 Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to our online briefing series about rural communities, climate, and COVID-19 recovery. I'm Dan Berset, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. We have had a great run-up panelist this week, and that continues today. In just a few minutes, we will learn about how rural communities can rise to the challenge of dual disasters, in particular the coronavirus outbreak and severe flooding. Our briefing mini-series kicked off Tuesday with a look at how rural electric cooperatives help their members lower their energy bills through energy efficiency delivered as part of on-bill financing programs. Yesterday, our topic was the bio-economies role in COVID-19 recovery and climate solutions. If you missed us on Tuesday or yesterday, you can visit www.esi.org. There you will find an archives webcast and presentation materials. When you do, take a moment to sign up for our Climate Change Solutions newsletter, which is a great way to stay informed about our briefing and receive our fact sheets and other educational resources. The goal of this briefing series is to raise awareness of the impacts of climate change on rural areas in the context of the coronavirus outbreak. Every state has been touched by the pandemic so far, but the incidence of the virus seems to be on the rise in places like Arkansas, Iowa, South Carolina, and other rural places. If this trend continues, it could not come at a worse time for emergency preparedness officials. Over the past several years in particular, summer months have brought increasingly severe and frequent natural disasters like flooding. Rural communities already face unique challenges in preparing for floods and maintaining adequate infrastructure. For example, local governments with small staff often do not have the capacity to apply for disaster preparedness funding and can be left out of valuable federal programs. Yesterday, one of our panelists mentioned the difficult time many rural hospitals are facing. Imagine how much harder treating patients is when a severe flood hits, when other emergency responders are stretched to the limit and facilities are at capacity with those sick from the novel coronavirus. This briefing will characterize these issues in the context of COVID-19, but we will not stop at describing the problems and challenges. As usual, we will do our best during this briefing to highlight solutions. These rural communities are implementing to solve those problems and meet and overcome those challenges. Our online briefing is part of this rural issues mini-series, but like most of what we do at EESI, it fits into a broader picture of climate change solutions. Some of you were perhaps in attendance a few months ago, back in February, when we hosted a briefing about coastal resilience efforts in communities around the Great Lakes. We heard at that briefing about how dairy farms are adapting to a changing environment, as well as the role that tribal organizations play in identifying and implementing solutions that are respectful to their long tradition of environmental stewardship. There will be some overlap today between that briefing and our discussion, so I encourage anyone interested to visit www.esa.org and watch that archive's webcast and refer to those presentation materials, and perhaps we'll get a question or two from our viewers that will help tie things together. Speaking of questions, because we are online once again today, I cannot call on you if you have a question, so please follow EESI on Twitter at EESI online and send in your questions that way. You can also send an email to EESI at EESI.org. We will draw from your question submissions after we hear from our panelists. Our first panelist is Dick Norton. Dick is a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan's Tubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He also holds a joint appointment as a professor in the program in the environment at University of Michigan's College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. Dick teaches and conducts research in the areas of planning law, sustainable development, land use and environmental planning, and coastal area management. His most recent research has focused on the challenges of managing shorelines along the Great Lakes. Dick, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Hello, Dan. Thanks for having me. I'm very glad to be here. Can you hear me okay? This is a quick mic check. Yep, okay, good. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. I was asked to speak. Let me call this up. Can you see that? Okay. We're good. Okay. Thanks for asking me. I'm here. I'm going to talk about the challenges of small planning for small-town and rural communities, particularly with regard to infrastructure and disasters, and what I have to say really covers the whole country, but I'll draw examples from my own backyard in Michigan, which is what I know best. So I'm going to move quickly. I'm going to give kind of a larger picture overview of things that are going on, and then happy to answer more specific questions if I come during the Q&A. Okay, so just to give a quick thumbnail history to make the point that since about the 1860s, we've kind of inverted. Our population has grown pretty dramatically from being mostly rural with lots of many smaller farms and market towns in a few cities to now predominantly urban. That transition happened at about the 1910s, 1920s, where we were about 50-50s. So in the 1860s, our population was about 80% rural. Today, it's a little bit less than 20% rural. So more folks live in rural settings today than in the 1860s, but as a proportion of the population in the country, there are less rural dwellers. At the same time, we have seen rural land development go down, or the rural uses of land go down as we've urbanized and done other things. So that today, roughly about 75% of the landscape in the lower 48 states is considered rural. And what's replaced that largely are cities, exurban cities, suburbs, exurbia, which is more rural residential development. And then even in rural lands, we've seen a transition to fewer larger farms compared to the many small farms that we had back in the late 1800s. So there is this transition taking place, and it's had a real effect on the landscape. Here's a given example from, again, my own backyard. This is the city of Grand Haven and Grand Haven Charter Township, and I'm hoping you all can see that pointer. That's the city of Grand Haven. These are located on the shores of Lake Michigan, on the western side of the state. The city is right there, and then this area is the larger township. So this is just to illustrate that both jurisdictions, if you will, have about the same population, but the density of the population in the city is quite a bit larger, about three persons per acre compared to the township, which is less than a person per acre. And the parcel sizes are correspondingly much larger in the township. So there is definitely some agriculture taking place in the township, but there's a lot of rural residential development, kind of more exurban development, kind of spreading out into the landscape. So given all of that, rural areas experience some ongoing challenges that have been going on for a while, and perhaps are getting a little bit worse. Challenges that are related to the business of farming, given global trade patterns and such, it's getting harder to farm and to engage in forestry. There are environmental challenges. Rural land uses, particularly farming and forestry, can be environmentally benign or even environmentally beneficial, but they can also be hugely environmental