 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to this afternoon's briefing. My name is Carol Werner and I'm the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. And we are very very glad that you are here this afternoon to be part of a whole discussion about how can we best go about advancing resiliency. There are a lot of opportunities that we're going to hear about this afternoon that will help communities, people across the country. As they look for ways to help their communities become more resilient, there are some, I think, really interesting opportunities that will allow folks across the country in all sorts of areas that have been dealing with disaster after disaster that are really looking at needs for new developments and how can they best do it in a way that will make their communities much more resilient. And of course, that has huge impacts in terms of their ability to have a safe, healthy, local infrastructure that can survive economically, can prevent sort of the worst damages, can really mitigate risk, can mitigate hazards. And I think across the country, states and localities are very, very interested in finding ways to deal with this. I know I was struck when we started to look at the numbers that in terms of areas that have been declared, presidentially declared disaster areas in three years, in 2011, 2012 and 2013, that that included areas in 48 states and 19 other jurisdictions. That is pretty staggering. And so it really calls out the need for people to come together, look creatively for innovative ways that we can help move resilience activities forward. What does that mean? How can we best learn from each other in terms of helping our sister communities across the country? And also make sure that the investments that we're making and that whether it's private investment, local public investment, national investment, to make sure that this is really the smartest way, because obviously, they're always limited dollars, limited resources, limited time. And so what's, how do we do this in the most effective, the smartest way for everyone? So it's a real chance to learn from each other. So to hear more about some of these innovative approaches and competitions to try and bring out the most creative approaches and ideas, we have a wonderful panel this afternoon and our leadoff speaker will be Sam Carter, who is the Associate Director for Resilience with the Rockefeller Foundation. Sam will talk a little bit more about the Rockefeller Foundation, what it's doing and why it is so concerned with regard to resilience and finding ways to really mitigate some of these risks and hazards, both domestically and frankly, globally, because Rockefeller has been in the lead in this whole area for a number of years in terms of its global look as well as its look domestically. And prior to coming to the Rockefeller Foundation, Sam had helped establish the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, where he was the Associate Director. And while there, he was developing a number of new program areas that allowed him to create new partnerships within a university setting as well as within New York City, but also in terms of global partnerships. And in 2013, he was involved in terms of developing and implementing the rebuild by design and was a project manager of the research stage of this important effort. And I think another interesting aspect about Sam's work has been that prior to his working with the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, he had been with the Social Science Research Council in the President's Office of the Research Council. And interestingly, while there, he worked on two books for the privatization of risk series. And that is a big part of some of the challenges that we are facing today as we look across the country in terms of looking at all of the extreme events that have come in myriad forms that communities that states have been dealing with over the last few years. So, Sam? Thank you very much, Carol, for that generous introduction. Thank you, Paul, for your help in coordinating this. And really, thanks for EESI for setting up occasions like this where we can have conversations like this because these topics fly around. There's these big ideas out there. And it's really important to be able to come together, explore these ideas, and think about what different actors, organizations, and entities are doing in this space and how these things might inform one another. So, I was really excited and eager to accept the invitation to come down. Thank you so much. Oh, my slide's up. Just a quick note before I get to my slides. The Rockefeller Foundation, for those of you who don't know, has been around for 101 years. This is our first year of our new century of work. And we were really set up by the massive private fortune of an entrepreneur and his family. And, you know, we've had a variety of different projects and large-scale initiatives that we've undertaken over the years. But for pretty much the last two decades, we've really been focused on how communities of various scales can prepare for an uncertain future. And our work around resiliency has really matured over the last decade with, actually, largely a lot of partnerships in Asia. For many, this is really the leading edge of a lot of the changes that are driven by changes to climate. And we've established about 10 years ago the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network. And much of our maturing work in this space really does come from an international perspective and learnings from engaging with people all over the world. And I'm really just going to touch on sort of the front end of what all that great work has been for the last 101 years. And just describe sort of a set of projects that we've been doing just over the last couple years. Another note, since I am going first and since we're talking about a topic as abstract for many as resilience, I think it's worth articulating a little bit about how the foundation views resilience. Like, what does it mean to be resilient? How is it a useful construct? And I'll just sort of lead into that by suggesting that if you were to sort of have a spectrum, an axis, where on one end is, you know, a resilient place or resilience, most people would think that the other end of that might be something like vulnerability or risk. But it's really important to understand that the other side, the antonym of resilience is collapse. And this is really about systemic collapse, complicated systems that overlay and intersect with one another. And how can these systems remain functioning, doing the things that they need to do to keep people safe, to keep livelihoods happening in the face of all the different challenges and risks that we're going to face in the future. So I just want to sort of put that at the top of the conversation and we can come back to that in Q&A or throughout our talks. So for the foundation in recent years, we've always been thinking big for many decades. But in this particular area, we really have an attitude that's sort of summed up in this Daniel Burnham quote, he's a famous Chicago architect, make no little plans. They have no magic to stir people's blood and probably will not be realized. Make big plans. Aim high in hope and in work. And I bring this up because the challenges that we face in the future are really big and they're bigger than any one person. And it's very much about changing minds. It's about changing entire systems of the way we organize ourselves. At the end of the day, it's about shifting paradigms. And that's not an easy task. It's not something that any one organization or even a small network of organizations can do. It's a massive collective action project. And we think it's doable. We think it's already happening. There's a lot of leading indicators showing that people are taking steps in the right direction. But we think that when you're working with this kind of issue and these kinds of challenges, you have to think very big. And for the foundation in particular, whose mission is really to improve the well-being of humanity around the world, that's literally our mission. It's pretty big. But we have a focus on poor and vulnerable people around the world. The question for us is how do you scale resilience? Because this is happening in places organically and maybe sometimes without much planning. It just sort of happens. People have to adapt. How do you scale the best ideas across countries, across jurisdictional lines and ultimately around the world? And that's really the challenge we've been taking very seriously over the last five years. The way that we've done this at the foundation is to take two specific strategic tasks. The first is really a deep set of initiatives where it's really about catalyzing innovation and integration to reframe how key actors and actions work. This work is very much place-specific. It has a heavy research component. It's really about understanding the local conditions, the specific context, and designing solutions to meet those needs. And then we also have a broad set of solutions. And this is really about distributing the solutions that we pick up from around the world and influencing global debate and practice to land these in different places. And the two real tracks of work at the foundation are one that we call resilience by design, which is the work I'm going to focus on and what I'm responsible for at the foundation, and then 100 resilient cities. I'll say a couple words about 100 resilient cities It's a global network. We announced our first 32 cities last year. We have a competition each year. We just closed our second competition, and we'll have a third competition starting next year. The entry point for the competition is a city applies, and they say we're doing X, Y, and Z, and we're working towards achieving these goals. And then the best applications are selected, and they become part of this network of mayors globally. In the United States we have, I believe, six cities that were selected in the first round, depending on how you count them. And these cities get funds from the Rockefeller Foundation to hire, as staff position, reporting to the governor, or