Tag: NHMP for Jefferson County

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.

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.