polluting if they're not done well. And so there's a lot of pressure to try and work with agriculture and forestry to do a better job of stewarding the environment. There are real demographic pressures confronting rural places right now as younger folks move out of the countryside into the cities. The populace of farmers, the age, average age of farmers are getting older. They don't maybe have younger generations to hand their farms off to, so the demographics they're making, continuing farming and rural land use is more difficult. Correspondingly, there are increasing urban pressures. As rural residents move into rural settings, they bring with them the desire to not smell manure being spread during the season. And so there are increasing conflicts with rural land uses in those kind of urban rural land use patterns. And then similarly, urbanization pressures in the form of land prices. As urban development etches out more and more into the countryside, that pushes up land prices, making it harder to stay viable as a farming or forestry operation. And then just in general, rural areas suffer from higher incidents of poverty, unemployment, and increased disabilities in the terms of the population. And they enjoy somewhat less opportunities for educational activities and lower diversity in general. So there are some rural areas in the country are really taking it on the chin right now in a lot of ways. So it's quite challenging to plan for them, particularly from hazards. And then in terms of planning for rural, two particular challenges, especially in the context of infrastructure and disasters, and I'm going to group them into scale problems and politics, culture problems. In terms of scale, what this really boils down to is we provide roads and water and stormwater and broadband service. It's just more expensive to have to provide it when the population is more spread out. If you're having to build three times as much pipeline to serve the same number of residents, it costs three times as much to provide that services. And that plays out for services as well. Police, fire, emergency has a response. So the more that we're seeing ex-urban development and folks coming into these rural areas that want to have more urban-like services, it's getting more difficult and more expensive to provide those services just because of scale problems. That really creates fiscal problems. And then similarly, in terms of governance, rural areas still encompass the great bulk of the land area of the country, but they're increasingly smaller parts of the population. And so it's very difficult to have the bandwidth, the capacity, if you will, to administer government, do good analysis, do good planning. So there's a real capacity problem to deal with the issues that we're trying to deal with in these rural settings. And then in terms of politics and culture, the planning for rural is complicated. Nobody I can assure you in this country really likes government. Nobody likes regulation. Everybody believes in property rights and individualism. I think it's fair to say that's a bit more true in rural settings where you're living out in places where it's a little bit harder to see how your use of your land area or the infrastructure you're building and wanting to use is having an effect on your neighbors. And so that makes accepting regulation a bit more difficult and the notion of private property a bit stronger. So there's some political cultural pushback against dealing with the problems we're dealing with in terms of infrastructure and disasters just because of that rural culture. So let me give you a case study. This is the floods that just happened in the state a couple weeks ago. So if you see my pointer, that's the lower peninsula of Michigan. That's Midland and some communities above it. This is a very small-time rural part of the state. And we had some major rain events in May that culminated in a dam failure. So this is the Edenville Dam. Somebody caught it just as it was giving way. So there's a great video on mlab.com that shows it fail. And huge poor water comes pouring out. There was a dam below that, the Sanford Dam that then gave way because it was overwhelmed by the floodwaters coming down. That had the effect of draining Wixom Lake, which was what Edenville Dam was holding. It washed away a bunch of roads and other infrastructure and it flooded a good bit of the town of Midland, which was below that. So here's a catastrophic dam failure in a small-time rural setting that had a huge impact. Let me give you some numbers. So in this one instance, two dams failed. 10,000 people had to be evacuated. 3,700 properties were damaged. Some 2,300 homes were damaged. Apparently only 14% of which had flooding insurance. That accumulated to about $190 million in economic losses to property owners in the state. $55 million in response cost and infrastructure damage. From that one instance alone. So we have in the state of Michigan about 2,500 dams statewide. Only about half of those are regulated. And for the whole state of Michigan, we have a grand total of two dam inspectors, safety dam inspectors for the state. And I've heard that we have about five other dams at least that are in critical condition that could face a similar kind of failure problem if we get the right storm events. So there's some reason to be concerned. So where do we go from here? How do we rise to the challenge? Planners who are worried about sustainability and adaptable communities and landscapes really focus on let's keep rural places rural. Keep working landscapes, working farm and forestry by making sure that agricultural is economically viable and forestry is viable. Let's make it resilient. Let's try and build away from hazards and not build in flood plains. Let's keep it economically resilient by diversifying the agricultural activities that are going, make them environmentally green, maybe make them more amenity-based so that folks who aren't consuming the resource but want to be there are contributing to the economic well-being of that rural setting. The small towns within these areas, let's keep them compact. It's much more efficient to provide infrastructure and provide the kinds of services and the kind of small-town fuel that you want to have. If you keep those communities, small communities, again build them out of hazard way or try and move them out of hazards way if they're in flood plains and such. And then keep the economies of those small towns especially locally focused with for example community-supported agriculture, those kinds of activities. And then finally in urban places that's where you want the density, again make them resilient to hazards, but they can be more focused on global economy. So there's a place for all of these different kinds of developments to happen across the landscape in the country. That leads though to new kinds of challenges that we're facing. We're facing a new normal. Climate change is happening. I know that's a politically loaded statement but it's happening and we have to deal with it. In rural settings, it's easier to have disconnects. It's a little bit harder to see how the activity that you're engaging in could be having larger impacts on the system. But the larger systems, the infrastructure systems, the natural systems, the coastal systems I work with, are dying a death by a thousand cuts. All of these little changes we're making are adding up cumulatively and we don't see it happening because it's happening so gradually. So that's boiling frogs. Environmentists like to say when what's happening so gradually frogs don't know they're being boiled because they're just not aware of what's going