sorry, reporting to the mayor, a chief resilience officer. And this is a position we want more and more communities to pick up. And then we give them a set of tools and resources so that they can really develop a resilience-building strategy over the next three years. And we work with the community to sort of flesh out and articulate that strategy. And then we connect them to a set of private, nonprofit, but largely private sector partners who want to work with the city to really implement the strategy. And then, of course, there's also the network effect of having lots of mayors, lots of chief resilience officers around the world that are sharing ideas. And that really embodies our broad set of solutions. But in terms of resilience by design, this is really what I'm going to be talking about for the rest of the presentation. As I said, it's really about tackling specific issues and trying to change the way that we think about them in specific places. And just to illustrate this point about how we need to change paradigms, I'll start off with the example of water. And in particular, coastal resilience. There's a set of challenges that we're very familiar with in this country with the large storms that we've had in recent years that really underscore this issue. But if we can describe the old paradigm, which has sort of brought us to this place that we're in right now, we might characterize it as pave, pipe, pump, and prevent. And what that means is we've created a set of largely engineering-based interventions and a lot of policy interventions as well that have allowed the urbanization of delta and coastal cities. This has created new land. You know, we've been able to develop. This creates wealth. But it unfortunately has also a whole set of unintended consequences, not least our increased risk of devastating floods, subsidence, it's contributed to climate change because of the way that we've developed. It's led to in many neighborhoods social isolation and inequality. And there's also a tremendous amount of ecological damage that's resulted from this paradigm. And just to illustrate this for you, this is an image from a catastrophic flood event. It's from a flood in New Orleans, actually connected to Hurricane Katrina, but it's sort of irrelevant what the image is. What it, or what the context is, because it's illustrative of this paradigm. There was a large wall that has clearly been breached catastrophically and what that wall enabled was the construction of many homes putting very real lives in danger right on the other side of that wall. Because the second you build that wall, you're saying to that community, you're safe. At least to a certain, in an engineer's mind, you're safe to a certain accepted level of risk, you know, at a 100-year flood or a 500-year flood, which are problematic terms as well. But, you know, once you build that wall there, it says, okay, developers come in, let's build some houses, let's have more homes, people start up lives, they get comfortable, they get safe, and then a catastrophic event happens and people lose their lives. And our argument is it doesn't have to be this way. This represents a particular paradigm of how we do urban planning and how we do urban design and how we build our cities. There are other ways to think about this. And we sort of characterize this at the foundation as a paradigm of living with water. And this is something that some communities have been doing historically for generations and generations, and they don't have catastrophic floods because they know how to build, they build in specific ways, and they build housing construction in certain ways that lets the water come in, is adaptable, and lets them be a little bit more flexible in how they work with it. This is just an example from, and again, this could sort of be from a variety of different projects. This happens to be from a rebuild-by-design project by the Interboro team in Nassau County in New York. And this is essentially another model, another way to do this work. Rather than having a high protective wall with residential right behind it, you have a small wall right there on the edge which is enough to keep back regular day-to-day title flows, boat traffic, et cetera. A sloping coast which actually doubles as a public amenity in parkland. There's a berm which rises to an appropriate level of risk tolerance depending on whatever the community decides is that appropriate level of risk tolerance. Some additional vegetation to also help protect. And then it slopes back actually into a wetland. This is actually the restoration of a natural wetland that was there before the development occurred, and it's actually that system, that layered approach to protecting which enables a commercial development to exist behind it. And in fact, that commercial development in this model in large part subsidizes the construction of that park and actually pays for a lot of the maintenance of it. This is a model that's been done over and over again with increasing frequency in different cities. Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City is a great example of this. And this is something that the foundation sees as embodying that next paradigm that living with water. And there's a ton of different ways that this can be demonstrated, but this is just one slide. So I really just want to do a quick overview of four different projects that are within our portfolio of resilience by design. And I'll end on the National Disaster Resilience Competition, which is our rapidly maturing partnership with HUD. There's an exciting set of events connected to that, and Harriet will talk a little bit more about that after I finish my remarks. And we can talk more about what the foundation is doing to support that in the Q&A if you're interested. But I'll start with a set of projects that's tied to something called Structures of Coastal Resilience. Each of these, actually I should make a note, each of these are characterized by a particular set of ingredients. There's a sort of a big idea, as I said, we're sort of going deep in a particular place or a particular local condition, building off of research to really understand what's happening today and what's going to happen in the future, and then partnering with a federal agency or a set of agencies at state or local levels to really leverage not just their authority, but also their budgets and their resources to really implement these projects. So the role of the foundation is really to create the environment or sort of an innovation lab that enables good ideas to surface and then work with our agency partners to implement these ideas. All along the way consulting and bringing the community in because without doing that it's just not a successful process on the merits and also for political reasons. But so with Structures of Coastal Resilience, this is really a partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. There's ongoing dialogue with FEMA around flood maps on this as well. But this is really taking as its scope of work the North Atlantic Coast Comprehensive Study, which is ongoing. The Army Corps of Engineers, as some of you might be aware, is the entity in the United States that's responsible for coastal protection. And what we wanted to do is look at particularly vulnerable communities that have a shared condition. And in the case of Norfolk, Hampton Roads area, Atlantic City, Jamaica Bay, and Narragansett Road Island, these are back bay systems. They don't directly face the ocean. Most of them have some kind of barrier island protection in front of them. And they're incredibly susceptible both to fluvial and fluvial flooding, which is to say flooding that comes when it rains and flooding that comes from surge or other kinds of storm events. And what effects surge is not just the increases of sea level resulting from a variety of factors, but also the sinking of land. And in particular, Norfolk is especially vulnerable in this respect. And that also comes from the result of decades of building on wetlands as well. So in these particular places, what we wanted to do was team incredibly robust, really advanced modeling of future storm surge projections, which take into account a variety of different risk factors that extend into the future, and marry that with top level design team support so that designers could work with the community with the best available scientific knowledge to produce really forward thinking resilience building designs. And so where we are in this process is there are preliminary designs for each of these four sites. We're working with the mayors and their staff and the city councils and the communities to really shape these designs and get everyone's buy-in and get people excited about it. And ultimately this will become, we hope, and that's why we're working with the Corps, part of the Corps' plans for these places because they have to construct protective systems already. And if we can sort of work through their mandate and deliver good ideas to them, the opportunity is there to really keep these communities safe for a number of years. Changing course is another example of this kind of work. This is a partnership also with the Army Corps of Engineers and in particularly with the port of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. For those of you who might be familiar with the way that Katrina has worked, the way that the state of Louisiana has worked with New Orleans since Katrina and Rita and other events, there's been a really amazing collaboration that's developed around developing a coastal master plan. There was a 2012 master plan that was the first such plan that was universally adopted by the legislature, which if you know anything about Louisiana is a real feat in and of itself. But one of the things that remained undesigned in that coastal master plan was how we were going to deal with the lower Mississippi course. This is one of the most heavily trafficked navigational bodies in the United States. It's one of the most if not the most active port in terms of gross tonnage in the entire country. Half the country's states feed their economies through this port. It's vitally important to national security for all