents, our team found that the best way to learn about natural hazard planning was through case studies. Understanding what other cities have done to succeed (and fail) in the field of hazard mitigation, and more specifically, in the integration of the NHMP with the comprehensive plan, was extremely helpful for everyone on the team.

If we had just stuck to reading lengthy policy documents, we would have only had some abstract ideas as to what natural hazard planning was all about. The main lesson we learned about case studies is that by reading them, our team members were able to ground ourselves in natural hazard planning through concrete examples. After reading the case studies, our team began working on our project with a greater understanding of what we needed to accomplish moving forward.

2. Check In Often
While our team is working from Eugene, our client is three hours away in Madras and we need to make sure that we check in from time to time. As we create our revised natural hazards chapter, our client has been willing to review our goal and policy language, to ensure that what we write matches the standards and expectations that he has set for the final stages of the project.

Aside from our client, we have checked in with our Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) twice and had a conference call with Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) representatives to discuss our hazard inventory, as well as our goal and policy language before it becomes finalized. The main lesson that our team learned was that by checking in frequently, we can make changes early in order to try and avoid any conflicts at the end of the project.

3. Public Participation is Key to Successful Deliverables
One of the most important aspects of creating our final deliverables has been the public participation input. We held a public forum and realized that some people hold strong opinions on matters that affect land use and regulations. In an attempt to receive the greatest amount of input as possible and keep the dialogue productive, we created a set-up of stations so that we could have one-on-one conversations with attendees. This allowed us to gather valuable input, start dialogues, and diffuse any potential air of conflict by addressing concerns upfront.

The resulting input that we received has directly informed the goals, policies, and implementation measures that we have included in our primary deliverable, the hazard mitigation chapter for the comprehensive plan. The input not only gave us a sense of what would be more or less popular with citizens, but also clued us into specific language that we should or should not avoid using. We learned that including public input and understanding the public’s point of view would create a stronger end product that wins more public support. While we will never win everyone’s support, by including public input, we can create a product that the public feels better about because their input has been included in our process.

Conclusion
Over the course of this twenty-week project Team Madras has learned several lessons in the process. Our hope is that in the future other cities can learn from our process as they proceed in comprehensive hazard mitigation planning.

 

Elizabeth Miller Madras Hazards Integration Plan CPW Community Planning Workshop
Emily Kettell University of Oregon Community Planning Workshop CPW Madras Hazards Plan Integration

 

About the Authors: Elizabeth Miller is a Community and Regional Planning student at the University of Oregon, and is additionally pursuing a certificate in Nonprofit Management.  She is from Kalispell, Montana, and is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with degrees in Fine Arts, Political Science, and Peace Studies. Emily Kettell is a first year Community and Regional Planning graduate student. She moved to Eugene from Chicago where she received her Bachelors degree from DePaul University, majoring in French and Public Policy, with a concentration in Environmental Studies.

Planning in the Calm before the Storm

Posted on by Julia Havens
OPDR Oregon Partnership for Disaster Resilience Madras Hazards Plan Integration
Illustration of the complicated interconnections of federal, state, and local policies as they relate to local planning for natural hazards. (FEMA: Federal Emergency Management Agency; DLCD: Dept. Land Conservation and Development)

In my hometown on the southern coast of North Carolina, preparing our home for natural disasters, namely hurricanes, was part of the routine. The first storms I remember were Bertha and Fran in the summer of 1996. Both hurricanes made landfall near my hometown within a few weeks of one another. Our house was undamaged that summer, but I can still remember standing on our front porch in the eerily calm eye of the storm, knowing we were only halfway through.

My personal experience with natural disasters piqued my interest in this year’s Community Planning Workshop (CPW) project that focuses on Natural Hazard Mitigation Planning in the City of Madras. After 18 years on the coast of North Carolina, I was very familiar with how to prepare for an imminent storm event, but I had always considered the extent of damage nearly inevitable. It had not occurred to me that it was within our power to reduce the impacts natural hazards have on our communities.

In other words, I didn’t know about natural hazard mitigation.

Mitigation refers to the things we can do now to reduce the impacts of a natural hazard in the future. It is the sustained preparations that we take when a hazard event is not imminent to make our communities more resilient when the inevitable happens.

Now, Oregon certainly isn’t at risk from hurricanes, but other hazard events, such as floods, wildfires, and the recent snow and ice storms do threaten the safety of Oregon’s residents on a regular basis. Earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes also pose serious, albeit less frequent, risks.

The OPDR – Oregon Partnership for Disaster Resilience is one of four programs within the Community Service Center. Among other things, this program helps Oregon cities plan with a mitigation mindset. One strategy they use is to help cities create Natural Hazard Mitigation Plans (NHMPs). Cities and other jurisdictions use NHMPs to identify and prioritize specific actions they can take to better prepare themselves for the natural hazards described above.

Last year, a CPW-Community Planning Workshop team developed an NHMP for Jefferson County, which includes the City of Madras in Central Oregon. This year, we’re taking that project a step further by incorporating the goals and priorities in the NHMP into the City of Madras Comprehensive Plan.

The graphic (shown above) depicts the policy framework of this project. We created this graphic to help illustrate the complicated interconnections of federal, state, and local policies as they relate to local planning for natural hazards. Our project is essentially that blue arrow pointing to the left. The NHMP and Comprehensive plans already exist, but we’re taking the relevant parts of the NHMP and crafting an addition to a comprehensive plan chapter so Madras will be able to better prepare itself for natural hazards.

This step, integrating the NHMP into the comprehensive plan, helps the city incorporate mitigation planning into their long-term land-use planning goals. It also provides an opportunity to develop public support of these projects. However, very few cities in the country have thoroughly addressed hazard mitigation in their comprehensive plans, so figuring out the best way to integrate these plans in Madras is part of the challenge.

That’s why this project is so important. For one, integrating the NHMP and comprehensive plan will help the City of Madras be more prepared for hazard events. Additionally, this project will serve as an example to other cities throughout the state and country that want to undertake a similar project. In fact, creating a lessons-learned case study that other towns can use to guide their own plan integration process is one of our project deliverables.

By the end of our project we will have seen the integration process of writing a comprehensive plan chapter through from start to finish for the City of Madras. Just as importantly, our process will be able to serve as a guide for other Oregon cities to build a safer, more resilient futures.

Laura Stroud OPDR Madras Hazards Plan IntegrationsAbout the Author: Laura Stroud grew up dodging hurricanes in the town of Jacksonville on NC’s southern coast. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in Geography before moving to the Blue Ridge Mountains to serve an AmeriCorps term at a land conservancy. Laura hit the AmeriCorps jackpot a second time with Resource Assistance for Rural Environments (RARE) when she served with a community development organization in Roseburg, Oregon. Laura is a first-year Community and Regional Planning graduate student at the University of Oregon.