on. So that's a huge challenge for us. I think we're really dealing with some serious political polarization in this country that's making it much harder to sit down at the table and calmly talk through what are the issues here and how do we deal with them. We do seem to be chasing one size fits all silver bullet solutions that I would call landscape dumb. And at the really basic level it's either government needs to fix all of this or we absolutely need no government at all to do anything get it out of the way. Well neither of those are really good solutions. We need to start tailing what we're doing. Having said that I think we are under investing in government. I'm just appalled that we only have two inspectors for the whole state of Michigan and we have a thousand dams we should be inspecting regularly to make sure that they're still safe. You get what you pay for we're not really paying what we need to be paying to get the kind of government we need to do good jobs. We're also building unfortunate policy expectations if we go back in every time a community floods out and say we're going to rebuild you back to exactly the way you were and not take stock of the fact that there could be another flood tomorrow they could wipe all of that out again. We're creating bad expectations about living with the environment and then finally a huge big challenge is loss of version. It's really hard for people to give up what they've had sometimes even to the point that they know it would be the right thing to do but still I just can't I can't give up having this home that I've lived in forever and that's totally understandable it's a real challenge. Where do we go with this? Well we need to start encouraging participation in government and decision-making before the storm happens and not wait till after it happens and that's a challenge but we need to start working on better ways to do that. We need to promote good government good governance not big government not small government but get government to do what we need government to do and make sure it's doing it well. We need to adopt better landscape smart policies that fit the setting that we're working in the natural systems and we need to also adopt no regret policies policies where even if climate change doesn't work out to be as bad as we thought it might still the things we've adopted make great good sense and they've helped us make for better communities so there are lots of things we could do along those lines and I think our next speaker will talk about some of that and then when we need to learn to live with nature better instead of trying to fight nature every last thread we need to figure out sometimes how to relocate or adapt to where we're living given the natural systems we're in and then maybe engineering is the last resort and finally we need to be developing better stewardship economies we need to figure out how to really steward and cultivate and manage our rural settings especially so that they will continue to thrive and provide us with the food support and the life support systems that we need and really expect out of our rural settings so those are all big picture things that we need to be doing and again my goal here was to kind of set the framework for how to dash these challenges and then a final thing I'll just say about COVID-19 is that's just made it all that much harder to do everything we're doing because it's so much harder for folks to get together and deliberate and collaborate in the way that we really need to be engaging so that's just added a whole lot of complication to that so that's my really quick spin through my presentation and I'll stop here and then look forward to questions during the question and answer period. Great thanks Dick that was a great presentation and we will definitely have time for questions if anyone joined us a little late and maybe missed part of Dick's presentation just as a reminder you can visit www.esa.org for an archived webcast as well as presentation materials after our next speaker we will have some questions and if you have those questions you can get them to us a couple different ways the first is by following us on Twitter at EESI online you can also send us an email and email address to uses EESI at EESI.org now on to our second panelist Steve Samuelson is National Flood Insurance Program Coordinator at the Kansas Department of Agriculture and Division of Water Resources serving citizens of Kansas at the Division of Water Resources Steve has worked in that capacity since 2007 Steve was a local community floodplain manager in Lyon County Kansas prior to working for the state Steve was a committee chair for the Association of State Floodplain Managers and he graduated from Emporia State University in 1982 Steve welcome to the briefing today thanks so much for joining us all right I hope you can hear me and see my screen so I'm a flood guy from Kansas and that's why you're looking at a map of Kansas right now and this map of Kansas has some white areas on it those white areas are counties that do not noun or have they ever had a flood map created for them by the federal government the national flood insurance program has existed since 1968 in an over half a century no flood maps have been made for large portions of the country the Association of State Floodplain Managers has a white paper called Mapping the Nation it's recommended reading now one of my challenges in helping rural communities in Kansas is that I've got citizens who don't believe they have flood risk and the reason they don't believe they have flood risk is because the federal government has never made them a flood map I also have citizens that believe they do have flood risk and they want to mitigate that flood risk but it's very difficult to mitigate the flood risk without the flood information associated with a flood map and if you were to look at a map of Kansas showing the COVID-19 cases across the state you would see something similar where there would be areas shaded in areas not shaded in I have rural communities that by their nature of being small and isolated they haven't had their first COVID case in their town yet because they haven't had a case in town yet they don't think they're at risk so there's a tendency to believe that you don't have risk until the information is kind of shoved in your face I'm going to say and I'm going to talk about small towns because that's what they suggested that I speak about one of the issues is going to be that as I'm giving this little speech everybody listening to me it's going to have a different opinion about what a small town is I bet there's people listening to me right now that think that a small town is 10,000 people you might be surprised to know that I often work with cities of less than a hundred people I'm relieved when I go to a town that has 500 people because I know they'll have at least a full-time paid city clerk so there'll be somebody there for me to talk to so I don't have to call the mayor at night at home when he gets off work so just deciding what a small town means may be a challenge in dealing with these things and small towns have limited staff so everybody wears multiple hats one of my one of my emergency management directors who does the floodplain management for her community is also trained nurse she's had to step aside from her floodplain management duties to deal with COVID-19 entirely she found somebody to fill her role he's the county appraiser and he knows nothing about floodplain management he seems like a nice man he seems earnest I think he's going to try hard but he's never taken a training class on floodplain management so that he knows exactly