Purpose
The purpose of this activity is to develop recovery-minded ordinances, regulations, and policies to ensure long-term recovery efforts.
Why?
This effort should build off of your existing pre-disaster and resilience planning efforts. For more information see the Community Readiness and Resilience Toolkit. It is essential that your community recovers in a way that is equitable, sustainable, and risk-informed. Most local policies and ordinances are created with non-disaster periods in mind. Following a disaster, however, there is a flurry of development that occurs in a time-constrained, politically contentious environment. Disaster-impacted communities need to understand why the disaster happened to ensure any recovery or reconstruction results in net risk reduction. The resulting delays can often conflict with a desire to quickly return to ‘normal.’
Without recovery-minded ordinances, regulations, or policies in place, the opportunity to create a more resilient community may be lost. Many of these legal and regulatory instruments are meant to introduce a more controlled pace of development and some focus on reducing bureaucracy or addressing strained government capacity. Communities need to consider what makes the most sense given the situation during each unique incident.
When?
After the disaster, following the establishment of the community recovery organization, and as needed throughout the course of long-term recovery. Ideally, some of this work would already have happened in the pre-disaster recovery planning stage. (Days 1-60)
Tips
- Tailor orders or ordinances to the needs of your community and the event to the greatest extent possible. Try to include the following in the language: Purpose; Duration; and Procedures/Permitting.
- Local jurisdictions cannot create emergency waivers that are dependent upon access to Federal funding. Instead, the waivers must be created to stand alone - with or without a Federal declaration.
- Waivers can establish local thresholds that are used to determine when waivers are activated and when they end.
- Documenting all impacts is an important component of community recovery efforts. Should the impacts of a local event overwhelm local capacities, the local government may apply to DHSEM for State assistance and the State may apply for Federal assistance. Recipients of State or Federal funding are responsible for maintaining accurate records of the disaster impacts that document and justify applications for assistance and support specific project funding requests.
How does my community do this?
- Assess current legislative and regulatory frameworks to determine long-term recovery suitability. Once activated, members of the long-term recovery planning organization assess local regulations, laws, and ordinances in the course of planning to address any areas where changes or additions to existing law are needed. Legislation may also include special assessments, impact fees, or other taxation schemes that help to support long-term recovery and disaster risk financing. The local government charter dictates how emergency orders, ordinances, and/or regulations are issued, passed, and implemented.
- Identify options for legislative and regulatory action and assess each for benefits and impacts. During early recovery operations, the emergency manager and/or recovery leader work with your community legislative board or council to identify and pass emergency ordinances. Prior to the creation or activation of a long-term recovery organization, this helps to establish a foundation for sustainable, resilient long-term recovery. In addition to including recovery-specific provisions in the disaster declaration, this might include access restrictions in impacted areas to prevent looting or prevent tampering with the disaster scene, emergency building moratoria, and others.
- Draft, introduce, and vote on recovery ordinances, or issue executive orders, as required. Local executive orders can address many of the immediate post-disaster legislative and regulatory actions that need to occur. An emergency or disaster declaration is often a precursor to such authorities. Ideally, communities will have passed one or more pre-disaster ordinance(s) prior to the event that addresses post-disaster recovery needs and activities. Learn more about pre-disaster response planning and pre-disaster recovery planning.
Community Call Out: Evans, CO
The City of Evans issued several emergency ordinances following the 2013 floods.