By Peter D’Auria/VTDigger
In 2018, the state of Vermont released a plan outlining how it should prepare for natural disasters.
The State Hazard Mitigation Plan lays out 24 strategies, separated into 96 discrete actions, to address risk factors for natural disasters. Those actions included improving flood resilience, strengthening building design standards and educating local communities about potential hazards, among others.
But five years after the creation of that plan, Vermont achieved only a third of those 96 actions, a new report dated Sept. 3 from the state auditor found.
Doug Hoffer, Vermont’s state auditor, said in an interview that if the entire plan had been put into action, it could have helped the state weather flooding in the summers of 2023 and 2024.
“I think there’s no question that those recommendations, had they been adopted, would have made a difference in the last two years,” Hoffer said.
In order to qualify for some federal disaster mitigation funding and grants from FEMA, states are required to draft a hazard mitigation plan every five years. Vermont issued a new plan in 2023.
“The state mitigation plan guides risk-informed decision making at the state level,” according to a FEMA guide to the plans. “It also guides local governments engaged in mitigation planning, including vulnerable and underserved communities.”
Although the creation of the plan is a requirement to draw federal dollars, FEMA does not verify whether states complete the recommendations set forth in their plans.
In the review, Vermont’s auditor looked at the 96 actions included in the 163-page 2018 plan. Those actions spanned a range of topics, and included steps to improve flooding and drought resilience, create a state buyout program for properties in hazard-prone areas, help municipalities better plan for disasters and improve maps and sharing, among many others.
An array of Vermont entities — including state offices, institutions of higher education and nonprofits — were in charge of completing those tasks.
But according to the auditor’s report, the responsible entities failed to complete two-thirds of those actions by 2023. Even high-priority actions were “frequently” unfinished, the report reads.
“It is unclear how effectively Vermont’s 2018 Plan reduced the risks associated with natural disasters,” the report said.
Those uncompleted actions include steps to better share hazard maps and data between state programs, analyze disaster relief funding sources and create a statewide map of headwaters in Vermont, according to the report.
Hoffer pointed to another piece of the plan that was not complete: a provision calling for the creation and sharing of model construction standards for disaster-resilient buildings and infrastructure.
“Had they done that in ’18 or ’19, and had they reached out to the towns and maybe had provided some incentives to get it done, then construction from that time forward in the at-risk areas would have been built to code explicitly,” Hoffer said. “And if you do that, then you prepare for the next flood event. And there will be another flood event, as you can imagine.”
Separately, Vermont’s 2023 plan included no actions specifically related to infectious disease, the report noted, despite being written after the emergence of Covid-19.
The auditor’s report faults leadership — specifically, the State Hazard Mitigation Planning and Policy Committee, a board of top state officials that includes the secretaries of the Agencies of Natural Resources, Administration, and Human Services, among others — for failing to ensure that the plan was implemented.
Staff turnover at the responsible entities and the Covid-19 pandemic also contributed, according to the report.
The auditor’s office recommended that state officials strengthen oversight, monitoring and training for the entities responsible for carrying out the plan.
In a letter to the auditor, Jennifer Morrison, the commissioner of Vermont’s Dept. of Public Safety, and Sarah Clark, the interim secretary of the Agency of Administration, expressed appreciation for the report and accepted its findings. State officials would consider its recommendations, they said.
Eric Forand, the director of Vermont Emergency Management, which is responsible for drafting Vermont’s hazard mitigation plan, called it an “aspirational” document.
“You want to do as much as you can,” Forand said in an interview, “so you codify it in the plan, and you try to do what you can to complete what you can.”
He said that it was impossible to tell whether completing the steps in the plan would have made a difference during the flooding in the past two years. “There’s no hard and fast answer that if we did something, it would equal something else,” Forand said. “There’s never that certainty in the emergency management world.”