what to do uh in this situation I've just told him when something comes up you call me and I'll walk you through it and we had a lot of rain in Kansas in 2019 and a lot of places got flooded small towns that most of y'all never heard about places like Elmdale with a population of 50 Durham is a town of 110 the diner downtown on main street had had about three feet of water in it he body got flooded and strong city got flooded I'm going to focus in on strong city a little bit strong city got flooded three times got flooded in May got flooded in June and got flooded in July and in spite of all that flooding they never saw anybody from FEMA and not one of their citizens ever got a dime from FEMA because you'd have to flood about a hundred small towns in Kansas all at the same time from the same event to meet the dollar requirements for presidential disaster declaration so these communities aren't getting presidential disaster declarations they're not getting the mitigation dollars that are associated with a disaster declaration I've worked for the Kansas Department of Agriculture since August 2007 in all those years not one of my citizens has ever gotten individual assistance from a disaster declaration we have had disaster declarations to communities for roads and infrastructure for public assistance but not the individuals strong city is a town of 583 people they have a highway that runs into town highway 177 it's got this culvert under it on the north side of the highway there's houses on the south side of the highway there's a stream well when it rains on the south side of the highway the stream over tops its banks water backs up through the culverts goes towards those houses to the north they solve that problem by closing a gate on the culvert when it rains on the when it rains on the north side of the highway open that gate wide up the water flows through the culvert under the highway and into the stream and it's carried away in the houses don't flood the problem arises when it rains on both sides of the highway at the same time when that happens the volunteer fire department unpaid volunteers come out there in the middle of the night set up a pump and pump water across the road and close the highway strong cds for mitigation grant put in a small floodproof pump house right here near this culvert where they could pump water under the road and not have to close the highway one person could go there and flip a switch you wouldn't need a crew from the volunteer fire department that would that would help protect those houses and keep the road open unfortunately when they applied for their mitigation grant the grant was denied you see when you apply for mitigation grant there are very good reasons why you have to have a cost to benefit analysis you have to prove that for every dollar you're going to spend you're going to have one dollar and losses avoided unfortunately strong city has done a wonderful job of avoiding losses so they didn't have a history of homes being flooded thanks to that volunteer fire department and those the hard work those guys have done so the fact that they've done a good job has meant that their grant was denied someday their truck will malfunction or their their pump will fail and the houses will flood and at that point will qualify for mitigation grant but it seems ashamed we have to let the houses flood before we can do that and you have to remember small small cities like strong city town of 583 people does not have a grant right on staff does not have an engineer on staff in fact the staff in strong city is three people tree yvonne and in math now they've got three people there but those three people do a wonderful job of living up to their responsibilities in their national flood insurance program national flood insurance program makes fun sure disaster assistance to individuals and mitigation grants available in the community in exchange the community manages floodplain so when they had those floods this they put out this little flashing sign out there on the main road that says hey everybody you have to get floodplain permits before you repair your flood damage and substantial damage determinations will be done and because long city does a good job of managing their floodplains they've joined a FEMA program called the community rating system community rating system rewards the community with flood insurance discounts based on a rating of how well they're doing managing their flood plans to reduce flood risk it's a good program but unfortunately it's heavily rated towards bigger cities small towns have a hard time joining crs when you join the community rating system or crs you have to have computer generated geographic information systems mapping gis maps and strong city doesn't have a gis department so my staff and i make all of the crs maps for all the rural communities that want to join the crs program in the state of kansas and i say my staff and i it's two of us myself and one other person and uh we get funding through a program that called the community assistance program state support services element and uh because because of that program that program funds two people i have 732 incorporated cities and unincorporated counties in the state of kansas so two people are meeting all the floodplain management needs and given all the advice and all the help we can to 732 communities all at the same time we're stretched a little thin i don't take vacations i work hundreds of hours of overtime and i still don't meet the need there's more need than i can meet we have a program called the coopering technicals partners program that program we're using to do watershed wide studies in areas all across the state and you'll notice many of these watershed studies are in those same areas that don't have the engineers under contract through the ctp partnership program the engineers use good lidar topography compared with two-dimensional modeling to create base level engineering of where the floodplain should be and how deep the water will be when my kansas division of emergency management is applying for a grant or hazard mitigation assistance they come to us and ask us for this base level engineering so you can use that data in their grant applications because there's no flood maps in these areas to use for anything else it's the best available information under that ctp agreement we have a little bit of money set aside for technical assistance what technical assistance works is that we have money we have engineers already on contract they're making flood maps they're doing studies well they can program into their study a hypothetical flood control project run the modeling and see how it would reduce flooding in a community maybe somebody wants to put in a bigger culvert to see if that would reduce flooding to homes near that certain stretch of road we could model that form this is a screenshot of the town of sun city sun city is a town of 48 people in sun city they they got flooded last year our engineers are doing a base are doing using their base level engineering to do technical assistance in in this town they're going to come up with a report at the end this month and it's going to include recommendations recommendations will probably be a pond at the upper left portion of this photograph or a berm at the upstream end of town to help reroute some of the water the community can take our engineering that we're going to give to them for free and use that in a grant application to apply for a grant under hazard mitigation assistance there's several programs there and if they get approved for a grant they probably still won't be able to build the project because you have to