Local resilience on the rise: Lessons from CROs in Florida
By: American Flood Coalition
Tags: Resilience, Flooding, Local, Ocean, Florida

In the past few months, an increasing number of Florida communities created positions tasked with responding to the growing risks of sea level rise and flooding. The City of Jacksonville, the City of St. Augustine, and the Town of Surfside each created a Chief Resilience Officer (CRO)* post in the past six months. With these announcements, Florida municipalities signal the importance of flood mitigation. Read on for more information about the CRO role and a spotlight on the Town of Surfside’s first CRO, Kate Stein.

What is a CRO? Simply put, a CRO is the point person for resilience work within a local or state government. A CRO may complement existing departments and roles or may serve as the first step in building out municipal resilience. No two CROs function exactly the same, given their diverse educational, technical, and professional backgrounds, as well as the manner in which municipalities structure the role. While their backgrounds may differ, all CROs are instrumental in improving municipal resilience. Flooding and sea level rise are topics of focus for many CROs, but CROs across Florida and beyond can also be responsible for a broad array of resilience subjects including transportation, water quality, and heat stress.

CRO Spotlight: Town of Surfside

Last November, The Town of Surfside hired its first CRO: Kate Stein. While the Town’s staff is relatively small given the town’s population of just under 6,000, Surfside created a new full-time position dedicated to resilience and sustainability in order to ensure a holistic and thoughtful approach to climate change. Given the close-knit nature of the community and Surfside’s many engagements with partners, the person in this position needed to have a community engagement background to, as Mayor Daniel Dietch put it, “build coalitions and consensus among a wide range of stakeholders.”

When hiring for the role, the Town sought a CRO who would sit jointly within the Town Manager’s Office and the Planning Department and who could effectively communicate about projects and gather input from residents. Stein fit the bill. Before accepting the new CRO position, she spent time as an NPR member station environment and transportation reporter, a freelance climate journalist, and the point person for gathering community input under the City of Miami’s Office of Resilience and Sustainability. She started using her communications background immediately, listing helping “residents understand why we are making efficient investments of time and money in adaptation and mitigation” as one of her two immediate goals in the new role.

For Stein, Surfside’s size can be an advantage “because that means [the Town] is a great incubator and place for pilots,” including one with the American Flood Coalition. Now, just a few months into her role in Surfside, Stein oversees work on the Town’s climate action plan, facilitates partnerships with nonprofits, local governments, agencies and universities, and helps develop public input processes, demonstrating how a CRO can make a huge difference in a smaller town.

The CRO concept, which is well established on a national scale and for large cities, is spreading across Florida and starting to reach smaller municipalities. With the advent of 100 Resilient Cities in 2013, a cohort of large cities across the U.S. received funding and other support to designate CROs. In Florida, the initiative catalyzed the creation of CRO positions in the City of Miami, the City of Miami Beach, and Miami-Dade County starting in 2015. Broward County, the City of Tallahassee, and Palm Beach County created resilience officers soon after. In the past year, the concept of the CRO spread even further. Not only did Governor DeSantis appoint a statewide CRO whose mandate covers municipalities large and small, but a broad range of small and mid-sized municipalities hired their own CROs. Further, many local government staff already serve in this role without the official title, and an even greater number of municipalities are considering formalizing the position.

Tips for Structuring a CRO position

When establishing the role of the CRO, municipalities should consider who the CRO reports to and what their responsibilities will be.

Within a municipal government, the CRO may head an office or department of his or her own, or be placed within the Mayor’s Office, the City/Town Manager’s Office, the Public Works Department, or two separate governments as a joint CRO for neighboring municipalities. CRO responsibilities vary by the municipality but may include preparing and implementing a municipal resilience strategy, identifying and pursuing opportunities to fund and finance projects that reduce flood risks, serving as the public face of the community’s resilience efforts, and coordinating across other municipal departments.

The American Flood Coalition is proud to see members like the Town of Surfside designate CROs to oversee goals and projects that protect their residents from flooding. As flooding and sea level rise become more severe, adding CROs to municipal governments is a monumental step towards community resilience. The Coalition expects to see continued innovation around this role, with municipalities sharing CROs in order to foster micro-regional cooperation and counties and states building out the position in a variety of ways. Institutionalizing resilience across levels of government offers protection for a broader array of communities, and AFC is proud to support any municipality looking to hire a CRO or otherwise make resilience a priority.