Building Local Government Financial Resilience to Disasters: Workshop Materials

On June 4, 2014, the NADO Research Foundation, the Rural Policy Research Institute (RUPRI), and the Northwest Georgia Regional Commission (NWGRC) came together to host Building Local Government Financial Resilience to Disasters in Calhoun, Georgia.  This one-day workshop walked city and county financial officers, emergency managers, and elected officials from NWGRC’s 15-county region through a process they can use to prepare financially for natural disasters, helping them understand the costs they may face from disasters, evaluate their ability to pay for those costs, and identify strategies for covering projected shortfalls.  The training was based on a workbook previously published by the NADO Research Foundation and RUPRI, Financial Planning for Disasters: A Workbook for Local Governments and Regions.  It included five modules:

1) Identifying the natural disasters that might have financial implications for your community;

2) Quantifying your local government’s financial vulnerability to those disasters;

3) Quantifying your local government’s financial capacity to respond to a future disaster, including identifying the financial resources may be used for response and recovery, taking into account restrictions on the expenditure of some types of revenue;

4) Identifying strategies to reduce the gap between financial vulnerability and financial capacity; and

5) Identifying financial interdependencies with neighboring public agencies and ways to address them.

This workshop was supported by the U.S. Economic Development Administration, which has funded the NADO Research Foundation to provide training and technical assistance on disaster recovery and economic resilience to regions and communities in the northeast and the southeast that were impacted by disasters during fiscal year 2011.

The workshop materials are included below.  If you have any questions about this event, the materials, or NADO’s work on disaster and economic resilience more broadly, please contact Megan McConville at [email protected].

Workshop Agenda

Workshop Slides
Dr. Matt Fannin, Associate Director of Analytic and Academic Programs, RUPRI

Additional Materials

• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Severe Storms Laboratory’s maps of the likelihood of tornadoes and severe storms
• Georgia Department of Natural Resources Digital Flood Insurance Rate Maps