Whole community charts course for Oregon resiliency

Presenter: Oregon’s resilience plan wasn’t written by a big consulting firm. It was written by the same organizations that have been at work rebuilding our communities for the past six years. Speaking Sept. 9 to the House Interim Committee on Emergency Management and Veterans, Erik Cole:

Erik Cole (Oregon, resilience plan manager): I work in the Office of Gov. Tina Kotek as the resilience plan manager for our state. The Plan for Resilient Oregon that we’re sharing with you today—that’s releasing today—really rises from the ashes of the Labor Day Fires in 2020. 

As you all know, Oregon’s worst wildfire disaster on record, with more than 4,300 homes lost and roughly one in eight Oregonians under some level of evacuation.  The fires impacted 11 counties, $1 billion in damage across the state.

Our federal recovery funding required Oregon to develop a statewide resilience plan. And so that’s what we’re bringing to you today.

Many states, when they put these plans together, go and hire fancy consultants to build a plan and meet that requirement. That’s not how our Gov. Kotek chose to do this. She really wanted the work to be based on a simple, very simple idea. And that’s that Oregonians know what Oregonians need.

Every recovery dollar, including the planning dollars we felt—she felt—should benefit Oregon communities facing these risks. So rather than hire that big consulting firm, we hired 51 Oregon community-based organizations already working on the front lines of resilience.

These are food banks, shelters, business groups, local disaster teams that people rely on to get through the tough times to help develop this plan.

The radical notion that we worked from was that we could put this plan together if we heard from the folks that were directly affected and impacted by the plan.

And we brought together two state universities—a dream team of Ducks and Beavers—working together to help be our researchers and scribes for the plan.

Presenter: Oregon’s Chief Resilience Officer speaks to Strategy 6, ‘Establish an Office of Resilience to steward resilience efforts and advance enterprise-wide collaboration.’ Jonna Papaefthimiou:

Jonna Papaefthimiou (Oregon, chief resilience officer): It is a total honor and a pleasure to be here with our community partners and with my team to see their work shine. I think we wrote a good plan. The test of a plan is not the words we say, it is the actions that it motivates.

And that’s why I get to talk about Strategy 6, which is about accountability and follow-through. I’m speaking to this strategy myself because as the state resilience officer, I have the privilege of working across state agencies and the opportunity to advance these commitments inside the enterprise.

I see accountability to the PRO goals as a key part of this job going forward. We have got to follow through on our work. 

I intend to track and follow through with state agencies in part by building on the work that this committee advanced last session (thank you): The idea that every agency should identify someone in a leadership role to engage on disaster preparedness and business continuity.

I also intend to rely on this committee’s work earlier creating the Emergency Preparedness Advisory Committee, which I hope can also advise on resilience and policies—policy decisions around implementation of the Plan for Resilient Oregon. 

The governor will be bringing a resilience bill in the next session and using the recommendations of this plan to inform her requested budget.

I look forward to continuing to be in conversation with the committee about that as the session unfolds, because, of course, accountability is also in your hands as legislative leaders. I feel that given all we have done to engage Oregonians to develop this plan, we owe them—and I owe you—some results.

And frankly, I can’t wait to get started. It is a pleasure to be a part of this big team building an Oregon that is resilient by nature and ready by choice.

Presenter: Resilience Plan Manager Erik Cole: 

Erik Cole (Oregon, resilience plan manager): So this is the process we followed. We reviewed existing plans so we weren’t reinventing the wheel. We checked in on our findings and solicited new ideas from those communities across the state, those 51 community-based organizations, and from homegrown experts and subject matter experts across Oregon.

We developed the strategies and actions in real time with those regional leaders, as well as with our statewide leadership group meeting remotely so that folks from across the state could attend. And then our university partners worked with us to develop and publish the PRO, as we call it: The Plan for Resilient Oregon.

The result, we think, is a plan that is people-centered. It reflects their priorities of people from communities across Oregon, as I’ve said. And it is integrated with the work of the state and the existing plans and programs and agencies we have.

So in keeping with our people-centered approach today, it’s better for you to hear from our community partners who worked on the plan and worked diligently to help us hear the voice of their communities and craft and write the plan.

Strategy 1: Increase the ability of state and local jurisdictions to effectively serve the immediate needs of survivors of disasters, especially those with the least capacity to recover.

Debbie Cabrales (Centro de Servicios para Campesinos): My name is Debbie Cabrales and I’m the executive director of Centro de Servicios para Campesinos.

Centro de Servicios para Campesinos is a nonprofit providing direct services and legal assistance to farmworkers and other Spanish and Indigenous speaking agriculture workers in Oregon.