have a local match when you do a grant and sun city is a town of 48 people with limited resources and virtually no funding for the match now that horrible looking thing is in anderson county it's a dam near the town of garnet and it didn't fail like like dick was just talking about michigan thank you and uh but we do have a dam safety program and one of the best ways to mitigate problems is prevent them from happening so we have engineers working our dam safety program and we have four of them in the state of kansas and they go out and inspect high hazard dams well our dam safety grant was cut this year by 10 so their entire travel budget for the coming year is 630 dollars we have 630 dollars to pay for the gas and the trucks to go out and inspect all of the high hazard dams across the state that we need to look at next year now they told me there'd be federal people on the line so i've talked about some federal programs and how we use them to help small towns in kansas because small towns in kansas can't really do it on their own if they're too small they just don't have the resources some of them are barely squeaking by quite frankly we had a flood map meeting in a town with a levy called barnard and they just said we can't afford to certify our levy and we might as well just give up now because our town is probably going to be unincorporated within a short period of years so small towns can't do it on their own so we use programs through the state of kansas to help support our small towns and now i'm going to stop talking and start listening thank you very much thanks d for your presentation um well uh you'll have lots of opportunity for for to continue talking um because we're starting to get questions and we're going to pivot now to questions and answers um really excellent presentation and um lots of really interesting insight um we are going to like i said transition to questions um we've started getting some from our audience thank you very much if you would like to submit a question follow us on twitter at EESI online or you can send us an email EESI at EESI online but now is the time when i step aside and introduce my colleague ellen von um ellen uh works on all manner of resilience issue at EESI and she's going to kick off our q and a the q and a portion um of our time together today so ellen welcome to the briefing and um i'll uh i'll be standing by great thank you dan and uh hello steve and richard thank you so much for your presentations um i have a lot of that you guys have a lot on your plate so um just thank you for what you're doing and sharing some of this with us um one of the things that um struck me i think with both of your presentations was just um you know obviously kind of just lack of resources it could be staffing it could be um mapping tools um and um i'm wondering if uh if you could expand on that a little bit in terms of what might be helpful to have from um like a FEMA grant or pre-disaster mitigation um if there are some some things for capacity building um that would be particularly helpful like for broadband infrastructure um again mapping tools um that type of thing i guess this could be for either one of you i'll speak up first so i don't know the whole country i just know kansas all right but i've got places in kansas where they don't have good internet service they can't get business to come to town because they don't have good internet service that's an that's an infrastructure issue at the same time pharma practices are changing you need more land to make a living on than you used to when my granddad was farming okay and as farms get bigger populations get smaller so populations in rural areas are dwindling and that means they have less tax base and less resources there so so how do you how do you solve that i mean that's that's a broad question saying how do we grow the economy in rural areas because if we grow their economy then they'll have means but through the through your part of the question about mitigation grants i'd almost like to see something in the language for the various hma grants you mentioned pdm or brick what if there was something in there that said this percentage one percent two percent pick a number of this grant program should be used for rural communities communities of a certain size and again pick a number 1000 people 2000 people whatever but if you did something like that at least they'd get a piece of the pie they may not get all of it and hopefully that there would be enough towns out there for that small piece of the pie that they would have the local ability to manage a grant like that and again grant management is an issue when you don't have any paid staff some of my towns the city clerk is a retired person who volunteers and works for free and so they would have to take on the responsibility to manage a grant so maybe if the grant program's included more allowance for communities to hire grant managers as part of the program just i know some some folks were also uh thinking that it would be helpful to have uh those that funding uh eligibility for um like you know training and hiring code officials for example so that you could have or yeah i'm i'm not sure how you hire code officials in a town where the mayor's not paid right okay and this goes this goes back to your definition of small towns i've got towns with like 10 000 people 5000 people they have code officials on staff yeah we i'll jump in too if i can make an observation that can you come back i know everybody thinks the solution to every problem is to throw my money at it and that may sound a little bit like this but i think we're greatly under investing in all of our economies especially rural economies and if we continue to decide we don't want to pay any taxes at all period full stop no government um all of the things that both Steve and i've been talking about is the need for more resources for government officials to serve their communities the way that they need to be served and so instead of i i'm absolutely not arguing that we need big government or that we or that you know government should be doing everything but we need to have enough government with enough resources and enough trained folks who know what they're doing to make it work the way it needs to work and i i think we've gone a bit too far on the pendulum swing to the star of the beast idea and we need to get back to let's invest in our communities and and provide the resources and it's not just um technical tools in my world everybody is wanting to develop the new toolkit um that they can put on the web that local officials can pick up and use and the reality is you still need to have people at the local level who know how to use them you still need to have basic folks with basic training and how to do the gis things that steve was talking about how to write grant applications and such and and you can maybe do some of that at the county level and kind of share those resources down but maybe you need to better support um actual local officials who can do that kind of work in house so um we need to start changing our mindset from away from all government is bad to let's invest in government the right way to to provide the resources we need to really thrive and kind of rethink how we're doing doing our communities and steve mentioned it's getting harder to farm because of the economics of farming the need to get big equipment to farm larger farm fields but it's also the case i think i can fairly say that a lot of our policies really favor they don't they're not supporting small farmers they're really designed to promote the larger corporate farming systems well you get what you support so if we want to