CSA Planning strongly believes in making the connection between hazard mitigation planning and other planning initiatives in a community. With every hazards planning project we analyze all of the community’s major planning documents to determine existing connections and to recommend further integration. Integrating hazard mitigation into local comprehensive plans and other land use, transportation, or redevelopment documents is essential for preventing future vulnerability. While the local mitigation plan should be a central repository for all hazard mitigation issues, relegating mitigation only to this plan stifles a community’s ability to institutionalize hazard resiliency as a core goal.

Florida’s Integration Initiative
In 2004, the Florida Department of Community Affairs (FDCA) began a project led by both its community planning division and its emergency management division to introduce the idea of integrating the Local Mitigation Strategy (LMS) into the local comprehensive plan. CSA Planning was contracted to work on strategy development and analysis, and assisting with integration for half of Florida’s counties. The initiative included developing summary reports, or profiles, for each county and 13 pilot municipalities, as well as facilitating regional workshops to introduce the subject of integration. The profiles included an analysis of current demographics, hazard vulnerability and its relationship to existing and future land use patterns, existing mitigation measures, and recommended options for integrating hazard mitigation into the comprehensive plan. Each county’s LMS, Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan (CEMP), and Comprehensive Plan were reviewed for strengths and weaknesses regarding natural hazard mitigation strategies. These strategies were derived from a soon-to-be-published FDCA guidebook, “Protecting Florida’s Communities,” and included 1) collaborate, coordinate, and educate; 2) get out of the way - provide evacuation and sheltering services; 3) make the environment less hazardous - protect and enhance natural protective features; 4) make structures more resistant to natural hazard forces; and 5) manage the development and redevelopment of land in hazardous areas. The project was just recently completed, and already several counties have begun taking steps to include new hazard mitigation policies in their comprehensive plans. From the feedback received at the completion of each workshop, it seems that one of the major benefits of the initiative was simply bringing local planners and local emergency managers together to discuss each other’s roles in building more resilient communities.

Example Hazard Mitigation Policies
A common request CSA received as we conducted the regional workshops for the FDCA project was to provide examples of policy language that incorporates hazards. The profiles suggest hazard mitigation strategies or tools that can be included in a community’s comprehensive plan based on its vulnerabilities and its existing comprehensive plan policies. The recommendations did not suggest specific policy language however, and many local planners felt they could better justify attempts to include these suggestions if they had examples of how other counties have done so. During our reviews we found notable hazard mitigation policies in many counties’ comprehensive plans, so we extracted the best policies for each of the five mitigation strategies analyzed and compiled them into a quick reference for local planners.
Download quick reference

Hazard Mitigation Integration Requirements
Integrating hazard mitigation into all planning documents is the next logical step after performing a risk analysis and developing a mitigation strategy for a community. In Florida, we have reached this next step, since all counties in the state now have LMS plans compliant with the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 (DMA2K) (see All-Hazards Planning and Emergency Management page). In fact, DMA2K suggests that the LMS include a process for incorporating the mitigation plan into other planning mechanisms, such as comprehensive or capital improvement plans, when appropriate. Other than this optional criterion, however, there are no current requirements to integrate hazard mitigation into other local plans. The benefits of doing so are many, and therefore each community should consider beginning the process. Florida communities can easily include such an initiative in their regular evaluation and appraisal report for updating their comprehensive plan but also have the opportunity to include new policies twice annually.

Past Clients – Integration Projects

• Florida Department of Community Affairs
  Integrating Hazard Mitigation into Comprehensive Planning
• Palm Beach County
  Assisting an LMS Subcommittee with Integrating Hazard Mitigation into the Comprehensive Plan
• Florida Department of Community Affairs
  Integrating Hazard Mitigation for the Glades Communities of Palm Beach County