In the meantime, we are convinced that working together is the only way we will find to limit future disaster-related loss and costs. Your proposed legislation presents state and local governments with an important opportunity to establish productive, long-term partnerships to reduce through mitigation the costs of disasters at all levels of government. NLC believes these proposed amendments to the Stafford Act could create state and local cooperative approaches to reducing disaster costs. We also agree that there should be significant benefits over time from a federally authorized pre-disaster mitigation program which includes federal financial incentives and state matching requirements to ensure long term commitments to mitigation. Almost two-thirds of federal disaster costs are from damage to public facilities and infrastructure.
All disasters are local.
Thus it is essential that responsible local officials, both elected and professional emergency personnel, are engaged on a permanent basis by state emergency managers to increase overall capacity to identify and assess disaster risks and to advance agreed upon mitigation strategies and priorities. We commend you for acknowledging the importance of cooperation between localities and their state governments in developing comprehensive and detailed state mitigation plans for reducing disaster losses. To ensure that true ongoing partnerships are established between states and their subdivisions, we recommend that you include language in these amendments to require that a state's comprehensive plan provide for ongoing consultation between state emergency managers and responsible local officials. This should help create working partnerships to improve and increase mitigation activities and to cooperatively develop ongoing mitigation priorities. In these proposed amendments there is only one funding distribution requirement, which is the 10 percent set-aside for impoverished communities.