Goals
During the planning process, KIPDA staff met with stakeholders (see the Planning section for details) to understand the region’s mitigation needs. After 60+ meetings with local officials, city and county employees, local interest groups, and members of the public, KIPDA staff helped create six goals for the region’s mitigation strategy. These goals were approved by KIPDA’s Regional Hazard Mitigation Committee.
The following section will detail the reasoning behind each goal. Please note that goal number does not indicate priority level.
Goal 1: Consider community members’ vulnerabilities
Each jurisdiction has residents who are particularly vulnerable to hazards. These community members could experience vulnerability due to the nature of their property such as living in a floodplain, occupying a structure with weak building materials, lacking access to a safe space, etc. They could be renters and thus ineligible for FEMA individual assistance following a disaster. Residents could have demographic characteristics that make them inherently more vulnerable to hazards such as age, disability, language(s) spoken, and/or race/ethnicity. Community members may be low-income, and income significantly impacts an individual’s ability to prepare and recover from a hazard/disaster. Some individuals might exhibit all of these traits. To enhance resiliency for the whole community, KIPDA’s counties and cities should focus on understanding and addressing citizen vulnerabilities through mitigation and preparedness measures.
To learn about the intersection between social vulnerabilities and hazards, click the story map button below.
Social Vulnerability story map
Goal 2: Expand flood management
Flooding, unlike most hazards, demonstrates a degree of predictability for two main reasons. First, floodplain maps created by FEMA tell us where flooding is more likely to occur. Second, we know that the built environment – think subdivisions, downtown expansion, new warehouses, etc. – contains dense impervious surfaces that cannot absorb or manage rainfall. This rainfall can then overwhelm local stormwater drainage capacity and lead to flooding outside of the traditional floodplain. Because of these factors, communities can better anticipate and plan for flooding.
Flooding is also one of the costliest hazards in the region, and its human and financial impact is only expected to intensify as climate change increases precipitation in Kentucky. Therefore, because flooding exhibits greater predictability, causes significant destruction, and continues to intensify, flood management is a priority for KIPDA’s communities.
Goal 3: Enhance energy resilience
Energy disruption is one of the most significant threats that hazards pose in the region. From cutting off water in a community to turning off heat during the bitter cold, power outages can have severe consequences – especially if communities are trying to respond to a disaster. Emergency managers, local officials, and citizens expressed repeated concern about hazard-related, power outages during plan development. Therefore, energy resilience, the ability to withstand and reduce the magnitude and duration of a disruptive event, is a top concern for the KIPDA region.
Goal 4: Promote resilient transportation planning
Transportation infrastructure largely determines an individual’s ability to respond to a hazard. If a hazard severely impacts roads and bridges, community members can be cut off from critical resources for hours, days, or even weeks. Local officials, emergency managers, and city and county staff cited many local roadway concerns during KIPDA’s hazard mitigation planning process. Therefore, resilient transportation, which can withstand hazard events, is a highly important issue in the region.
Goal 5: Strengthen water & wastewater infrastructure
Water and wastewater infrastructure provides a vital service to the whole community. However, a hazard event can damage or even destroy critical pieces of water and wastewater infrastructure, which can sharply curtail a community’s ability to respond and recover from an event. During the planning process, water and wastewater utilities expressed significant interest in expanding hazard mitigation efforts. The KIPDA region is prioritizing resiliency initiatives for water and wastewater.
Goal 6: Improve data management & tools
The Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP), Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC), and Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA) require applicants to prove their need for mitigation funding through a benefit cost analysis (BCA). In the recent past, KIPDA communities have struggled with BCAs because of the substantial number of records and volume of data required to receive eligibility. In fact, BCA requirements are one of the most significant hurdles to implementing mitigation projects in the region – especially in small and impoverished communities. Therefore, it is crucial that the KIPDA region improve data management and tools so that its communities are eligible for critical mitigation funding.