Introducing our August series on Public Safety and Hazard Mitigation in the Comprehensive Plan.
In too many communities, the comprehensive plan and the Local Hazard Mitigation Plan live in separate binders — prepared by separate offices, often in separate counties, by decisionmakers who may not know each other, let alone talk to one another. It’s a gap we’ve written about before: integrating hazard mitigation plans into the comprehensive plan is one of the most impactful — and most overlooked — things a local government can do.
The result is predictable. The comprehensive plan sets goals for growth and land use without accounting for hazard exposure. The hazard mitigation plan identifies risks without connecting them to zoning, subdivision standards, or infrastructure policy. And somewhere in between, development keeps happening in floodplains, in wildfire interface zones, and in locations that fire trucks can’t reach in time — because no one in a position to connect the dots was in the room when the decisions were made.
This August, we’re spending five weeks on public safety and hazard mitigation in the comprehensive plan. Not as separate topics for separate departments, but as a single, integrated question: are your land use decisions making your community safer or more vulnerable?
Here’s what’s coming every Sunday in August:
August 2 — Land Use and Public Safety Infrastructure
Where Development Goes Determines Who Gets There First
Response times, service costs, and coverage gaps are land use outcomes. When counties approve scattered rural development without asking whether fire protection, EMS, and law enforcement can serve it adequately, they are making a public safety decision — whether they treat it as one or not.
August 9 — Natural Hazards and the Comprehensive Plan
The Hazards Are Already on the Map — Is Your Plan Reading Them?
Tornado tracks, drought indices, wildfire risk ratings, extreme heat exposure — the data already exists. Most comprehensive plans acknowledge natural hazards without connecting them to land use policy. This week is about closing that gap.
August 16 — Man-Made Hazards and Land Use
The Risks Nobody Puts on the Map
Pipeline corridors, hazardous materials transport routes, industrial facilities, agricultural chemical storage — man-made hazards are among the least well-integrated elements of local comprehensive planning. They are also among the most foreseeable.
August 23 — Floods and Floodplain Management
The Most Predictable Hazard — and the Most Preventable Damage
Flood damage is the most costly and most predictable natural hazard in the United States. The data has existed for decades. The policy tools are well established. Most of the damage that occurs is the result of development decisions that ignored both.
August 30 — The Local Hazard Mitigation Plan
From Awareness to Action
The LHMP is the document here in the US where all of this comes together — but in most counties it sits in a separate binder from the comprehensive plan, updated every five years by a team that rarely includes the Planning Commission. This week is about what it looks like when those two documents actually talk to each other. For a deeper introduction to the LHMP process, our complete guide to hazard mitigation planning is a good place to start.
Five Sundays. Five topics. All of it aimed at the question local governments don’t ask often enough: what happens to our community when something goes wrong — and what did our land use decisions have to do with it?
We’ll see you tomorrow for the first long read in the series.
Want to get a head start?
The resources below offer a solid introduction to the topics we’ll be covering this month — a good place to start if public safety and hazard mitigation are new territory in your planning practice.
- FEMA Local Hazard Mitigation Planning — FEMA’s overview of the LHMP process, requirements, and resources for local governments. The starting point for understanding how hazard mitigation planning works and where the comprehensive plan fits in.
- FEMA National Risk Index — An interactive map showing natural hazard risk, expected annual loss, social vulnerability, and community resilience for every county in the United States. Worth pulling up for your own county before August 3rd.
- NFIP Community Status — Check whether your community participates in the National Flood Insurance Program and at what level. Relevant for every week of this series.
- USFA Fire Department Overview — National fire department data including response times, staffing, and coverage by community type. Useful context for Week 1 on land use and public safety infrastructure.
Book of the Month
- Planning for Disaster: How Natural and Manmade Disasters Shape the Built Environment, by William G. Ramroth, Jr. (Kaplan Publishing, 2007)
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Have a public safety or hazard mitigation question you’d like to see addressed in the series? Let us know and we’ll get pointed in the right direction.
2026: Bring Your Plans to Life
JCShepard.com Monthly Themes for 2026
- January: An Introduction to Small Town & Rural Planning and Community Engagement
- February: Population and Housing Trends
- March: Economic Development
- April: Community Facilities / Historic Sites / Education
- May: Public Health / Parks & Recreation
- June: Communications, Utilities & Energy
- July: Natural Resources
- August: Public Safety & Hazard Mitigation (Today!)
- September: Land Use
- October: Transportation
- November: Implementation
- December: Reflections
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