support a diverse rural economy that's provides more employment for small farmers we probably need to be rethinking our federal and state policies in a way that really support that and cultivate it instead of kind of keep pushing towards big corporate farming and i'm not i don't mean to shoot at big corporate farmers i understand the pressures there are but but we need to kind of step back and rethink carefully the policies that we're talking and what effect that's having on who's participating in the economy yeah thank you um and richard you also mentioned um you know you need not just the tools but you need the people you need the human resources uh with the skills to do this work um are there examples that you either one of you can think of that um that there's a real need for in terms of skills training um in in your community i asked this because we're you know we're we're thinking about um this whole issue of workforce development and just what would be um maybe most helpful in that regard yeah maybe maybe steve if you don't mind i'll start off with this and then you build off for what i say so this is also going to sound like i'm preaching for hiring planners but the reason i got into planning was because i recognized the kinds of skills you need to do the kind of work we're talking about is really done well in an urban and regional planning program so in my work in coastal communities most of which are small towns and very rural the really important skill sets are being able to work with gis geographic information systems um where you can pull together a lot of data and make a lot of sense out of what's happening here you need to be able to work with census data and know population trends you need to know landscape data all of that coming together so that those are the technical skills that people need to have to understand the the ground that they're working on so to speak and then the other skill set you need is to develop the ability to work with people and to not come in and tell them here's what you need to do i'm the train planner and i know best and you have to do what i want to do you need to figure out how to be able to sit down at a table with everybody from the community or a good number of them who are coming to the table with different note thoughts on what we ought to be doing and how to approach it and be able to facilitate some good dialogue so that's maybe more of a soft technical skill and i can tell steve's got it i mean he's got that ability to kind of talk common sense and get people together so we need to cultivate that kind of training and you just can't do that through an online platform you can't create another tool i'll put it up on the web and think that communities are going to pick it up and do something with it without having that kind of assistance so so whether it's planners or maybe public administrators having those kinds of people working skills and then the gis technical analysis skills putting bringing those together would go a long way to helping out thank you that's that that's very interesting because that sort of the saw skill you mentioned came up in some previous briefings we had uh in this series it's just you can't say too much about the importance of that in addition to the technical skills so um thank you for raising that steve did you want to add anything to that left those gis for living so she'd appreciate but to do gis you need you need a license and you need a computer those things cost money uh one of my towns i was talking to recently their entire budget for streets for the coming year is six thousand dollars so yeah okay so they're probably not gonna invest in gis right now again roles communities small resources you get a little bigger yeah yeah you can't it all depends on what your definition of smaller rural is um i know there's some coming in i had one more dan if i could go ahead or if you want to take other questions yeah i'll ask one from the audience and then we can kind of go back and forth um this person emailed the question very early in the briefing so we'll get her we'll get to her first um this question has to do with uh watershed management and the question is um what recommendations do you have for how local communities uh can more effectively engage in watershed management to plan for and minimize risks associated with floods and other challenges um steve maybe we'll we'll go to you first this time and we'll ping pong back and forth between you and deck so as you saw from one of my slides we're doing watershed wide studies because we all know that floods don't stop at city limit lines so that's why we're doing our studies based off uh natural boundaries rather than political boundaries we also have program in state of kansas where we've got watershed districts that are authorized and they can create local taxable districts and those watershed districts build dams for both water recharge flood control recreation and water supply purposes and and that's the kind of thing you do rural areas you can also do watershed studies in an urban area because those those people have this the urban flood risk but we're concentrating on on rural right now and uh so like yeah i would i would add to that i think um so having studies that kind of map out the resource base are really important to show the connectivity between areas and it's very much the case that urban flooding starts in rural settings um where the if storm water isn't well managed up high in the watershed um that can have really exacerbate the impacts make make you know really complicate management downstream so so again the technical hard skills are having good data and studies to kind of map out what's going on here and what are the relationship the soft skills are trying to figure out how you can get communities to start working together and to recognize that what they do might have an effect on the neighboring jurisdiction and do that through watershed councils i'm a i'm a member of the Huron River Watershed Council here in mid michigan um and trying to cultivate awareness of folks and look for opportunities to collaborate and sometimes that maybe means starting small and getting folks to realize hey we can all be better off if we work together on some of these issues so look for small wins and try and get that larger perspective and get folks to work together and then the final thing i'll say is to um i'm gonna shoot a little bit at the national flood insurance program for a long time there's been a real emphasis on um restoration after storms hit so so there is the crs the community rating system program and an nfip and the idea is we should get communities to better manage to keep people out of floodplains and such it doesn't work that well as it could be at the same time we're subsidizing insurance for folks who are building in places that maybe aren't the safest place to build so the nfip program has been pretty harshly critiqued by some researchers who say that's made it worse it's made it worse we're not really doing good hazard management but we're subsidizing insurance so people are building where they wouldn't otherwise build and then when you build dams kind of like the edenville dam people get a sense that hey the dam's there we've solved the problem we can build below it but when that dam fails the the damage you see is way worse coming out of it so so kind of making sure that as we adopt government policies that are designed to do good that we don't kind of bake in by accident what i would call perverse policy incentives that you actually encourage people to do exactly the opposite of what you're trying to do and and once you once people build it's way