Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management

Crisis and Emergency Management

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April 2004                                                                            Volume 6 - Number 3

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Perspectives...

Mainstreaming Mitigation: An Opinion Piece

By Scott G. Burnotes

During the research of my last newsletter article, I observed that Hillsborough County; Florida placed the responsibility of hazard mitigation in an interesting spot. They placed it within their Department of Planning and Growth Management. To me, this makes much more sense then placing the responsibility within the Department of Public Safety or Public Works. Their Office of Emergency Management is a section within Public Safety and is responsible for planning, coordinating, and caring out the response to a disaster. To “mainstream” mitigation, we must learn from the Hillsborough County example and make mitigation a part of our everyday lives. We can’t start thinking about hazard mitigation right before the hurricane reaches land or after an earthquake destroys a city’s infrastructure. By placing the responsibility of hazard mitigation within the Department of Planning and Growth, your linking mitigation planners closer to staff from other departments the planners are already familiar with, such as code enforcement, parks/recreation, and waste management, etc. These departments’ cultures and activities are more in line with the goals of hazard mitigation.

People will argue you cannot place hazard mitigation within a non-emergency management discipline because they do not know about the effects specific disasters can have on a community’s vulnerability. Others might state that hazard mitigation is lost within an emergency management department because it is not as exhilarating as “response” or guaranteed the large dollar signs like “recovery”. The fact is that hazard mitigation does not neatly fit within any local government department. It routinely crosses departmental lines. All departments must work together, but I would argue that planners are the best equipped to prepare background information on hazard mitigation programs, examine how they fit with the long term goals of the community, and decipher which department is best suited to implement each individual mitigation program for the local government. In Hillsborough County, the Department of Planning and Growth’s responsibility is planning for and managing the county’s future. They develop a Local Mitigation Strategy (LMS) from input given by different governmental departments, private partners, and members of community programs. This limits any other department that feels a mitigation program does not fit neatly with their core goals and objectives from dumping their mitigation responsibilities on the local emergency management agency and allows local emergency managers to focus their already limited time on preparedness and response.

Although I believe that hazard mitigation can be mainstreamed at the local level by placing it in a department with a planning discipline, I do not believe that anyone but the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be responsible for championing the cause at the federal level. Local planners will still need a place for guidance and recommendations. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) needs to quickly realize that by only briefly mentioning mitigation under their strategic goal of prevention, they are downplaying the importance of the word’s definition. Prevention and mitigation do not mean the same thing. Everyone knows that you cannot prevent a natural disaster, but DHS believes it can prevent a terrorist event. In a democracy such as ours that is a fallacy. American taxpayers will receive more security for dollars spent on mitigation programs than they ever will with prevention. Mitigation programs by nature are “all hazards.”