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Got my bus pass been a ride first class streetcar downtown with a fine Ladies in the peeps are OG say don't hurt nobody looking this damn thing.
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Five years ago, the village of Lytton, British Columbia, was almost entirely destroyed by wildfire. Nearly 90% of the community of about 210 residents was lost, with over 500 structures burnt. More than $140 million in provincial and federal funding has since been committed to recovery. And in a June 17 article for the Canadian Press by Brianna Owen, it examines why rebuilding remains slow, why concerns have emerged over governance and consulting costs and the overall recovery process five years later. As Brianna writes, the scant progress is not for a lack of funding. The federal and provincial governments have committed more than 144 million, or about 1.9 million for each of Lytton's current residents, whose number has dropped by more than half since before the fire. And so, in this conversation today, we want to talk about the challenges of recovering, the challenges of navigating that, the goal of making everybody whole again, but also the need to actually do so in a way that is financially responsible, that creates the conditions for lasting prosperity rather than settling the community with new constraints that will, in time, become a real burden for them. And so we want to know, how do we recover after disasters like this? And what does it take to rebuild a town? And so welcome to Upzoned, where we take one big story making the news, and we explore what it can teach us about building Stronger Towns. I'm Norm Van Een Petersman, and I work with Strong Towns as our director of membership. And and with me today is Mitch Durand Wood. He's the author of youf'll Pay for this and a longtime Strong Towns contributor through his writing on the Dear Winnipeg blog, and a member whose work focuses on making local municipal infrastructure and finances fun and compelling and interesting for folks. Mitch is in Winnipeg, Manitoba, a large prairie city that has had to invest a lot in flood defense systems and water diversions. Now, also joining us for the first time on Upzoned is Graham Watt. Graham Watt is the manager of strategic initiatives and flood recovery for the city of Grand Forks, British Columbia, a community of about 4,200 or so residents, also in the interior of British Columbia. And Graham brings firsthand experience helping communities, including his own, recover after disasters. He's been a longtime member of the strong towns movement, and it's great to have you both here. Here. Welcome, Graham. Welcome, Mitch.
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Thank you.
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C
Hey, Norm. Great to be here.
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Yeah.
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Let's start with Litton itself. Graham, you're 260 miles from Lytton, so it's not exactly in your backyard, but you have a general sense of what it and other interior BC communities face. What is it that stood out to you as you read this story?
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You know, the first thing that jumped out, of course, is just the horror of the event itself. You know, a firestorm sweeping the entire community ground. And you know, as someone, I'm a public servant and imagining my city hall burning down and all of our records and even our backup server disappearing, I just can't imagine the stress is faced by, by the, by the community and by my counterparts, you know, the folks that face that that year. You know, I've been involved in emergency management and community planning in that kind of Interface for over 10 years now, and seeing that event unfold was, was really huge. So, you know, five years after, there's always kind of that recurring story that comes out. How's the community doing? How are they recovering? And I can always see the backstory that it's, it's, it's not the headline, it's, there's always going to be complexity because no community is the same.
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And was there something that you think there are lessons that are being learned in this, the immediate aftermath and sort of the challenge of responding to something that. So the scale being so dramatic of the majority of the town being wiped away. What are some of the things that I guess from your perspective in this work stood out?
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Yeah, well, I mean, the impossibility of trying to easily build back a town when there isn't hardly any place to live within an hour's drive over mountain highways, desert highways, in this case, you know, with the community scattered across the province and very few local and regional services that were directly connected, I think to me that's the backstory that you kind of start with. And no, no community faces this the same way. But when you're rural, remote, and only had a half dozen staff at the time of the event, how do you pick up those pieces? The other thing that really stood out to me and this, this story kind of didn't speak to it as much as some of the other ones I've seen. But the complexity when you have hazardous materials, toxic ash, the soil all having to be excavated and removed to be able to inhabit it, and layering that on top of the fact that it's all a rich multi thousand year archeological site for the local first nation. And it's going to be complicated and there's going to be a lot of expert systems involved. So when I read the article, I kind of felt it spoke to some of the frustrations that people were seeing with a long and complex recovery. And I really want to make sure that when people are thinking about a place trying to rebuild, they're looking at what would it take to put back the roads, the sewer, the water, the electrical, the functional systems of a community as well as the governance ones. They're, they're not going to be easy
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as living in B.C. at the time I remember we were in the midst of a heat dome. Lytton was setting incredible records for the hottest place I think in North America at that point. And just the question was, you know, what's going to happen? And then all of a sudden the shock of seeing it go up in flames and just the devastation that that created and now it's almost, you know, like you said, we do these check ins 5 years later, how are things going on the ground? Jasper, Alberta burned, for example. And so there's stories, you know, picking up on how things have gone there and, and you know, in all of our communities where we have strong towns members, we have these, these sort of pockmarks or these stories in our past of, of serious events that have taken place. But Mitch, you, you seized on this article and, or a similar one from April as well, touching on just some of the challenges and, and what stood out is as you were navigating through kind of this, this compelling story here.