harder to get them to move out of harm's way than it is to tell people don't build in harm's way in the first place so we need to both kind of make sure we're not making it worse with how we develop from a watershed perspective recognizing it's all connected and then find places that are going to be repetitively flooded with climate change maybe it's time to figure out how we can help folks move out of harm's way there's no easy answer here by the way nothing about this is easy and pretty much whatever you propose will make somebody unhappy so we need to kind of just figure out how we can do a better job of collectively working through this together Ellen we'll go back to you for the next question oh sorry Steve please please jump back in Richard that those insurance subsidies did exist but they are slowly going away and they're being taken away in stair step increments right now so they're pulling the band aid off slow because when you try to raise the rates to the full actual rates all in one shot that's pretty painful for people and again rural rural economies people have to be able to adjust for that higher payment yeah absolutely yeah that's I know that's that's been taking place yeah um but it's it's you know it's not easy but at least the conversation has to happen so this is this is important um so it's good to raise this and I know that for for those watching who are um you know congressional staff I know that there's there's a real interest has been a lot of momentum in past years of updating NFIP and so I I hope I hear your concerns um and make that a priority so Dan um I also had a question I guess just thinking about we've talked a lot about these sort of nature based solutions natural infrastructure um are there specific projects Richard you mentioned we need to to learn to live with nature and it's you know it's hard to control nature um uh so recognizing that we have of course crumbling infrastructure like dams that we we need to fix are there also some some natural infrastructure nature based solutions for resilience that um that you're looking at or Steve um that you guys are looking at for your communities I'll um I'll say a few things and I bet Steve has more too the in in more urban settings there's a really big push on green infrastructure so called green infrastructure low impact development infrastructure so instead of having a curb and gutter that takes the water just as quickly as you can possibly move it into the storm drain out to the river let's build rain gardens and swales where the the water is reconnected into the natural landscape and infiltrates down so there's some kind of aesthetic concerns here when we've seen I've had colleagues who have studied um rain gardens and tree lawns and people don't like it they want to see a clean curb in a tree lawn but in fact if we're going to manage water better and try and better solve the flooding problem we need to kind of go back to those natural landscapes so uh impervious parking lots swales and parking lots that collect the runoff off the parking lot into that drain system and filter it and control it instead of shunting it as quickly as possible out to the watercourse those are the kinds of natural features um in inland lakes you can do instead of building a hardened seawall you know plan a lot of vegetation and and um more natural systems that will better absorb wave energy um uh then trying to just fight off nature it's a little bit harder on the Great Lakes the energy systems that they're so big so um living shorelines are really living and they're moving um I know in out west with the kind of flooding that that Steve experienced there may be some limits what you can do with swales it's if the floodplains are just that big and the rainfalls are that dramatic um you may be constrained but certainly in urban settings there's a lot we could be doing to go back to green infrastructure that better handle stormwater. Richard mentioned farming practices earlier and and I'm from an area where traditional road crops are king but you can alter farming practices to rebuild healthy soil and healthy soil allows rainwater to infiltrate into the soil you you would be amazed how much how many gallons of water could be absorbed into the soil just by increasing soil health and that reduces the runoff which causes flooding it increases the the soil moisture so your reward root drought resistant it makes healthier plants you get less sediment if there's fertilizer that's on top of the soil and that runs off and that pollutes local water supply systems I'm a big advocate for healthy soils and it's a shame that when I go to flood conferences I hear all of the traditional NFIP solutions and nobody's talking about farming practices in soils cover crops will help reduce erosion and help add carbon back into the soil when you till those back in. Those are the kind of Steve I want to just build on that when I mentioned landscapes smart policies and no regrets policies that's exactly it you don't have to get all caught up in the debate about climate change to recognize there's a lot you could be doing to improve farming by doing exactly the things that Steve just described that if climate change doesn't turn out to be as bad as we thought we're still doing a better job of farming we're still doing a better job of cultivating and stewarding the landscape so it's part of the problem with our political dialogue right now as we get caught up in all these debates about well kind of get over that and think about those really good examples that Steve just mentioned about how to make farming work better and to improve the farmland and oh by the way that's going to really reduce the amount of stormwater flowing off the land and excess you know making flooding problems worse yeah the nature-based solutions are the more yeah it's it's a line of thinking that it sounds so intuitive and every when we when we talk to experts like this on our briefings it's one of the things that everyone talks about but for some reason there's a disconnect there and people are you know whether it's public whether it's acceptance of them or if there's a maybe there's an assumption that they're less effective but all of our panelists it seems are come out pretty strongly in support of improved or increased use of nature-based solutions from a environmental and sustainability but also from a common sense perspective. From the cost perspective I think finding that it can be actually more cost-effective to do that so yeah it it also I also wonder and Steve you reminded me of this in terms of the farming practices I assume the ag extension programs are talking about this um and yeah absolutely absolutely so the NRCS the USDA yeah sure they they promote soil absolutely yeah right upper strips at the edge of farm fields but but then I've got the guys that you farm fence row to fence row and you knock the fence over and go a little on the neighbor's property too just temporarily move the fence and then put it back when you're done right you know what happens because I was the neighbor the next question comes from someone in our audience and this is a little bit more of a clarification question it was originally sort of targeted to you dick but I think there's a way to broaden it just to get a little bit more background and we'll start maybe with you dick and then Steve interesting what you think or what you know um who and how are is dam regulation determined in Michigan who regulates the dams who gets to make decisions about what's regulated what's unregulated and then when you Steve I'm sorry uh interested in here sort of how things are done in Kansas and sort of if there are any differences