UO shares research on preparing governments to support disaster recovery

Presenter: How can governments better support wildfire recovery? In 2024, Lane County commissioners heard research from the UO’s School of Planning, Public Policy and Management. On June 12, Suzannah Burke:

Suzannah Burke (UO PPPM): My name is Suzannah Burke. And we’re here today to talk to you about long-term disaster recovery policy recommendations that were a result of the disasters in the 2020 Labor Day fires here in Oregon.

Why did the 2020 Labor Day fires inspire this project? Well, they were some of the most destructive fires in Oregon on record: Over 1 million acres were burned and over 20 counties were affected. These fires forced over 40,000 Oregonians to evacuate and that’s when the recovery starts is: ‘How do we get these evacuees back in their homes?’ And that is still ongoing today over four years later. So that was really the catalyst that started this research.

[00:00:51] I do want to take a moment here to distinguish the difference between wildfire recovery and wildfire response. Wildfire response is the immediate impacts of wildfires—when the fires are burning and people are in immediate danger. We’re looking at the recovery effort, which is when the fires are out and people are trying to return to their homes.

[00:01:10] Key finding number one was that renters and medium-income homeowners are the most vulnerable. This is often a result because renters don’t always have that formal lease agreement, and then with medium-income owners, they’re on the cusp. They’re not always qualifying for that financial aid, and so they often have to be fully responsible for the financial impacts to rebuild their homes or get back into their homes.

[00:01:33] Although the priority should be getting people back into their homes as soon as possible, disasters do create opportunities for smarter rebuilding. It does provide an opportunity to pause and think about how to rebuild more equitably.

[00:01:45] And then also communication across government agencies is uneven. Sometimes there are too many cooks in the kitchen. There are a lot of government agencies that all want to help and do the right thing, but sometimes it can be overwhelming and inhibit efficiencies.

[00:01:58] State and federal delivery was hindered by bureaucracy—government policies get in the way of working more effectively.

[00:02:05] Nonprofits are highly valued in recovery efforts. Nonprofits are often staffed by locals, and so they have a little bit more trust.

[00:02:13] And then the last key finding is that land use codes can restrict rebuilding efforts. A lot of our interviewees say they wanted to rebuild their home, but it was built over 50 years ago, and they want to rebuild it exactly as it was before. And that’s not going to happen because since then, code enforcement laws have been changed. So it completely hinders the process.

[00:02:33] So those are our key findings. I’m now going to turn it to Jenna who’s going to start us off with our first policy recommendation.

[00:02:39] Presenter: Jenna Bryant.

[00:02:40] Jenna Bryant (UO PPPM): While we began this project by focusing on wildfire recovery specifically, we ultimately shifted our focus with these recommendations to apply more broadly to natural disasters across the state.

[00:02:51] We heard in our discussions with stakeholders that in this context there wasn’t a meaningful distinction between policies for wildfires and other types of disasters. So we want to make sure that these recommendations can also apply to ice storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, and a variety of destructive events that can impact communities.

[00:03:08] I’m going to talk about the concept of prefunding for recovery. This recommendation asks that local and state governments set aside flexible reserve funds that could be used to help communities recover from disasters.

[00:03:22] The idea here is that we heard repeatedly from our stakeholders that, while funding is available from state and federal agencies, often that funding takes a long time to arrive to local governments.

[00:03:32] We also heard that the reimbursement process for funding can take a long time and often local governments have to hold onto debt while they’re waiting for reimbursements and that can be really burdensome for local communities and can really slow the recovery process.

[00:03:45] So the idea is that setting aside flexible reserves that could be reused for a variety of recovery activities would really help communities get on their feet that much faster.

[00:03:54] In terms of the activities that these funds would support, these include impact data collection and coordination, as well as establishing long-term disaster recovery managers across the state. Both of these are examples of activities that we have termed precovery in our report.

[00:04:10] The idea with the term precovery is that it’s planning for recovery. So you can think about precovery activities as separate from mitigation and disaster preparedness, but really thinking about the structures and frameworks that need to be put into place in advance of disasters.

[00:04:25] So even if we don’t know the specific disaster that will occur in a community, we know that some disaster is likely to occur, so making sure that those frameworks are in place at the local and the state levels.

[00:04:36] Other activities that these reserves would help support would be needs assessments, land and housing surveys, and other types of recovery studies that would help us understand how communities have been impacted directly after disasters. And then it would also ensure that essential public services could continue to carry on with minimal disruption.

[00:04:56] So that would include basic water and wastewater infrastructure, for example, making sure that communities have the funding to keep those systems up and running, and also that public administrators at the local level can continue to help their communities, and continue to support recovery.

[00:05:11] At the local level, we would ask that local governments establish some type of dedicated reserve fund for recovery. Ideally this funding would be set apart from the general fund. We would worry that if it were within the general fund it might be easily swiped for other needed but nonrecovery activities, so ideally it would be a separate fund.

[00:05:30] And then we would also ask that local governments create some type of framework for how they would manage and administer this fund going forward.

[00:05:37] Many local governments have some considerable funding restrictions that would make this really difficult, so at the state level we would also ask that a state agency also set aside a recovery funding reserve. This would serve as a type of insurance plan of sorts that local governments could tap into as needed based on community recovery needs, sort of as they arise. So it would be held by the state, but it would be funneled towards local governments as needed.

[00:06:02] And similar to the local level, we would ask that the state agency in charge of this fund and any other relevant partners would establish criteria and protocols that really clearly outline how this fund would be administered and managed going forward.