these reasons. However, it's incredibly exposed and the only way that you can allow the navigational channels to stay open at this point is to do continuous dredging and to really sort of hollow out the river, which creates these strange forces of nature that actually eliminate the sediment flow out to the marsh islands and are gradually eroding the coast of Louisiana. So in addition to sea level rise, you have this massive disruption and disappearance of land on the river delta. And it's actually happening at a rate of a football field an hour, if you can believe that, it's massive. And if you take this thing out over time, it basically means Louisiana's going to be underwater and the whole thing's going to fall apart in the next 90 years. So the question is how do you work within these constraints? How do you partner with the port? How do you partner with navigation and the pilots of the barges? How do you work with the city to ensure the culture remains and the fisheries remain? There's not a simple answer to this. That's why it hasn't been solved yet. But we think the competition model is actually a great way to surface good ideas and really get new thinking on the way. So we actually did a national search. We identified eight teams that would, and it's multi-disciplinary teams. They include researchers and engineers and hydrologists forming. Most of them have six, seven, or sometimes even 10 or 12 different private firms that come together to form these teams, research institutions as well. To really take a look at this and say what could we do? How could we develop this over time? We received, we had eight sort of semi-finalist teams. We narrowed it down to three. And those three teams are now in an intensive design stage that's ongoing. And we hope to get their final designs in mid-2015. And again, there's massive buy-in from all the stakeholders in the region because this is a problem that everyone recognizes and everyone wants to solve. And there actually is money to implement a lot of this stuff because of BP's Deepwater Horizon and other things like that. So there actually is an opportunity here to do something grand and do something really great. Rebuild by Design, which as was mentioned in my introduction, I was a project manager for when I was at NYU before I came to the foundation. This was a partnership with the foundation and HUD and other philanthropies to do something similar to what we were trying to do in the other two competitions I described. But in this case, massively rethink how we would do disaster recovery using HUD dollars in the Sandy affected region. Traditionally, disaster recovery funds flow to states, largely governors, sometimes mayors, depending on the capacity of the place. And there's a real requirement to sort of use these funds to recover specifically around the disaster. And what HUD had the leadership and the vision to do with Rebuild by Design was really articulate, well, let's take some of that money, in this case about a billion dollars, and compete it across these communities that are eligible for these funds and really see what they could do if we turn our vision to making a more resilient North Atlantic coast and in particular the Sandy affected communities. And so this led to another competition, which the foundation was able to support with its more flexible dollars from philanthropy and that really was built out from June 2013 through April 2014, resulted in six winning projects and those projects were awarded $920 million, which are currently in the process of flowing to those states and cities. And I can talk more about that in Q&A if people have questions. But finally, just the last thing I want to mention and then I'll turn it over to Harriet to really talk about what this really is. Over the summer, President Obama announced the National Disaster Resilience Competition. This was a competition that is really built off of in many ways the successes of Rebuild by Design and the ability to organize communities and get great ideas out there and really scale that approach in that philosophy out across the entire country, or basically the entire country. As Carol mentioned, in the past three years there have been 67 communities of those at 48 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and then 17 other territories and communities who had a nationally declared disaster in the years 2011 to 2013. And so the opportunity is to bring that kind of innovative design thinking to all these communities that are all recovering from these disasters and really inspire them to pick up the challenge and really rise to the challenge and think about how they might grow to become more resilient. And HUD in organizing this as a competition is really challenging them to compete, come up with great ideas. And the foundation for our part is really helping them develop their ideas through a set of technical assistance programs. We're running a set of resilience academies that's really bringing the teams that are putting together the applications to regional retreats and really working with them so that they're really thinking about these ideas. We're pairing them with experts that we have in our network. We're connecting them to the best ideas from our projects around the world. And we're really just trying to make everyone as successful as possible in working with HUD through this competition. So I'll stop there and I'll turn it over to Harriet or actually Carol. And if you have any questions about all this material I just threw out at you just we can talk about it at the Q&A. Thank you very much. Great. Thanks, Sam. And I think there should be lots to talk about. And as Sam said, we're not going to hear from Harriet Tragoni who is the director of HUD's Office of Economic Resilience. And I have known Harriet, known Harriet's work for a lot of years or I should say a number of years now. And I think that she is the right person in the right place at the right time in terms of really looking at this whole issue about economic resilience. She, as Sam said, she's going to talk more about this whole competition to encourage innovation. But Harriet brings a lot of experience through her whole background in local government. I think every day we see evidence of some of her work as the director of the D.C. Office of Planning in terms of how to create greater sustainability, walkability, accessibility, livability here in the district and as part of that rewriting the city's zoning code for the first time in 50 years. But before that she was also director of the Planning Office for the State of Maryland where, again, looking at a lot of the challenges that were being faced within Maryland and its communities and how to deal with this on thoughtful multi-year, multi-decadal situation in terms of thinking about solutions that would make sense and would last. And she also had spent several years at EPA prior to her work with the State of Maryland and she also had been the co-founder of the Governor's Institute on Community Design. So she, again, brings a lot of thoughtful background into this very, very important area that we now need in terms of helping our communities across the country. Here are you. Good afternoon. Thanks all of you for coming. We're very excited to see all of you here and really thrilled to be talking about our favorite topic, resilience and competition. So this is great. And thank you, Carol. That was a lovely introduction. Now everyone knows I can't keep a job. I bounce around all over the place. But I've only actually been at HUD for just under nine months. So one of the things I didn't know about HUD was how intimately involved it was in disaster recovery. I mean, I had no idea. And what a time to be involved in disaster recovery. The frequency and severity of extreme weather events is greatly increasing. You know, those of you who are working here on the Hill know. You know, you appropriate the funds. HUD has a program, but it's not annually funded. It's funded in the wake of a disaster with a specific appropriations bill that has specific requirements. And our national competition is actually happening under the auspices of one of those bills. I was shocked to find out that HUD had been appropriated more than 45 billion dollars just since 2000 to do long-term disaster recovery. And that's a lot of money no matter how you look at it. And a lot of places, not every place, but a lot of places have been spending that money to very lovingly rebuild things just as they were, just where they were. And when you think about, not in the wake of a disaster, the aspirations that many states and communities have for the future to diversify their economy, to create greater opportunity, you know, to create amenities, and make places a better place to live with more convenience and more choices, that's not necessarily how this money is being used. So one of the ideas that really motivates us in doing this competition is how can we spend that same dollar we were going to spend, but potentially get a different and broader set of benefits from that expenditure. So, you know, Hurricane Sandy was a big deal. And it started a lot of things in motion here, not just for the Rockefeller Foundation and not just for HUD, but we have Matt Dahlby here from EPA, but he's in some ways a stand-in for many, many other agencies. So around a task force that was formed for Hurricane Sandy, a great number of federal agencies started to work very closely together. You know how it is. Many of you are in government or have worked in government and that sometimes collaborating is an unnatural act. It's not the easiest thing to do. There's nothing in any of your performance standards that says this is a way you should be doing business, but in fact, you often get a much different, a much better result if you can work together. So that's been a real hallmark, you know, of the work that I think all of us have been doing. We're doing unnatural things, coordinating across sectors, across jurisdictional boundaries, and across agency lines. And one of those major events that caused a lot of that coming together in coordination was Hurricane Sandy and the aftermath. One of the important things worth mentioning, we