Kathleen Rice and Jack Schnirman

Reform FEMA with a focus on resiliency

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As we approach the fourth anniversary of Superstorm Sandy, preparedness is essential — acting on the lessons we learned from the storm, and doing the work now to ensure that our homes and families are protected if another storm strikes Long Island in the future.

The most important lesson we learned from Sandy was that residents and local governments need to prepare beyond just this hurricane season. We learned that we need to make our homes and infrastructure resilient enough to withstand the storms that we know will come — this year, next year or a decade from now.

Over the past three years, many families who lost their homes during Sandy have taken that lesson to heart and tried to rebuild in a way that guards against future natural disasters. Too often, though, they’ve found themselves fighting a bureaucratic system that prioritizes short-term fixes over long-term resiliency.

Marie Basile lives in Long Beach’s West End, and her house was destroyed by Sandy. She wanted to rebuild using a resilient design and durable materials. That’s the type of thinking that our government should encourage and support, which will save us money in the long run as more frequent, more severe storms spread federal resources thin.

But because of the limitations of current federal law, our disaster-recovery system doesn’t look that far ahead. So Marie was on her own, forced to take out a $200,000 private loan in order to build a stronger, more resilient house.

Local governments have had to wrestle with the same frustrating dilemma. When it came time for Long Beach to rebuild its iconic 2.2-mile boardwalk, the city trudged through a painstaking bureaucratic process and came out with two options: a $32 million project to rebuild the same unprotected boardwalk that Sandy destroyed, or $42 million for a better boardwalk that would withstand future storms.

It should’ve been a no-brainer. Thousands of Long Beach residents were surveyed, and 88 percent said they believed that a stronger, more durable boardwalk was the only choice. But due to the same outdated recovery system, the Federal Emergency Management Agency couldn’t authorize the $42 million project on its own. It was ultimately only through the efforts of Sen. Chuck Schumer and Gov. Andrew Cuomo that Long Beach received federal and state recovery funds to cover the cost of the stronger, safer boardwalk.

The problem isn’t that FEMA wants to waste money building homes and structures that won’t weather the next storm. The problem is that we’ve learned the importance of resiliency over time, and the law hasn’t caught up.

Our national disaster recovery efforts are governed by a law that was passed before storms like Sandy were a frequent occurrence, and it doesn’t reflect the lessons we’ve learned over the past decade. That law, the Stafford Act, has been amended and improved in small ways, but it still rests on the fundamentally outdated idea that natural disasters are rare, and that when they do occur, the government’s job should be to help put the pieces back together, to get homes and structures back to the way they were beforehand — essentially just erase the damage, forget the disaster happened and pretend another one isn’t on its way.

That’s not a smart 21st-century strategy. And again, while the law has been updated to allow FEMA to provide grant funding for mitigation and resiliency projects in some cases, it’s not good enough. Families and local governments shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get support for building back stronger and smarter. Resiliency shouldn’t just be allowed; it should be actively encouraged, and in many cases even required.

So what’s the solution? There’s no quick fix. We won’t solve this problem by tacking another amendment onto the Stafford Act, or by rushing to replace it.

It’s time to take stock of all we’ve learned and reform our national disaster recovery system comprehensively, with resiliency at its foundation. We need the president to convene a task force that brings together all relevant federal and state agencies, lawmakers and independent experts who can work together to assess what’s working and what isn’t, and find the best way forward.

We need a new plan for disaster recovery in the 21st century — one that starts with the assumption that extreme weather events are the new norm. One that reduces the bureaucratic burden placed on families and state and local governments, and provides for a more individualized approach to disaster case management. And perhaps above all else, a plan that helps prevent future damage and maximize precious resources by prioritizing resiliency and hazard-mitigation projects.

We can do better. We can plan for the future by learning from the past. We can use our shared experience to make the law smarter and make our homes, businesses and infrastructure as resilient as our people.

Kathleen Rice is the U.S. representative for New York’s 4th Congressional District. Jack Schnirman is Long Beach’s city manager.