Municipalities on the Front Lines of Puerto Rico's Recovery

📖 The Scoop

To fulfill Congress's requirement for an economic and disaster-recovery plan for Puerto Rico following Hurricanes Irma and Maria, a team from the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center conducted an analysis for the government of Puerto Rico and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The team assessed the hurricanes' effect on Puerto Rico's municipalities and the municipalities' ability to govern, deliver services, and recover from the damage they incurred. To address information gaps in Puerto Rico, the team surveyed officials from all 78 municipal governments, conducted 12 regional roundtables with municipal officials, collected and analyzed available municipal-level data, and consulted with subject-matter experts. The team's analysis shows that municipal governments faced the hurricanes while dealing with severe fiscal constraints caused by declining income-something that complicated response and recovery efforts. FEMA data revealed that the most-heavily affected municipalities were clustered in the southeast coast of the main island, where Maria made landfall, and the central mountainous region, where the rugged terrain exacerbated the hurricane's effects. The team created a framework to evaluate the rate at which different municipalities are recovering, which revealed that the most-heavily damaged municipalities are generally also the ones recovering most slowly. Finally, working with the government of Puerto Rico and FEMA, the team developed a set of courses of action (COAs) for recovery aimed at improving municipalities' capacity to govern and deliver key services. These COAs focus on improving municipal fiscal conditions, implementing regional approaches to service delivery and planning, rebuilding urban centers, increasing transparency, and enhancing municipal capacity.

Genre: History / Caribbean & West Indies / General (fancy, right?)