talked about rebuild by design. It was a competition. It was directed at the design community. So let's talk about that for a second. That in and of itself is kind of a bizarre thing because they're not our grant recipients. You know, there might have been money that ultimately went to fund those designs, but our money didn't go to designers. Rockefeller's money went to designers. Why would they ask designers to be this kind of weird intermediary between the government, the federal government, and our normal state and local partners? It's because design is a way of taking a set of problems and potentially finding a different answer, right? When we started to even do this national competition, I heard from so many people who said, oh, I've got a project for you. Yeah, I've got a project. Let me tell you about my project because it's been languishing for 10 years this project that I have. I'm just looking for money to fund it. So I don't need to look at anything else. I don't need to explore options or find partners. You've got money. I've got a project. We're done. No, no, that's not really what we're looking for. So even when it comes to a disaster like Hurricane Sandy, tremendous flooding, high winds, storm surge, it turns out there are lots and lots of ways to address those risks. Many, many different ways. Here's some examples of what some of those approaches might be. Some of them work better in some places than others. But it's also true that if one of your strategies is a wall, this is a great illustration. What else can a wall be? It can be a bench. It can be a screen for media. It can be a shelter. It can be part of housing. It can be a community gathering place. It can be lots and lots of things, and that's just a wall. So the idea is what are the aspirations and needs of communities? What are they? And if we put all those things on the table, in addition to disaster recovery and resilience, could we get a different answer? And that was really the brilliance behind Rebuild by Design. That's why the designers were the intermediaries, because they went to the community and said, we know what your recovery needs are. Let's talk about your other needs. If we spend this money here, what are the other kinds of benefits that we could get if we thought about it differently? You can combine these different types of barriers, along with different ways of storing water, along with other amenity-based features, and you can get very, very different things. You don't have to have the same answer in every community. It can change and morph in different places. This is what we might have expected to see around the island of Manhattan, because that's the kind of thing we know would work, a big seawall. Wouldn't that be great? But that's not what we saw. There was a project called the Big U, and I'm not going to show it to you exactly, but I am going to suggest that what the Big U demonstrated was that you can have a different approach in every neighborhood that meets the needs of that community based on their articulation of what those needs are. It could have a very different character, look very different, provide the same level of protection, but also provide a way to diversify the economy, provide new amenities, meet the needs of that community. I think that is the epiphany that we got from Rebuild by Design, and that's the kind of thinking we're hoping to bring to the national competition. There are a couple of other reasons that we would do it this way. Are we rolling in money at the federal level? Oh no, we're not. At the state level, at the local level, we are not. In some ways, it might have been a luxury in the past that we would spend our money silo by silo and not only not care if there are other benefits to be had, but maybe even be prohibited from spending the money to get those other benefits by the siloed program. Well, we just don't have the luxury of doing that anymore. We have to be smarter about how we spend our money, and for a couple of reasons. We need to spend the money much more efficiently, but we're also at a moment for a lot of our infrastructure where we know that something we invest in today that we might still be paying for in 20 or 30 years is in real danger of being obsolete. Think about transportation and all the innovations people are talking about in terms of how we use transportation, things that might greatly change our needs for parking, on how we calculate capacity, on what's the rate of car ownership. Think about utility infrastructure and how different that might be. If we had more distributed networks and more microgrids, that could be totally different than it is now. So the other thing we have to think about is can that infrastructure investment have those multiple benefits? So if one of those uses ends up being less important over time, that there are these other reasons for paying for that infrastructure, it's also true that we need it to be mutable and adaptable. We know the ways in which some things are going to change, so why don't we build it so that we could adapt that infrastructure for another use, that it has the ability to change. And finally, multiple benefits means multiple funding partners, private partners, other public partners. One of the things we do know for sure that the federal government is going to be shouldering less and less of the cost of these things. If we just were to look at that trend, that's likely to be the outcome. But the more benefits we have, the more funding partners we have, so it just makes sense. So we basically are putting out a billion dollars. A B was an important number for us because a B is the attention getting, but let's be clear, it's a carrot. And in the scheme of things, it's a small carrot, because what we're looking at trying to leverage is the many billions of dollars that state and local governments spend every year on water and sewer, on roads and bridges, on buildings, on parks, on all kinds of infrastructure. Most of it being spent without any thought about its resilience. So if we can leverage with our billion dollars some thinking about how those other dollars get invested, that is the real objective here. So leverage is a big important part of this competition. We want people, it's been a long time since some of these disasters, right? Carol talked about the timeframe. It's calendar year 11 through 13, so people will be applying in 15. So it's several years since the disaster in some cases. And we can't use national data to say, oh, these are the most impacted and distressed. I mean, we use that information pretty soon after the disaster. But if there were other impacts, let's say that you had natural resource-based tourism and the job losses and the business closures that resulted from having some of that natural resource destroyed, you might not have seen those impacts for a couple of years, right? You might still be feeling them today, but you didn't know it right after the disaster. So we're asking that states and localities apply their local data to tell us both who's most impacted and distressed and what their unmet needs are that remain from their presidentially declared disaster. So we think that's a fairer way to allocate the money, but it's a different approach than we've used in the past. We want people to use science and risk to look forward at what are their vulnerabilities in the future, what are the risks they face in the future. We hope that with our partnership with Rockefeller and with other philanthropies that we're looking to try to engage, that we'll be able to provide and encourage resources be spent to do this kind of analysis and planning. We hope a broad set of stakeholders get engaged and we're really encouraging partnerships that people really look public and private sector. And we want to leverage these investments. We're engaging a lot of folks. I mentioned that for Hurricane Sandy, a lot of agencies got together. 17 federal agencies are collaborating with us as part of this national competition. And we've been preparing them for a lot of questions and maybe some rapid action, because we know one of the hardest things in government is to blend different federal funding streams. So we want to figure out how we can do that more easily. We can leverage each other's money and hopefully get a better result. Sam covered the eligible applicants. There are basically 48 states. The District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, it's two-thirds of the counties, but the states are really the primary applicants. 17 localities can apply on their own without their states. But the states are going to have to strategically decide which of the eligible counties they're going to decide based on the data that's available which are most impacted and distressed. So it's a state call. The two-phase competition and the phases are kind of long. The first phase is six months long. A lot of time for Rockefeller to be able to deliver some technical assistance. A lot of time for other places in the country to kind of catch up to the Sandy affected region who had an opportunity to really do some of this design thinking. What are the risks and vulnerabilities? What are the types of resources we might already be spending that could be leveraged? What are the kinds of partnerships? What are the things that we aspire to do in our community? And how can this money help us to get there? So phase one is not a project. We don't want to see a project. We don't want to talk about a project. We want to hear about an approach. We want to hear about your partners. We want to hear about your risks and vulnerabilities and what you're addressing. And then if we like your competition, if it's highly rated, according to our ranking factors, we'll invite you to participate in phase two, based on your phase one approach. Show us that it's feasible. If it's for a lot of money, you're going to have to do a benefit cost analysis. That won't be the only basis for our decision, but OMB wants us to have you do that. And then we'll award the money at the end of the second phase of the competition. It's important that people tie back to their declared disaster. And the only place we are going to be spending our HUD money is in places