[00:06:16] I’m going to pass it now to my colleague, Brendan, to talk about our second recommendation.

[00:06:20] Presenter: Brendan Adamczyk:

[00:06:21] Brendan Adamczyk (UO PPPM): Our second recommendation is creating long-term disaster recovery managers in counties throughout the state. You’ve already done this. In fact, Lane County is the model with Matt McRae. And in fact, throughout all of our research, we heard that Matt’s a real model for what this kind of job can look like.

[00:06:35] We’d ask that all counties establish this type of position at the same level as an emergency manager and the idea here is to have a position in place before a disaster comes. So you have someone who’s already installed, who knows the local and regional and state and federal partners and is preparing for recovery with that precovery that Jenna talked about.

[00:06:53] This person would work to coordinate with those partners. At the state level, that could be the Oregon Department of Emergency Management or Oregon Housing and Community Services. The federal level, that could be the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, or Housing and Urban Development, HUD.

[00:07:06] Also working after a disaster to work with elected officials, community partners like some of the nonprofits that we’ve talked about, and other folks and the public to not only create priorities for recovery funding and think about how that funding can be administered, but then also report on progress, especially to elected officials to make sure that there’s transparency in how that funding’s being spent.

[00:07:26] And then like Jenna mentioned, working a little bit on that precovery work. You can think of this as perhaps reaching out to a local construction company, developing a scope of work that can be activated in the event of a disaster, whether that’s an earthquake, an ice storm, or another wildfire, to more quickly help folks start rebuilding key county and local infrastructure.

[00:07:44] At the local level ideally, every county would establish this position. Again, we know a lot of counties have limited resources. So we consider that some more rural or smaller population counties might pool one position across multiple counties.

[00:07:58] And then at the state, we’d want the state to ideally provide all or at least partial funding for these positions, given the acknowledgement that a lot of counties don’t have these resources, but the importance of having one of these positions installed before a disaster.

[00:08:10] And we’d ask the state to consider either requiring some kind of local match, potentially between 10% and 25%, or offering that position only if a county has established the recovery fund that we talked about for the first recommendation.

[00:08:24] Presenter: Evan Gardner:

[00:08:25] Evan Gardner (UO PPPM): I’m moving into our data management recommendation here. In our interviews and focus groups, we heard a lot of anecdotes, and there’s just one I want to highlight to you all. We spoke with a local-level organization that gathered survivor data after the 2020 wildfires, with the expectations that it would be shared to FEMA, FEMA would collect similar level data from other local organizations and then collate that and pass that back down for use.

[00:08:50] In reality, what happened was the data went up, but it didn’t come back down. So, what we’re seeing a lot is just difficulties with data management and communication.

[00:08:58] We’re also seeing survivors being exposed to something called survey fatigue. Essentially, on one of the worst days of their lives, they’re being asked multiple times to provide very similar information to different agencies. So, filling out maybe four or five surveys, which is, you know, a very difficult thing to do in that moment.

[00:09:14] So moving forward, state and federal actions we want to implement are number one: Supporting development of data collection plan to kind of ensure that that anecdote doesn’t happen again and data flows freely up and down from local and county officials and organizations up to the federal level.

[00:09:33] And then also creating a standardized data collection form. That way survivors can be interviewed once and that data can be shared through those predetermined data collection agreements instead of that four or five times we’ve been seeing in the past.

[00:09:48] On the local level, we ask that local agencies coordinate with state and federal agencies to work with and help establish those data-sharing agreements and collection forms. Something that was mentioned during the interviews and focus group we did was consider preemptively gathering key resident information prior to disasters.

[00:10:08] There are privacy concerns with that. The privacy concerns would necessitate confidentiality agreements and things of that nature. This might be seen as a potential overreach or something that shouldn’t be in the purview of government, so there’s a difficulty there.

[00:10:20] The actual development of the data collection form itself, with so many interested parties contributing and discussing this, it will probably be a challenge to create that as well.

[00:10:30] And then the data storage of the collected information itself, our recommendation is to use an existing data management database to eliminate the need for creating something new and trying to find new FTE to support that. Something like the HMIS (Homeless Management Information System) model in Lane County could be an example of that.

[00:10:47] Presenter: Evan also passed along several valuable ideas shared during their research.

[00:10:52] Evan Gardner (UO PPPM): These were things that were communicated to us that these were important, but we didn’t necessarily have the time or resources to look into or might be outside the scope of our project in general.

[00:11:01] So the first one was to create a recovery resource guide for local governments. Essentially this is a playbook of sorts of best practices, lessons learned from disasters that counties can have on hand to refer back to. What we heard was some counties have a version of this, some have maybe a less robust version, some really don’t have much at all. So just creating some sort of standardized product that can be shared amongst counties.

[00:11:26] Evaluate how land use policies can affect recovery efforts. We heard this can be a big tool in recovery. Unfortunately, we didn’t have really the scope of this project to dive too deep into that.

[00:11:36] And then lastly, going back to the prefunded fund for recovery, we heard a lot of, ‘This organization shouldn’t manage this fund.’ We didn’t hear a lot of, you know, ‘This organization should manage this fund.’ So, diving more deeply into that and identifying, you know, what agency ideally at the state level would manage that.

[00:11:54] Presenter: Lane County’s Policy Lab brings on Suzannah Burke, Jenna Bryant, Brendan Adamczyk and Evan Gardner to share with commissioners their research findings on precovery: preparing for recovery by having funding, personnel, and cooperative data-sharing agreements already in place before the next disaster.