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Yeah, well, for me it was, it was sort of the larger question of, of again financial sustainability. Because you know, when you, when your, your town, your city has a, you know, a natural disaster like this and everything is lost and you have to rebuild everything that you owned. You know, it can seem pretty overwhelming, seems like it requires a lot of money. But the reality is, is that's every city, right? We all have to eventually replace everything we own. But a natural disaster forces us to do it all at once. And to me what was sort of striking is the fact that when we do look at it as an all at once, we start to ask maybe questions that we weren't asking before, like can we afford all of this all at once? Because the reality is if we can't afford it all at once, we still can't afford it all over the it's natural lifespan, right? So this is to me it was really interesting that the natural disaster is forcing some questions that we just elsewhere forget to ask. Right. And in particular there's a lot of federal and provincial money flowing into this all at once. To rebuild everything that they need rebuilt. But when there's a lot of money flowing, it's a little bit easier to stop asking those questions, right? And again, to me this is just the parallels to every city in Canada, every city in North America in the US that there's state and provincial and federal aid for infrastructure. And it is these big sums of money that come into our communities that kind of make us forget to ask these hard questions of can we afford to maintain this forever? And I think the one example in the article that stood out to me is the there's $50 million coming in from the province and the federal government to rebuild one recreation center and a fire station, right? And of course they're being rebuilt to like, you know, Olympic standards for the pool and all of that, which is nice to have. And it's like, oh, this is great. And of course if you live there, you're like, oh, this would be wonderful. But this is a town with 100 people living there. Now once the federal money and the provincial money stop flowing, those are the people left holding the bag on the maintenance. And can you do that? A $50 million complex, even if it's going to last a thousand years, is still $50,000 per resident, or sorry, $500,000 per resident. That's a lot of money. So it's a good, again, a reminder that when everything needs to be rebuilt all at once, it's hard to ask those questions in the face of it. But again, everywhere we should be asking that because it's the same whether we're doing it all at once or we're doing over time. We still have to replace everything we own eventually.
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Maybe if I can respond directly to that, having been through that ourselves, where a third of our community's residents and about 2/3 of the business in industrial core was affected by the flood. It didn't wipe it out, but there was massive damage. There was multi week shutdowns, there was layoffs on bankruptcies. Many people were out of their homes and living in their RVs for over a year. You know, there is a real pressure to try to get the systems functioning again so people can start, people want to start rebuilding. And in Lytton is a bit different because people were scattered starting out as hard. And so you're going to be looking for, people are going to be looking for those kind of answers. But the bigger question I think is how to take that moment to think about what does this community want to become what might look different and are we going to try to Put everything back exactly as it was, or is there something different that should come of this? And I think that that's the climate adaptation and kind of risk management side of this that also needs to be discussed. And in Grant Fork's case, a portion of our communities in North Rockwell neighborhood is right across the river from the confluence of two rivers right across from downtown. And the floodwaters were 2 to 3 meters high in that area. And there was a dike that had been built in 1974 to kind of respond to a flood that happened three years prior to that. So it was a quick rebuild of a dike that wasn't actually designed for, you know, a flood of record or a design event as we talk about. And so the community ended up deciding to take that, that floodplain and naturalize it to buy out all the properties, remove the old dike, build a setback dike. And that was a big decision that took the community thinking about what should this look like given the kind of hazard exposure that we have. And that's something that's different. When you have an existing community with all of your built out infrastructure, hopefully have an asset management program where you're figuring out what and what to invest and where to make the most difference for the community, that's something that can kind of be built on incrementally. But all those services and all those homes that were built up over the years weren't necessarily built with hazard exposure in mind or risk governance. And now when you're rebuilding all at once, every single one of those risk layers has to be added. The new building codes, you know, the new fire codes, all the life safety stuff, the water infrastructure permitting, you know, every single layer of risk governance now is more expensive than it used to be. And having to do it all at once when you don't actually have a community around it to support that is going to be really long and going to be very expensive. So I don't balk at the big figures. I think it's important to go, you know, what could be some ways some regional support can help community in a rural area. You know, in B.C. we have something called regional districts that can share services with all local governments. And often the emergency management role is, is done in partnership. And so can your recovery be in that. And that's what happened in Grand Forks.
