Tag: Jefferson County’s Natural Hazard Mitigation 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.

Reflections: The First Term of our Community Planning Workshop Project

Posted on by Julia Havens

Elizabeth Miller Madras Hazards Integration Plan CPW Community Planning WorkshopAs our team wraps up the winter term, I think it’s a good time to reflect back on our progress on our Community Planning Workshop project. Before my team started our project of incorporating the Madras Natural Hazard Mitigation Plan into the City of Madras’ Comprehensive Plan, few (if any) of us had never read a comprehensive plan. Similarly, most of us had not considered natural hazard mitigation planning as an important task for a city planner.

At the early stages of this project our team was given a considerable amount of reading to do. Between gaining a good understanding of the significant documents, the regulating agencies at play, and our scope of work, it took us almost three weeks to wrap our heads around our project concept, the keys players and documents involved, and task at hand that is our project. Not only did we have to learn these concepts for ourselves, but we also had to quickly figure out how to present the scope of our project and these concepts to our Community Planning Workshop class. Even more intimidating, our team would also so have to present to a committee of community leaders (our Technical Advisory Committee) in our fast-approaching meeting with them. Needless to say, there were several conversations with our project manager and our project advisor that entailed them re-explaining concepts to us, as well as there were many times when we found that we had to go back and re-read the numerous documents.

Our team had both the benefit and the misfortune of having our meeting with the Technical Advisory Committee pushed back three weeks due to a snow and ice storm (the irony of that situation wasn’t lost on us), requiring us to think on our feet and re-work our entire schedule. During these three weeks our team did further investigation of case studies and other relevant documents, so that by the time we reached our meeting, we really knew our content. What’s more, the meeting was a great learning experience, and solidified all of the knowledge we had been gathering throughout this process.

Recently our team did our final presentation of the term to our Community Planning Workshop class. Our team was only able to spend a small fraction of the time on this presentation than we did our previous presentations, and some of us were even set to speak on content that we had never done before. Despite this, our presentation went exceptionally well. The following day our team asked ourselves how we managed such a successful and succinct presentation. Ultimately our team’s understanding of our project, which came from the many hours of research, discussion, and experience discussing it in a professional setting, allowed us to speak confidently with our content.

Our team is now at a point where we’re synthesizing all of our research and work into major deliverables that include stakeholder interviews, a public survey, the initial process of drafting our key documents, and planning a public forum for next month. At the beginning of this term, I looked at these tasks with apprehension and nervousness. As we are going through this process now however, excitement has replaced apprehension. There’s something to be said about doing your homework, and something even more to be said about the professional experience that CPW offers.

 

Elizabeth Miller Madras Hazards Integration Plan CPW Community Planning WorkshopAbout the Author: 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.