SOLEDAD — Soledad City Council members heard information about the Multijurisdictional Hazard Mitigation Plan being prepared in Monterey County during their July 21 meeting.
The hazard plan will eventually seek community input before being sent to CalOES and FEMA for review in March 2022. Once approved, the plan will come back for adoption within the different jurisdictions sometime before July 2023.
Laura Emmons, emergency services planner with Monterey County Office of Emergency Services, presented the information as part of the county’s region-wide attempts to reduce the impact of hazards identified in the area. Some of the hazards that could hit cities in the Salinas Valley include: agricultural emergencies, droughts, earthquakes, flooding, wildfires and public health hazards.
The plan itself establishes guiding principles for reducing hazard risk and proposes specific mitigation actions to eliminate or reduce identified vulnerabilities. Emmons also noted having the plan in place would make the area more capable of receiving federal funding for pre-hazard mitigation.
“It’s not an operational plan,” Emmons said. “It has actions that can be taken prior to a disaster to mitigate the risk, but that does include actions in an emergency operations plan to improve reactions.”
The plan has countywide and jurisdictional strategies for cities like Soledad, which is one of the 12 incorporated jurisdictions included. Strategies include mitigation plans, such as regulations and building code changes; outreach; infrastructure projects, such as seismic retrofitting; and conservation and restoration efforts, such as flood protection measures.
“We really encourage the community to get involved,” Emmons said. “One of the most important elements of the planning process is being able to get community input on what the vision is for risk reduction in Monterey County.”
The county’s hazard plan, from 2016, expired in March 2021, but planning efforts were delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
For information on providing community input, contact in******@co.us or call 831-796-1905.