The people we serve are some of the most vulnerable in the state, both legally and environmentally. When disasters happen, they’re impacted by the initial disaster, working through fires, smoke, and floods to provide food for Oregonians and their families. They also often have less access to recovery due to language barriers, legal requirements and a lack of trust with government systems.

That is why I wanted to be part of the Plan for Resilient Oregon, and why Strategy 1 matters so much to my broader community and to me.

Strategy 1 calls for increasing the ability of state and local jurisdictions to effectively serve the immediate needs of survivors of disasters, especially those with the least capacity to recover, like our campesinos.

Because as we all know, farmworkers are the backbone of not only our community, but of Oregon.

Action 1.1 in Strategy 1 is especially important to me because it calls for timely and accurate preparedness, response, and recovery information in multiple languages, formats and community communication channels.

So all Oregonians, especially including people with limited English proficiency, can receive and act on critical information. This is a crucial change for the people I serve for their safety, health, well-being, and being able to recover fully.

Presenter: Erik Cole:

Erik Cole (Oregon, resilience plan manager): Strategy 2: Formalize support for regional community resilience networks that bring together tribes, local governments, federal and state agencies, Coalitions of Organizations Active in Disasters (COADs), long-term recovery groups (LTRGs), and other community organizations to identify priorities, share resources, and advise state efforts.

Matthew Havinear (Jackson County Community Long Term Recovery Group): I’m Matthew Havinear. 

I’m a United States Marine Corps veteran, and I have a background in disaster response and emergency services. Today I have the privilege to be the executive director of the Jackson County Community Long Term Recovery Group. I’m joined by my colleague Tessa Elbettar, director of operations and engagement.

In 2020, the Almeda (Drive) and South Obenchain fires destroyed over 2,500 homes in the small communities of Talent, Phoenix, and unincorporated rural Jackson County.

Our organization was founded to guide and support our community through the recovery process and rebuilding. And we found ourselves, years into recovery, asking ourselves: How do we take the lessons we’ve learned to improve outcomes for the next disaster?

The answer to that was becoming the Rogue Valley Community Organizations Active in Disaster, or COAD. 

COADs are a regional network of partners that work together in disaster response and are recognized as a best practice nationwide.

Our state has several active COADs and many communities that are identified that want to start one. And that’s why Strategy 2 of the Plan for Resilient Oregon is so important.

Tessa Elbettar (JCC LTRG): I’m Tessa Elbettar, director of operations and engagement.

What six years of recovery has taught us is that a strong disaster response depends enormously on what exists before the disaster. You don’t build the boat as you’re rowing it. 

Critical relationships between organizations, trust and communities; key communication systems; trained volunteers—these are just some of the things that can’t be built when a fire presents immediate risk of destruction to our communities.

In the Rogue Valley, we bring together more than 200 across two counties, Jackson and Josephine County. We don’t wait until there’s smoke in the air to exchange business cards.

Matthew Havniear (Jackson County Community LTRG): This summer alone was one of our worst wildfire seasons to date. The Rogue Valley COAD network activated five times for six fires, and that is across Jackson and Josephine counties. 

In practice, that meant coordinating shelters and other community-based efforts like meal coordination, livestock evacuation, donations, and logistics, volunteer management, and public information sharing.

It’s no secret that disasters are disproportionately impacting our most vulnerable community members, and no single organization can support this work alone.

Tessa Elbettar (JCC LTRG): Disaster response and recovery happens at the speed of relationships, but relationships require infrastructure. Right now much of that capacity depends on short-term grants, donated staff time, and stretching finite and limited resources.

Across Oregon, as CDBG (community development block grant) funding sunsets and resilience hubs funding runs out, many resilience networks report uncertainty about how they will continue this work.

We can’t prevent every disaster. But we can decide whether we use our lessons that we learned through recovery and apply it to future disasters. And the ones that we see every summer and every disaster season, our networks remain at risk of crumbling with no formalized support or infrastructure. Our communities risk not only losing our key resources and relationships, but the lessons learned, including those from the twenty twenty Labor Day fires across Oregon.

Disaster frequency is increasing as well as the intensity, andthere really are no blue sky days anymore. Strategy 2 addresses that, and that’s the opportunity for Oregon.

Presenter: With Strategy 3, ‘Integrate housing, economic, business, and workforce resilience,’ Heidi Khokhar:

Heidi Khokhar (Rural Development Initiatives): Hi, I am Heidi Khokhar. I am the executive director of Rural Development Initiatives—the Pacific Northwest rural development hub. And for 35 years, RDI has worked alongside rural people and communities to recover and strengthen local economies, leadership, and the capacity for local people to lead their own development.

In 2025 alone, we worked with 168 rural communities in the Pacific Northwest, engaged nearly 1,700 rural people and directly invested about $300,000.

