Transcription
Rebekah Warren: When severe weather hits, we tend to think about: what happens afterward? Flooded basements, downed trees, damaged roads, power outages and the cost of cleaning it all up. But what if some of the most important work happens before the storm? Here in Washtenaw County, local governments are increasingly looking at how to move from reacting to disasters to actually reducing the risks those disasters create. One of the tools they're using is called a "hazard mitigation plan," a long-term blueprint for identifying vulnerabilities and making investments in those vulnerabilities before they become emergencies. And that work is connected to a much larger vision for resilience and climate action across Washtenaw County. I'm Rebekah Warren, and this is Issues of the Environment. Joining me today is Beth Gibbons, director of the Washtenaw County Resiliency Office. Beth, thank you for being with us today!
Beth Gibbons: Rebekah, thank you so much for having me here!
Rebekah Warren: Beth, you have used the phrase "grounded hope" to describe the approach you're taking to resilience in Washtenaw County. I love that phrase because it suggests optimism, but also practicality. What does grounded hope actually look like when you're talking about something as tangible as flooding, extreme storms or aging infrastructure?
Beth Gibbons: I appreciate that question so much! It is a phrase that I use because hope is very important, but in order for hope to be something that really buoys us and moves us forward, it has to be rooted in pragmatic action. And so when we're talking about climate impacts, those that are with us already and those that're coming, heat, more severe ice storms, more flooding, it means that we have to understand where our flood risk is. We have to understand where are the neighborhoods in the homes that are experiencing repeat flooding already. We have to begin to understand, "What will those flood trends look like?" We know that they are worsening. How will they worsen in another 10 years, 30 years, 50 years, in the lifetime of the investment of a homeowner and of a city or village or township? And we have to be doing good planning now, prioritizing projects and being really strategic to be funding those projects in order to address those risks. So, to me, the hope comes when we say, "Okay, we know that there's a risk. We think that we can create a plan to address it. And now, we can actually work to prioritize that plan and to fund a solution to keep people protected."
Rebekah Warren: So, is part of the goal to change the way that local governments think about disasters from asking, "How quickly can we clean this up?" to asking, "What can we do now so this doesn't happen or it isn't as bad the next time around?"
Beth Gibbons: It is. I think about hazard mitigation planning as a way that we are breaking the disaster cycle. If we continue going into disaster after disaster only thinking about recovery, we are never going to be able to catch up with the impacts that are happening as so many people in this area experienced just this summer a couple of heat and air quality warnings, a couple of heat waves, the tornadoes. We don't have time to only work on disaster response after an event. We have to be actively preparing in advance so that we are becoming more resilient.
Rebekah Warren: But for folks who haven't heard that term as frequently, what exactly is a hazard mitigation plan?
Beth Gibbons: A hazard mitigation plan does a couple of things. So, on a technical level, having a hazard mitigation plan is a plan that is an enabling device that allows certain pockets of money, especially from FEMA, to flow to a county, city or township. Without having a hazard mitigation plan in place, there are funding opportunities that are not made available to municipalities. So, one, having a hazard mitigation plan is a tool for accessing pre-disaster funding. Number two, in this technical world, having a hazard mitigation plan is a first step for a community to participate in what's called the Community Rating System. This is an opportunity that FEMA provides for communities that have properties in flood plains. If a community has a hazard mitigation plan, they can then participate in a community rating system. And in doing so, they can earn credit that will actually reduce the cost of flood insurance for private property owners in that community.
Rebekah Warren: You're listening to Issues of the Environment on 89.1 WEMU. I'm Rebekah Warren, and our guest today is Beth Gibbons, director of the Washtenaw County Resiliency Office. We're talking about efforts to make Washtenaw County more resilient to extreme weather and why planning for the next disaster might actually begin years before that disaster arrives. Beth, you are leading in a bit to an important piece of this puzzle that hazard mitigation isn't just an environmental issue. It's also an economic issue. Having that approved mitigation plan, as you said, can make communities eligible for important federal funding for resilience projects. How significant is that funding opportunity for Washtenaw County and its cities and townships?
Beth Gibbons: It's extremely important that we're able to access this funding. So, at this time, the only communities in Washtenaw County with a hazard mitigation plan are the city of Ann Arbor, and the city of Ypsilanti is in its process of having a hazard mitigation plan approved. That means that only the city of Ann Arbor, as a municipality, is currently eligible for a suite of funding that is called the building resilience and community funds from FEMA. There's also a number of funding sources that are flood mitigation funds and revolving loan funds that are only available to the city of Ann Arbor. It's really critical that we're accessing these because we know that there are risks from power outages. Again, heat risk, severe ice storms are something that are becoming more and more frequent across our whole community. And if we want to be preparing for those, preparing our infrastructure for them, so that we are not suffering as severe of impacts, it's really necessary that we have this pre-disaster money. And currently, it's not available across the whole county. It's fairly common for counties to take a leading role in the development of a hazard mitigation plan that they will then work with the cities, towns and villages within the county to make sure there are projects being prioritized in that plan and that the risks that are being reported in that plan reflect the needs of those towns, villages and cities. The county's approach to hazard mitigation is that we'll be leading a hazard mitigation plan with the intention of it serving the whole of Washtenaw County, so every municipality will have the opportunity to access those pre-disaster funds.
