The variational effects of jurisdictional attributes on hazard mitigation planning costs

Abstract

Under the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 and Federal Emergency Management Agency's subsequent Interim Final Rule, the requirement was placed on local governments to author and gain approval for a Hazard Mitigation Plan (HMP) for the areas under their jurisdiction. Low completion percentages for HMPs—less than one-third of eligible governments— were found by an analysis conducted 3 years after the final deadline for the aforementioned legislation took place. Follow-up studies showed little improvement at 5 and 8 years after the deadline. Based on these results, a previous study hypothesized that the cost of creating a HMP might be an influential factor in explaining why most jurisdictions had failed to write or gain approval for a HMP. The frequency of natural hazards experienced by the planning jurisdiction, the number of jurisdictions participating in the plan, and the population and population density were found to explain more than half of the variation in HMP costs. This study is a continuation of that effort, finding that there are significant differences in cost both across ranges of values for the jurisdictional attributes and single-jurisdictional versus multijurisdictional plans.