that states and localities identify as most impacted and distressed with remaining unmet needs. We use the language. You must address those unmet needs. Normally we would call for you to satisfy those needs. We deliberately use slightly... We use different language because we want people to pivot to the future. We want people to look at the future risks and vulnerabilities, but still our money is only going to be spent in the geography that you've identified that states have identified our localities as most impacted and distressed. Now, when states have said to me, wait a minute, what about this big statewide plan I was going to do? I'm like, do it. Don't tell me you're not already spending money on planning in your state that you're not spending money on infrastructure in your state. You are already doing that. So you can spend our money, potentially, in the places you've identified as most impacted and distressed and move that money to other parts of the state, but no one wins this competition without a lot of leverage. You will have to be spending money in a bigger geography and to do more permanent things than our competition is going to allow. That's how you're going to win. Here are some of the rating factors. They're slightly...they're the same factors. They're weighted differently in the two phases of the competition, but you can see 20 points in both phases are for leverage and long-term commitments. We want permanent change out of this. We want a lot of skin in the game. So what do you get if you win? As much as $500 million. That's the maximum award, so we could do two of those. Or as little as a million. So we didn't know what we'd get, so we gave it a broad range. But we want people to give us approaches and projects appropriate to the scale of their risk, right? A lot of times we end up doing things at such a small scale. Let's think about a flood control measure that actually exacerbates the risk to the neighboring jurisdictions. We do something here and it just moves the water somewhere else that might be even more vulnerable. So we want to see solutions at the scale of the risk. We've actually gotten an inquiry. I don't know if anything's going to come of it and I can't say who, but someone has asked us, would we accept a multi-state application? To which we said yay. We definitely would accept that. So it gives me hope that people are understanding what this is and hopefully applying a lot of their effort to do something exciting. So I'll just close by saying Rockefeller's been a great partner. We're excited to be working with them and that they also are holding out the prospect that while HUD will pick winners in collaboration with our federal partners of our decision panel, it's possible Rockefeller could pick different winners on their own and do things to support other interesting projects. And so that gives another dimension to this competition that there might be something in it for you even if you don't technically win the federal competition. So tell everyone they should play. Thank you. Thanks Harriet. We'll now turn to Matt Dalby who is the director of the Office of Human Services at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Matt has been at EPA for a number of years and I think very interestingly he also comes from a background in academia where he was an assistant professor at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Jackson State University. And he is the author of a work entitled Regional Visionaries and Metropolitan Boosters. Now this was looking particularly at decentralization regional planning and parkways but I think we sort of in terms of thinking about the whole topic under discussion today regional visionaries and metropolitan boosters are really important piece of our whole theme of how we need to think about going into the future and tackling the challenges that we face and I think it's a great opportunity on October 23rd invited communities to apply for technical assistance through EPA's Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities Program. So this is another opportunity for communities to look with a new eye towards greater innovation to help themselves become more resilient. Matt. You're talking about that. You know it's interesting you're listening to Sam and Harriet speak you know we live in the physical world I mean it probably would have been better if I could sort of jump in and weave in some of the work that EPA does as Sam and Harriet were speaking but the physical world doesn't work that way. I mean I think there are a number of things that came up that you know we get involved in at EPA we get involved in unnatural acts working with other agencies and we've been doing that for about the 20 years of our program we get involved in design issues we get involved in innovative and creative solutions particularly around the built environment I think that most of us would recognize that we've been building under development patterns in a particular way since about World War II I mean I think that's the when I think of history I think about that you know that space neutralization that has led to more pavement that has led to disinvestment in previously developed communities it's led to more time in the car it's led to less walking it's led to all these sorts of things and right now many of us who are working in this field are trying to figure out what are the new creative innovative ways to grow that deal with the challenges that are created by what I just described you know at EPA we work on leveraging other agencies' dollars because we have very few we also recognize that design innovation and creative thinking about the next incremental growth in communities can lead to catalytic investments and as Harriet described the federal government is not building the great high schools that we built during the new deal any longer buildings that actually value our kids we're building things with much less money and we're building them in ways that are not as good as they used to be but we know that good design and the right policies and the right codes when they're put in place will spur on really good development because that's where the market wants to be and you don't have to pick up you can pick up the paper every single day or read it online every single day and you hear about the changing lifestyles that millennials and those of us who are in the baby boom are looking for so our office my office at EPA that space and so where am I so again because I couldn't jump in at previous times I'm just going to tell you the story of our office and how we are doing work in this space you know we've been around since the mid 90s when Harriet actually founded our program and we've been working with local governments and states and other federal partners to figure out how to grow better I mean as many of you know the environmental protection agency's mission is to protect public health and the environment we do this primarily through a regulatory regime but we all know that the way we use our land impacts the quality of our environment and that's the space that we work in we're a a voluntary program we have no regulatory authority to do our work but we have a high demand for our work and we do it and we've been doing it you know again since the mid 90s in three different ways one we've been working on changing the conversation making sure that communities that want to grow better have the tools and ideas that can adopt to grow better we sponsored this national the new partners for smart growth conference which will be held this year in this region in Baltimore in January 2015 we have a smart growth achievement award program where we've been looking at and rewarding communities with awards who are doing a really good job in protecting the environment growing economies supporting better community outcomes and public health outcomes and we have a whole set of publications that we've been working on for the last 20 years that address everything from green infrastructure to codes and ordinances to equitable development to small towns and rural communities that want to grow better we also help communities that want our help as I described before the development pattern that we've had since World War II has not been so good for the environment but it's the exact development pattern that our codes and policies at the state level, at the local level and even at the federal level allow us to build and so many communities are trying to figure out how can we change the policies that we have that lead us to have a development pattern that is not necessarily good for the economy, not necessarily good for the environment communities and public health our office which is very small we have about 30 people an extramural budget of about $2 million a year we spend about half of those dollars in providing direct technical assistance either to communities or to states and here are some of the programs that we have our smart growth implementation assistance program is sort of our flagship program where we work on cutting edge issues and communities to help them figure out again how to grow better the governor's institute on community design or I think Carol did when describing Harriet that's one of our grant programs where we work directly with governor's and governor's staff to figure out what policies need to be put in place to help change development patterns we work in capital cities with green America's capitals and then I'll describe a little bit about our building blocks program in a moment but we also use other people's money you can see we've worked with FEMA USDA, Appalachian Regional Commission Appalachian Regional Authority and use their dollars to get into communities that matter to them to work on the codes and ordinances and strategies that can help communities grow better we also work with partners my office is the lead office at EPA on the partnership for sustainable communities which was started by Secretary LaHood Secretary Donovan in the early summer of 2009 our three agencies have been working together on sustainable communities grants on the building blocks projects on Tiger and such since 2009 it's still going very strong my initial start working on