6.7. Update the Mitigation Strategy

One of the most important steps in developing your plan is to refine the community’s mitigation strategy, particularly in light of experiences gained from implementing the previous plan. To continue representing the jurisdiction’s overall strategy for reducing hazard risk, the updated local mitigation plan must reflect current conditions and progress made in mitigation efforts. The 5-year plan update allows each jurisdiction to assess its previous goals and actions, evaluate the progress of the action plan, and adjust actions to address current realities. The mitigation strategy should also be reviewed after a disaster to see if the recommended actions are still appropriate.

An updated plan must describe if and how any priorities changed since the previous plan. Your community’s mitigation priorities may change over time for many reasons. Addressing these changes allows you to redirect actions to reflect current conditions, including financial and political realities, or changes in conditions or priorities following disaster events. Also, now that the community has implemented some actions, you can apply lessons learned about what worked and what didn’t.

New actions should be identified based on the updated risk and capability assessments. Prioritize new actions and any actions carried forward from the previous plan. Factors that may lead to changes in priorities include:

• Altered conditions due to disaster events and recovery priorities.
• Changing local resources, community needs and capabilities.
• New state or federal policies and funding resources.
• New hazard impacts identified in the updated risk assessment.
• Changes in development patterns that could influence the effects of hazards.
• New partners that have come to the table.
• A different method of prioritizing actions compared to the previous plan.

Changes in a community’s priorities do not always directly relate to how a plan prioritizes mitigation actions. For example, a change in priorities could include:

• New or modified plan goals compared to the previous plan.
• New hazards or removal of hazards that are no longer profiled in the updated risk assessment.
• The removal of mitigation actions from the plan update after a change in political or community support, changes in hazard exposure, or a lack of financial ability to execute the action.

If no priorities have changed, plan updates should validate the information in the previously approved plan.

Plan updates must reflect progress in local mitigation efforts. While goals may not change significantly over 5 years, completing mitigation actions and integrating the plan into existing planning processes shows progress in risk reduction.

The plan must describe the status of all mitigation actions identified in the previous plan. The plan should list whether they have been completed or not. For actions that have not been completed, the plan must either describe why the action is no longer relevant or indicate that it is included in the updated action plan.

The planning team will ask the local agencies and departments responsible for each action in the previous plan to give a status update. For instance, agencies could provide information about the following:

• If the action was completed, did it have the intended results? Did it achieve the goals outlined in the plan? What factors led to success?
• If the action was not completed, what were the barriers? Was there a lack of political support, funding, staff availability or another obstacle? Should the action be included in the updated mitigation strategy?
• When actions are completed, consider highlighting some key projects. This is a great opportunity to illustrate how the community is reducing risk.

An updated plan must explain how the jurisdiction(s) incorporated the previous mitigation plan, when appropriate, into other planning mechanisms over the last 5 years. This demonstrates progress in local mitigation efforts. As plans and mechanisms are developed and updated within each participating jurisdiction, the plan’s information should be integrated into those external documents. The plan update must then highlight the planning mechanisms where the previous plan was integrated, and what information was integrated.

The following recipe card presents ways to showcase the integration that occurred over the past 5 years in a jurisdiction’s plan update. Each of the previous plan’s participants must note the planning mechanisms that were developed or updated based on the previous plan’s information. They must also identify which of the planning mechanisms integrated hazard mitigation elements and what those elements were.

If the previous plan was not integrated into any of the participants’ planning mechanisms, the update must state this and explain why. An example could be that no planning mechanisms were developed or updated after development of the last plan.