but go ahead dick yeah um I don't know the precise details but the we have damned a lot of our rivers in the state of Michigan and they range from very small um um boundaries to really large structures and as I understand it the state regulates about half of them and it's primarily based on the size of the impoundment behind the the structure so the size of the structure itself and the size of the impoundment and when that gets big enough I don't remember the exact acreage but when it gets big enough where I think if it fails that could be real damage that's when the state steps and takes on a regulatory role right so so dams are monitored in the state of Kansas we have we have state statutes on this and we have a dam safety program at the water structures program in the division of water resources under the Kansas Department of Agriculture the man who runs that program is also my boss so I'm not going to give you the exact statistics but probably get them wrong and not be in big trouble with it but the way they determine what a high hazard dam is is by looking at the height of the dam is measured at the emergency spillway and how many acre feet of water are impounded behind it essentially how big is the lake behind the dam okay thanks thanks for your clarification what would be affected by a dam breach to determine if it's a high hazard dam or not because a big dam that has nothing below it it's not a high hazard dam so that's generally they're they're regulated or controlled by the state though as opposed to local or or sort of you know sort of interstate regional entities I think they're generally locally regulated by the state the dam that failed in Midland the Edenville dam was also subject to right permitting by the uh for federal emergency regulatory commission energy regulatory commission because it was a hydro dam so there's a bit of controversy about that dam they FERC withdrew its permission to make hydro because they were very concerned about the safety of the dam and they've been really working hard on the dam owners to take needed repairs and the state was going back and forth with them too and it wasn't happening so the it's the size of the dam the structure that dictates whether or not the state's going to pick up and regulate it um and then how much how many resources the state puts towards that effort is a function of how many resources the state has to work with and their allocation of resources across all of their different programs and and we're not allocating very much um they were really relying heavily on dam owners doing their own inspections and submitting them to the inspectors to read and sign off on but quite often the inspectors don't have the capacity to actually go out and look at the dam that's my understanding from reading news reports okay thanks um i think we have time for one last question uh before we wrap up uh and i'm gonna try to bring it around to sort of the outbreaks of coronavirus sort of the context for all of our briefing series and um you the both of you think about flooding uh mitigating flood risk you think about this all the time um from where you're sitting um what are you most concerned about from a public health sort of an intersection between public health and floods and dam safety flood risk perspective are there things that you're sort of really on the lookout for are there issues that you think that um that you're really nervous or that you're really on the watch for um or are there um um sort of what are your main concerns as i mean none of us hope of course that the coronavirus spreads but um if it does over the summer and if there's risk of flooding what what are your chief concerns about sort of that intersection of of natural disasters and public health disasters so this year it's looking a little easier for me than last year did last year was was terrible on the flooding and all the rain we got this year's going a little better if this year was like last year my concern would be people who have to evacuate from a flood not necessarily going to the center but they just can't go back home uh so now i've got a mobile population where the mobile population they're moving around and that brings them in contact with other people so that's kind of how i would be concerned about how the coronavirus would interact with flooding in a situation like that we didn't activate very many shelters last year nothing like that where people haven't been staying shelters but a lot of people went to hotels and and that sort of thing yeah i same thing here um the thing that we're seeing is that we're getting wetter we're we're gonna very likely almost undoubtedly see bigger storms wetter more frequent and severe storms are going to just keep happening and COVID-19 has just sucked the energy out of everything to deal with but COVID-19 so a lot of and it's made it really hard for government to function when you can't have public hearings and meetings and get together and keep things going and you can only do zoom so much so it's the increased frequency of storms have me concerned and and then beyond that i i think um just um our most of the problems we're dealing with it's really easy to think oh that happened in midland or now for the midland folks to think well it happened now it's not going to happen for another 500 years and that's probably not the case we're probably going to see more storms and we still have all of these disconnects that are preventing us from seeing how things piece together and thinking carefully about how do we start playing for that and COVID-19 is just making it so much harder to give it the attention it needs because we're so distracted with having to deal you know understandably so to deal with those public health concerns but it just adds to the challenge that much more um well you said go ahead please have the last word what i've seen studies i've read eastern kansas is going to get about two more inches per rain per year western kansas might get about two inches less the middle of the state's going to stay about the same dry lines moving about 140 miles to the east that's the sort of the front range for tornadoes now the deal is though that even where in the places where the rainfall stays the same the storms will come less frequently and be more intense and i'm already seeing that happen yep that's happening here too so we have to deal with drought and storms at the same time this is a bit ironic how this is playing out well thank you very much and dick you said you can't do everything by zoom but i hope present company has accepted from that hopefully that wasn't too much of a dig at the end of our briefing series on your well it's you know doing these online you know we do kind of miss out for sure on the on the in-person you know aspect of it but um you know it's it's wonderful when we're able to bring panelists together like you and steve uh to to sort of provide perspective on the topic and at some point maybe we'll be able to do sort of a follow-up briefing on some of these issues hopefully at a time when we can get together and and not be remote and and have an opportunity to meet and shake hands and all that um thank you so much for taking time out of your busy days and joining us today and educating our audience about these issues um i'd like to thank ellen uh and omri and dan o'brien and everyone um on team esi for all of their help with this week um if anyone has missed um any of the briefings that we've done this week the three of them visit www.esi.org um their archive webcast as well as presentation materials uh while you're there um i encourage everyone to 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