the resilience here the adaptation or the what do you do after disaster actually started in 2007 after tornadoes knocked down the town of Greensburg, Kansas one of my colleagues invited me out to speak about how to rebuild in a more sustainable way it led to my office working with six communities in Iowa after floods and tornadoes hit there in 2008 and it led to a memorandum of agreement with FEMA to work on long-term recovery and hazard mitigation and the place that we started I mean I always wonder like what would have happened if Sandy had happened earlier Irene had happened earlier but we got our start in working in Iowa and we were brought in because as Harriet sort of described when communities were rebuilding after disasters they were rebuilding to where they were before except when there were different circumstances we were asked to come in and say hey how can we work on making sure the comprehensive plan is part of the recovery because comprehensive plans look towards the future and how you can grow and have an economy that could be sustainable over time wouldn't be good if recovery and comprehensive plans were worked on together and we've continued that relationship with FEMA in Brooklyn, Missouri we've worked in Spirit Lake Nation which is a tribal community in North Dakota and much of many of my colleagues in our Region 2 office out of New York who are working on the Sandy Recovery are working underneath this MOA that we started with FEMA we're working with other agencies like GSA and then we're right in the middle of a number of these other administrative initiatives like the Strong City Strong Communities of Urban Waters and a whole host of other ones that I think arguably got a little bit of their model from the Partnership for Sustainable Communities which was started in 2009 the issue though is as I just said a couple of moments ago our budget is very small there's a lot of demand for the work that we do and we've been wrestling over the last few years how do we take the idea that we can only work with a certain number of communities each year to partner with other agencies and get that to scale how do we work with the tens of thousands of communities across the country that want our help and one of the ways we've begun to do that is by taking our technical assistance turning it into tools and then going into communities maybe 25 to 30 communities a year as opposed to 7 or 8 communities that we used to do so we can go in for one day short quick hit type of workshops and that's what led to our building blocks for sustainable communities program as you can see up here I mean the idea with tools are that communities come to us when they learn a little bit about the tools we bring the tool to the community and we demonstrate to those communities what the next steps would be and either changing their codes changing their policies, attracting development talking to other federal agencies about implementation dollars I've never really figured this out like how do you follow this all the things that are going on up there so the bottom line is our building blocks program allows us to get into more communities every year it allows us to bring our federal partners in who are the implementing agencies we're often not implementers it helps us figure out what the strategy a community could adopt to get better outcomes out of their growth and development regime that they're under and then it also allows us to sort of test out and perhaps allow these tools to be used by other organizations like trade associations that work with local governments like NACO or NATO or ICMA and that sort of thing generally when we bring a tool when we bring a tool to a community we have a homework assignment for the community that they give us the codes they give us the policies that they have in place we talk through what we hope that the community could get out of the tool we have an agenda we bring presentation we try to get some sort of hands on exercise going we spend a day there and when I say we bring a team of experts from around the country that we bring in through contracts and then we come up with the next step sort of process in 2015 as Carol mentioned we announced that we have our building blocks program it's out on the street we have requests for letters of intent I think there were a number of them in the table outside it's about five pages that describes the different tools that we have this year and I'm just going to talk through the first four really quickly but we have a bike sharing tool that we can bring to the table we have an equitable development tool an infill development tool a tool used for small cities in rural areas and then the flood resilience tool which I'll talk about in more detail but just real quick the bike share tool will allow community to figure out the feasibility what types of planning processes need to be put forward in the equitable development tool this has been a big issue for us over the last couple years there is a perception that sometimes when communities rebuild existing places there are gentrification displacement pressures and things like that so we have worked with our office of environmental justice to try to figure out ways to mitigate gentrification and displacement as appropriate and help communities grow in a way that all communities all parts of the community can benefit from that growth we've put together an infill development tool for distressed cities this came out of some work we did in Fresno, California which was part of the Strong Cities, Strong Communities initiative and this is a really important tool because many distressed cities are trying to figure out how to grow their economy and if they grow their economy in ways that continue to leave out their downtowns they're going to be missing out on opportunities to make sure that the actual growth and development that does come can be supportive of the entire community so we developed this in Fresno and now we're going to deliver it this year and then our rural communities and small cities tool is aimed at recognizing that all of our work is not necessarily going to be done in urban areas but we do have the opportunity to help small communities grow and there's a big economic development component of this because many of our rural communities across the country are the ones that are suffering the most from the economic downturn and the change of the economy and changing technology certainly over the last couple generations and then so finally I'll talk quickly about our flood resilience riverine and coastal communities tool this tool came out of a larger project that we did in Vermont after Irene which is funny so I've been to Greensburg just after that the tornado in Iowa just after that tornado I was speaking at the American Planning Association meeting up in Vermont like two weeks after Irene so I guess don't invite me to places because you wind up usually having a disaster I'm a disaster waiting to happen right so the state of Vermont asked us to come in to help figure out how to use smart growth or sustainable community strategies as a ongoing tool after a disaster and so what they asked us to do was look at their local plans and their policies and their codes which are things that I described just before and also to look at what state policies and what federal policies were going to influence the way they rebuilt themselves and so we did that and this is the best graphic that describes the work that we did by looking at the COMP plan, by looking at hazard mitigation plans and development regulations we were able to do this basically checklist that said here are the considerations that you should consider when you're rebuilding and if your COMP plan doesn't allow you to begin to think about safe areas to grow or ways to conserve some land around your rivers then here are ways to change it and so we delivered that assistance and we looked at particularly at two communities which I can't remember Sarah do you remember which two communities we looked at in Vermont it's in the report which is available actually the checklist is outside anyway so we looked at two communities and then we realized that this is the type of checklist that could be delivered through our building blocks program and so right now it's one of the tools it emerged out of this Vermont work that is going to allow communities to begin to assess before the disaster how they could grow more resiliently what codes are going to be barriers to allowing them to grow more resiliently and I mean I think the probably the main reason that I was invited here to speak about this is because if communities begin to use this type of checklist whether it's through our assistance or on their own or through other organizations then the multiple positive benefits they would get out of investments that would be made as they grow in a more resilient way would feed into and fit into some of the things that Harriet and Sam were talking about earlier right let's figure out good places to grow let's figure out what policies will allow communities to deal with weather events let's figure out how infrastructure can be deployed and brought into communities so you get multiple positive community outcomes and we feel very strongly that this tool is a first step in many communities if they begin to begin to use this and we'll find out we'll see how it's used if you begin to use this then you're going to have a better sense of where your dollars should go and your investments should go to grow in a more resilient way. I'll end on this last slide here the deadline for applications and the application is very short it's a couple pages it's next week Sarah Dale here Sarah raise your hand Sarah is our project officer for this in my office at EPA if you have questions Sarah contact information is down below okay good thanks okay thank you so let us begin our discussion and I should also just ask our panelists if there were other points that you thought of during other presentations please be sure to raise those and if you could just identify yourself when you ask your question or make a comment do you have any discussion go ahead so to what extent do you bring in the internet to let