We are a nonprofit organization doing that work. A significant part of our work is community-based economic development, and we work alongside local organizations and leaders to identify the assets in their own community and turn those assets into sustainable opportunities for wealth, jobs, and businesses.

That experience gives us a very practiced and practical perspective on what resilience is.

A resilient community is not simply one that can respond to a disaster. It is a community where businesses can survive disruption and recover. It’s where workers and entrepreneurs can meet local needs, where people can find and maintain housing, and where communities have the capacity to come together and act before a disaster.

In rural communities, economic development, business resilience, housing and workforce development are deeply connected. When a small business closes after a disruption, a community can lose both jobs but also essential services.

When housing is limited or damaged, it affects whether employers can find workers and when local organizations lack the capacity to navigate programs and access resources, even good recovery investments can struggle to reach the ground.

That’s why RDI strongly supports Strategy 3 in the Plan for Resilient Oregon.

And while Strategy 3 is fundamentally about economic resilience, there is something broader that we believe is also important to this conversation, that rural should not only be the recipients of economic development and state investment, they should also be architects of it.

Rural communities should not have to choose between being the places that supply Oregon’s resources, define so much of our culture and identity, and provide our recreational assets, and being at the table when the decisions are made about our state’s future.

That is why RDI is leading collective efforts to create space for rural people to articulate their priorities, elevate the solutions they are already developing and acting on, and ensure rural perspectives are part of the conversations that shape our state.

As an example of that, in April, RDI convened over 350 rural people together at our Regards to Rural Conference to build connections and collective voice, and that will be reflected in the forthcoming Pacific Northwest Rural Policy Agenda and at Rural Oregon Day on April 22 next year.

The process of developing the Plan for Resilient Oregon included perspectives from communities across the state, and rural communities had real, meaningful opportunity to be part of that conversation.

I appreciate that effort and energy, and it’s really quite unique, and that is ultimately why RDI supports PRO and Strategy 3, because if Oregon is serious about resilience, we need to invest in the housing, businesses, workforce and local economic opportunities that allow rural communities to thrive and be responsive locally, and also while ensuring those communities have the leadership and civic capacity to shape what’s next. 

Presenter: With Strategies 4 and 5—‘Invest in data collection and sharing,’ and ‘Use data to drive long-term planning and investment of lifeline systems’—Tim Dooley:

Tim Dooley (Association of Oregon Counties): My name is Tim Dooley from the Association of Oregon Counties representing Oregon’s county governments. I’m very excited by my assignment here today to talk to you about the importance of good data and data sharing.

Why are counties talking to you about data sharing? We occupy a unique role in emergency management and the Plan for Resilient Oregon by statute.

Counties are required to have an emergency management agency, and the county commissioners are the body that issues local disaster declarations and requests for state assistance when local resources are overwhelmed.

Counties are also that bridge between the state, enterprise and residents for many types of service delivery, not just in emergencies.

County road departments, for example, maintain the most miles of roads in the state system—over 26,000 miles and more than 3,400 bridges over 20 feet in length from the Burnside Bridge in Multnomah County to the covered bridges in Lane County.

That responsibility for infrastructure means that local governments have a lot of data about it—where critical infrastructure is located, what the weight-restricted bridges are, and expected life spans for that infrastructure.

But that’s not always plugged into the state side. And there’s not enough visibility into where the gaps are and what the most important investments might be for items like evacuation planning or ensuring fire equipment can access certain areas.

So connecting local data to state systems also enables local governments to better serve our residents. As I’ve been seeing this fire season by usage of the Genasys evacuation system to alert people when they need to be ready, set and go.

AOC hosts the IRIS and maintains the IRIS system, which is an asset management and cost accounting system that 28 of our 36 counties use to track and maintain their most valuable asset, their pavement.

The Plan for Resilient Oregon is a holistic look at how we can improve the state’s capacity to weather disasters in the future, both for community groups and governments.

AOC is excited about several facets of this plan, including funding a pilot program to expand the Iris system to include other public sector assets such as parks, fairgrounds, water and sewer systems, and to determine the feasibility of growing that program over the long term to enable more jurisdictions to sign on to the system.

Better data sharing and collection will also enable local governments to think about things like comprehensive plan development going hand-in-hand with natural hazard mitigation, so that we continue to grow and develop in ways that take resiliency into account from a systems perspective for utilities, defensible space and transportation. 

Presenter: Oregon follows best practice by building relationships during the creation of its resilience plan. As Oregon Emergency Management Director Erin McMahon said at the University of Oregon, The value of a plan is not the plan. It’s the getting to the plan, the thinking through the plan, and the work with partners to get there.