Rebekah Warren: Beth, you alluded to the fact that there are places where extreme weather doesn't necessarily affect everyone equally. Those folks might experience the same weather event very differently from someone with more resources or a different health makeup. How do you make sure that resilience planning doesn't just simply protect infrastructure, but actually protects people?
Beth Gibbons: Yeah, I believe that this is core in the work that our office is leading and doing in collaboration with so many departments across the county and also partners throughout the county. We use a couple of tools that are already available. We have what is called the Opportunity Index in Washtenaw County. This is a snapshot of access to opportunity by census tract throughout Washtenaw County. We can look at considerations. What is an energy burden in a household? So, how much of your household income is going to the cost of energy? Do you have access to transportation? Because during a disaster, if your house is out of power and you're a person on a medical device and you don't have access to transportation, that has become an acute emergency immediately. So, we have an opportunity index, which is a mapping that we can use to look at existing risk. We also expect the hazard mitigation planning process that we'll be going through to really be thinking about questions of energy reliability, aging populations or immigrant neighbors who may not feel comfortable going to some official sources for resources. How do we help them to connect with neighbors so that they have more social connectivity and less social vulnerability? There's a lot of ways that we can center people in this work, and I really believe that when we're talking about climate and we're talking about climate impact, we need to be thinking about how are people affected and bringing their stories front and center in the work.
Rebekah Warren: Beth, one of the other challenges here is that extreme weather doesn't respect city or township boundaries. A storm doesn't stop at the Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti city limit. Your office has been working with municipalities, as well as departments like public health, parks, facilities management and the Water Resources Commissioner's Office. How does regional coordination allow you to accomplish what individual communities might struggle to do on their own?
Beth Gibbons: Yeah, it's absolutely critical because these impacts don't respect municipal boundaries and nor does the way that water moves nor does the experience of a heat wave. When a person who is living in Ypsilanti Township knows that they need to have relief, they're not checking to say, "Okay, is the nearest relief center in the township or is it in the city or is it in Superior Township?" They just think about the resource that they know to be there. It's so important that we're creating communication channels that cross municipal boundaries. And then, when we start thinking about things like how does water move, we have a very connected relationship between our rivers, our streams, but also our drains. And so we need to be taking advantage of regional entities like the Water Resources Commission who are thinking about the interconnection of our drains, about our road commission that is thinking about the interconnections of our transportation networks, and more broadly than that, a group like SEMCOG that is able to think with us about the relationship that those systems have to an even broader region to make sure that, one, when we're creating some kind of resilient intervention on one street, that it connects at the next street over. A bike lane that only goes two blocks because then the municipality ends isn't a very good bike lane. We need to make sure that there's conversation happening across these borders. We also need to make sure that we're having conversations that happen across our watershed, so that the way we care for our rivers and our lakes is really a conversation that happens from the headwaters down to the mouth of a river.
Rebekah Warren: Beth, thank you so much for your time today! That was Beth Gibbons, director of the Washtenaw County Resiliency Office. For more information on our conversation today, please visit our website at WEMU.org. Issues of the Environment is produced in partnership with the Office of the Washtenaw County Water Resources Commissioner, and you hear it here every Wednesday. I'm Rebekah Warren, and this is your community NPR station, 89.1 WEMU Ypsilanti.
About Beth Gibbons
Beth Gibbons is a practitioner in residence with GLISA, helping the team pursue new funding opportunities and identify new potential focus areas and partnerships. She has over a decade of experience working on climate change adaptation and 20 years of experience working on sustainable development, community engagement and partnership building. Her climate change experience and expertise includes developing and executing climate adaptation plans, strategies and projects at multiple scales of government and across multiple sectors. Beth has led regional and national conversations on climate-induced migration and how communities are or should be preparing to receive climate migrants.
She has worked with stakeholders across the Great Lakes region ranging from community-based organizations, rural communities and tribes and state agencies, federal climate programs and national nonprofit networks. From 2016-2022 Beth served as the executive director of the American Society of Adaptation Professionals (ASAP). She is an advocate for the improvement of the community of practice of climate adaptation and resilience at all levels of society. She serves on the National Advisory Board of the Climate and Space Program of the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering and was an author of the 5th National Climate Assessment’s Midwest Chapter. She is uniquely knowledgeable about what is working and what is needed to advance climate action – in both mitigation and adaptation/resilience across the Midwest and Great Lakes Region. She sees climate change as an existential threat to our communities and way of life and seeks to bring together the people, knowledge and resources needed to build effective and equitable climate solutions. While her work is national, she is a dedicated community leader and extends her passion for resilient places and justice into her service and volunteer work. She currently serves as the director of Washtenaw County’s Resiliency Office.
Resources
Washtenaw County Resiliency Office
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