people get together their funding and get together their community so okay do you want to repeat the question yeah okay so do do you want to put your microphone to what extent to use the internet to get people to think about ways to combine funding and to engage community stakeholders so we don't prescribe any particular way to get people together and as we mentioned it's kind of a long competition we're at the very early stages of it so actually Sam and the Rockefeller Foundation are hosting next week a resilience summit where every eligible applicant has been invited and so engagement strategies are going to be one of the topics that are going to be discussed as is financing resilience so those will be among the topics and the ways to connect people will certainly be part of that Sam just turning on my microphone thanks for the question there's a general question about how do you sort of catalyze collective action that I think is part of Bob's question how do you get people engaged with different kinds of ideas and thinking across traditional silos and the internet does have a sort of leveling factor in terms of making lots of information available to many people Matt is describing the various tools that his organization is putting together these are scalable globally immediately with the push of a publish button so that's an opportunity that we have as people that are working in this field to really reach broader and broader constituents for the foundation we use the internet in many different ways but I'll mention just specifically tied to this process one thing that we are doing in preparing these this technical assistance for the communities that are eligible to compete in HUD's competition we recognize the opportunity to pull in the decades of experience that we've had in working with communities around the world to make them more resilient to help them grow to become more resilient and really codify that into a curriculum that will be deployed through these workshops that we're going to run regionally but there's no reason that can't be deployed in other ways so we're actually launching in December a new website that's going to be a version of that entire curriculum that we will be delivering at those regional academies that will be accessible to anyone in the entire world so we see it as a key way of sparking innovative ideas that's how you reach people that have the next best idea oftentimes but of course you do have to couple that with really meaningful one-on-one and group engagement as Harriet mentioned In the past a lot of the progress that's been made looking after the general health safety and welfare of the population have been actually accomplished through regulations and I don't see anywhere mentioned specifically the end of the regulation that's been given to the bad and anybody largely probably is going to suffer further why isn't there more attention placed on either innovation, regulatory process expansion so we could have had a panel just about regulation there's a lot that's happening in the regulatory world there's some things happening at HUD with respect to our part 55 floodplain guidelines and other things building codes all of those things are happening and I expect to see potential regulatory reform coming out of the collaboration among the federal agencies where we look to try to make it possible to do that unnatural act of combining federal funding streams and aligning entitlement requirements and other sorts of things but I don't know that we meant to suggest that competition and this idea of distributing money in this way is the sine qua non of reform or innovation but I will tell you I'm not personally writing any regulations at HUD so I probably wouldn't be the best person to talk about it but there definitely is regulatory activity happening in every agency to make some things that are hard to do now easier and to add some requirements that also help protect property, life and safety and so I will just add this I don't personally write any regulations either but one of the things that we are doing under our MOA with FEMA is helping FEMA rewrite the guidance that FEMA delivers to states that then states use to get communities to write hazard mitigation plans and that guidance the things that we are adding to that guidance is respect land use planning think about comprehensive planning think about future economic development opportunities and get that incorporated into the hazard mitigation plans which has not been prior to that and arguably there are hazard mitigation plans all across the country that were written without that and once this work gets done they will be written in keeping with economic development strategies in keeping with comprehensive planning and land use and incorporating extreme weather events of which we are seeing more at this point back here first I'll just add that I think we can all agree that it's a good thing that private foundations aren't regulating everyday Americans but with that I just want to underscore you know there is a lot of innovative work being done in that space again that's not really the focus of this but just to emphasize the leverage component of the national disaster resilience competition includes and is open enough to capture the idea of regulatory reform within states and within communities to count towards the quality of their application that's part of the kind of action that we're asking communities to take that's part of a coordinated plan and effort that would also include potentially HUD funding through the DR program it would just seem that this kind of effort would help inform regulatory or innovative regulatory approaches as we move into the future as well back here first okay my question relates to the recovery and its relations to the additional benefits that was mentioned the NOFA talks a lot about relating to the specific disaster declaration but it also has words about multi hazard it doesn't use the word mitigation for either reasons but my question relates to an example let's say in Tennessee or in Arkansas where the disasters that were declared were flood related or tornado related but perhaps the largest hazard that they that matters in the earthquake zone relates to earthquakes and there hasn't been an earthquake in that region would any planning that emphasized or included earthquake mitigation in those particular areas come under the additional funding rather than the HUD funding or couldn't be included under the HUD funding it really depends on the specific circumstances but that condition exists in every single state in the three year period states were hit by a finite number of disasters and they're subject to more different parts of the state were hit by different things it's up to the state or locality to tie back their unmet need from one of their declared disasters some of those unmet needs might relate to environmental impairment we're very specific about that in the NOFA they might relate to economic distress that might result from that so let's say one of the examples is natural resource based tourism I think I might have mentioned it earlier that if one of the things that happened is that you I said the job losses and the business closures might have happened a year or two years after the disaster occurred if that's your single you know if that's your primary sector that serves your community that one of the ways you might address your unmet need related to job losses and unemployment it might be to diversify the economy so that then gives you some other openings some of that economic diversification might be to address other types of risks so it's a competition that has these prerequisites you have to tie back but we do want people to be looking forward and if it's in that same geography looking at future risks it's absolutely possible to look at resilience to future risks in the same geography where you have unmet disaster recovery needs and just to add a little bit more and push a little bit with what Harriet's saying this is really where the opportunity for technical assistance to the communities I think adds a lot of value to this because there's the opportunity to think really creatively if there's a long tail of unmet economic need tied back to the flood event in that particular state how could we diversify the economy and simultaneously have a co-benefit of protecting our communities from future earthquake that's a perfect design problem and that's where we can come in and really work with communities and try to identify those opportunities and build really comprehensive projects that have these multiple co-benefits that are making communities more resilient because at the end of the day we don't know what's coming next that's the whole problem so the opportunity to do everything that could happen in the future be smart about identifying the risks that are meaningful and really design accordingly so let me just also be clear about this because Sam and I are sitting up here together our competition is a federal government competition we love Rockefeller, they will not be choosing the winners of our competition they are running their own technical assistance and other federal agencies and HUD folks will be there but it is in some cases but it is Rockefeller's technical assistance so like I say they might pick their own winners and fund their own projects that have nothing to do with anything we decide to fund but our hope is that anyone who applies in this competition in phase one is going to end up with a product that is going to be useful to them whether they go on in the competition or not because they will have gone through an effort to look at what their risks and vulnerabilities are what are the sources of funding in their jurisdiction that can be used to address these things and hopefully it will give them a framework for better decision making going forward whether or not they end up getting federal funding for it great, okay, here so if I can solve it it seems to me that all of what you just put you talked about today what you talked to is something that has been missing in recovery a lot and that is an efficient exercise some kind of opportunity to to assist the community to think