Photos courtesy Vermont State Auditor
by Vermont Auditor of Accounts Doug Hoffer This summer’s extreme weather and flooding events have been unfortunate harbingers of the “new normal” of climate change. Thank you to all the first responders and community members who helped keep people safe and have since pitched in with the clean-up process. And to all those directly impacted by the floods: I have been keeping you in my thoughts and wish you the speediest recovery.
The growing frequency and power of extreme weather events makes it clear – Vermont needs to do more to proactively ready our communities to reduce the danger to Vermonters’ lives and property.
On September 3 my office released an audit of the State Hazard Mitigation Plan. The Plan, managed by Vermont Emergency Management (VEM, situated within the Department of Public Safety), is intended to be the one-stop location that details how Vermont intends to be ready to face the most significant natural hazards like flooding, extreme heat, infectious disease, and drought. It is meant to be a blueprint of how the state can reduce the impacts of future events, with State government’s leading subject experts indicating the highest priority actions Vermont should take.
We initiated this audit to make sure Vermont has a good planning process in place, and that there is accountability for implementing the Plan’s action steps. The adage “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is a perfect summary of what’s at stake.
Overall, we found that Vermont state government can improve its mitigation efforts and its use of the Hazard Mitigation Plan as a tool to drive that improvement.
Our specific findings include:
➢ VEM reported in 2023 that only one-third of mitigation actions from the 2018 Plan had been completed
➢ VEM and a committee of high-level state officials did not follow through on the process they had developed to evaluate whether hazard mitigation efforts were actually effective
➢ information about the status of mitigation actions was sometimes unreliable
➢ no mitigation actions in the 2023 Plan specifically address the risk of an infectious disease outbreak
We were pleased that the Agency of Administration and the Department of Public Safety agreed with nearly all of our recommendations to improve performance in the future.
We commenced work on the audit months before the most recent flooding events. I hope the timing of the audit’s release - with images of the recent damage fresh in our minds - will help policymakers re-double their “prevention” efforts.
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