before they leave in recovery it's always the most difficult time to even do that sort of thing but but there was the little town of Ballemeyer, Illinois that needed to take a great leap in fact what they ultimately did was go 200 feet elevation up the hill it just completely moved the town and rebuilt it's really thriving now but they needed help with that and actually there were some federal agencies at that time to help them think through a new energy system for the town which is far more efficient I think but now I think is what is so inspiring what you just talked about of the possibility I don't know whether that could be institutionalized you're probably not thinking about that at this point you're just trying to get the project right but those would be well thank you for that comment I think what Matt Dolly said just a moment ago is also true in some cases communities did have a vision they had a comprehensive plan they had aspirations it was actually the federal government who said you can't spend any more money if you haven't adopted a new code you certainly couldn't build the safer code now and I think those are the kinds of things that are changing and the idea that you could spend a dollar and get several dollars worth of benefit now I mean I think we're all getting acculturated to that idea as being a good one so both what what communities should be encouraged to do think about the future right but it's also getting the federal government to recognize the aspirations and the goals of places and saying if we can meet our primary objective why do we want to prevent these other benefits from also being you know also being realized so I think we're both learning constant learning practice can I actually add one more thing to that because the question about how do you institutionalize this practice is really core for the foundation's question about how do you really scale this up and often times when I think about this partnership with HUD and the opportunity for the foundation this is an occasion to have this conversation with 67 communities around the country and we're actually inviting the other two states Nevada and South Carolina so we're gonna have the conversation with them as well and really to invite them to increase their capacity to do this on an ongoing basis and you know success for the foundation means yes there will be wonderful ideas and proposals that come through HUD's competition but if we leave sort of a legacy in these places where there's these multidisciplinary teams that are thinking about resilience and really looking to the future and are connected to the local research institutions and are talking to designers and are having these conversations across agencies that's that's the opportunity okay go creativity that we've all demonstrated with some experience of the Virginia federal bureaucracy the ability to knit together programs like community block grants disaster recovery and so on and to collaborate as you are doing with the this program represents a tremendous leap in innovation and creativity already and so I think that there are many people at the local level and in organizations that have been involved with disaster recovery over a long time that appreciate very much the openness and silo thank you that's really great to hear I have to give a lot of credit to the current OMB director who's the former secretary at HUD and we also have some really great new leadership in the form of Julian Castro a former mayor of San Antonio I come from local state government we've been heavily influenced by the advice of the state local and tribal leaders task force looking at climate and resilience issues you know I think it's really about doing what states and localities are already having to do which is to be much more common sensical about how money gets spent and really trying to get as much benefit out of it as they possibly can so I think we're basically trying to do everything we can do to be responsive to that but it's good to hear that you think it's a good idea thank you great did you have a comment over here go ahead yeah is there funding built into any of these programs let me just say we've had a lot of success with our report card for American infrastructure which is great infrastructure is there funding built into any of these programs to look at how these projects perform or hold up when the next disaster comes so the NOFA makes really excellent bedtime reading it'll take you several days to get through it but you'll sleep well but there's actually a very specific section in there so one of the things that we're interested in is ecosystem services or what people call green infrastructure and one of the reasons why it's been hard to use in some cases even though it's one of those things that provides multiple benefits it can cool cities it can manage storm water it can create recreational and transportation opportunities is that the performance data is spotty and the transferability to different soil types in different regions is also not known so we'll give people credit if they partner with research institutions and collect that performance data as part of a long term commitment to the field and furthering our knowledge in this effort so in some small way yes we had two last questions ok here ok so that's a good question I appreciate it ok so that's a good question I appreciate it you know the interesting thing about you know disaster recovery is that it often comes in different chunks right so there's the immediate emergency immediate response and I think housing folks right after the disaster is the immediate response I feel even bad about saying this but I mean our work with FEMA comes in at the next step sort of the long term recovery and so we are primarily working on long term recovery and hazard mitigation I know there are other parts of EPA that have worked on sort of energy efficiency and things and I think that there are other organizations that we've worked with over the years that worked on the Katrina cottage I think that's what it was called I mean here I do you have probably had a little bit of experience with that do you want to say I mean we're doing a lot of that kind of work in different parts of HUD to look for those opportunities and we're hoping we see innovation earlier this morning was talking to the CEO summit that's the building industry it's NIBS along with the AIA and all the other design and engineering professions but about the need for innovation that part of you know part of what you know what we need to demand and require is multi-purpose infrastructure we need buildings that can swim I think drywall is one of the most ironically termed things you know that I guess maybe not it can only be dry if it ever gets wet at all it's just no good but you know I think there's a lot that we can be doing in the building materials space and in the types of market signals we send I mean right now for better or worse you know we've so averaged out the with insurance with average premiums and other things that nobody, no individual property owner gets a signal about whether there's something they can do to reduce their risk and no financial incentive to pay for it a risk adjusted premium would actually create that incentive and potentially a whole new industry and there are those things and those things are potentially changing but this is a competition that's also a little bit about scale so we need to do work at every scale and some of it at the scale of a single building and some of it at the scale of a large landscape to get the kind of results that we need can I just add like one other piece of one other project that we are working on is we're working to figure out what types of codes and policies all the way down to the building codes that localities could adopt or make changes to in order to adapt better and it's a project we're in the middle of and we should probably talk about that because we're looking for some additional expertise on it a lot of things there's a lot of things out there it's just getting it out there and to use one example it's very important for manufacturing housing which is a fun program it's a high code and this would be a wonderful way to break down the tiles because there typically we understand that that's the largest source of unsubsidized affordable housing and there have been some wonderful innovations in that area but it's hard to see if the industry is not as resilient as we can see and so I would just respectfully request that sort of get thought about in terms of how it was within the ages but thank you so much I was so delighted I'll just make one comment more of a plug but there's a grant and a partnership we made with EcoTrust which some of you guys might know it's an organization based in the Pacific Northwest and we're creating with them an internet platform actually called the Resilience Exchange that's also going to be rolling out in the next couple months but I think you can get a preview of it at resilienceexchange.org this is actually a tool that enables people all over the world who have good ideas like the ones described to actually share their ideas break them down into their component parts and then actually lets people that are thinking about these problems really rejigger and reconfigure the different building blocks that actually make the idea resilient to hopefully generate new and innovative solutions so that's something that we're going to make available to everyone and hopefully we'll do some of the work that you're describing great that's great to hear about and I must say with regard to all of these efforts it's something that we are hoping to stay in touch with you all on so that we can sort of bring these articles of progress the stories forward in terms of what are seen as additional unmet needs, how communities, how states are interested in moving forward what the role of different entities can be so that we can truly optimize everyone's efforts to address these really really important problems and to make sure that everybody does have access to these tools so thank you all very very much and thank you all very much for coming and for contributing to this very rich discussion thank you bye bye