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But that infusion of one time money is one of the areas I think that we want to focus in on because the opportunity to gain it's not a windfall because it's in the context of severe disaster. But the flip side is there was a readiness to say, Lytton is Canada, and Canada needs to stand with the people of Lytton. We need to basically make things right again. It's been interesting. I mean, there are some real obstacles to getting things rebuilt, as you mentioned, the first nations sites and things like that, that needed to be addressed in a wholesome way. The flip side, or in addition to that, though, is the sheer scale of all of the available funding up front makes it that, like, there's a lot of public money that is being spent first with the goal or the hope that it will then spur private investment. And at strong towns where, you know, this is not just a project management problem, or not even a personalities problem, we're saying, like, our system continuously backs its way into. We're going to put all the money in up front, and then we're going to try to recoup that over time through property taxes, through other means of raising revenue, through, you know, building it. And they will come sort of speculative systems. And I see it in my city, where for every $3 of private investment in terms of land and property that we see in our city, we have $1 of public infrastructure to keep up. So that's our community centers and our roads and our streets. So we have a 3 to 1 ratio of private dollars that are available in the land and in the buildings to $1 of public, which is actually nowhere close to enough to be able to be sustaining us ourselves when, you know, we have a big flood or when we have an. Which is, again, we know it's not just when or not if that happens, it's. It's when that happens. So we need to be preparing for that. And if Lytton is costing them $1.9 million per resident, I'm just, like, stunned at the expectation that we would have something similar for a much larger population of 120,000 in my city, let alone across the lower mainland. Like just that precariousness of an approach that says, well, the way that we get out of these problems is to put all the money in upfront, I think, is going to be a huge burden for us. And Mitch, I know that Winnipeg had to make some pretty serious decisions about the way in which they would invest in flood defenses and other types of things, because that was the primary threat in Winnipeg. But that has since given rise to its own version of lots of public money has gone in. And, yes, there's now new residential subdivisions in areas that are newly protected by the diversion, the flip side of it, in Fargo, North Dakota, I was just up there, they've done the same thing where they created a huge diversion and it has led to a suburban sprawl and created the conditions in which a lot of public money then gives rise to a low productivity use of the land and the corresponding challenge of saying, if ever this needs to be repaired, we actually won't have the productive land use to justify repairing it. But, Mitch, that's a right in your wheel.
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C
So, yeah, so, I mean, in Winnipeg, the Red River Floodway, essentially is what it's called. It dates back to the 1950s. Right. So this is an old project that was brought. It was a provincial project, so the province paid for it because it was all on provincial land. But the idea was, at the time to protect sort of the province's major economic driver, which was the city of Winnipeg. You know, to say that it led to sprawl, I don't know that, like, it's maybe one factor out of. Out of many that, you know, protected more land than just the city of Winnipeg proper, obviously. But I think there was a lot more, a lot more nuance, a lot more complexity than just to link those two as a straight line. I don't think so. You know, and then in the 1990s, again, we had another, what they call the flood of the century, which was even more. The city of Winnipeg was protected, but then the province did upgrades to it to bring it back up to that standard. So that's been, again, provincial money protecting the city. And so the city has not really had any cost to incur with respect to that, again, just because it bypasses the city. So, yeah, it's difficult to say, you know, whether, you know, from. From what they've looked at flood damage and. Or potential flood damage, had that not been in place for, especially the 1950. And then there was a flood in the 70s and then, you know, the 90s, just those three big ones as in addition to just regular annual flooding. It is apparently way more than paid for itself. So from a provincial standpoint was it was a good investment. If the city had had to pay for it, would that have changed the math on it? Probably because, you know, the incomes and the expenses are different from that perspective. But, yeah, I mean, I guess a little bit to what you were talking about earlier is that, you know, the rebuilding, when you get the provincial or federal funds, you know, it almost acts like an insurance policy, like a group insurance policy, or like, okay, we're going to help rebuild, but yeah. The core question, again, is then, like, if beyond that is federal and provincial support or state support required beyond that to keep operating and keep maintaining it? In most places that we live in, that is actually the case. And when that money doesn't show up, we just don't maintain it. And so if in a case of a natural disaster, you come and you get all this federal and provincial state aid, rebuild everything. But then after the aid program is done and the community's left to its own devices, what's going to happen is that those places are just going to eventually slowly erode and eventually slowly get abandoned to the point where at the end of their life, they will just be a building that they close down. And that's not what we want for our communities, obviously. It's not what we want for our towns. We want to be able to maintain. The thing that stuck out to me in the article, they do talk about how this federal aid has a caveat on it, that the town must show that they'll be able to do the maintenance and operations for six years after federal aid ends. Like, six years is not a very long time. Right. It's very much. Seems like a very bureaucratic check a box like, okay, you'll be good. Okay, cool. See you later. And then six years later, the town is in deep trouble. And again, this is. I feel the natural disaster has just highlighted this in a very stark fashion. Something that's just happening at a slower pace or a slower, gradual pace everywhere else in North America.
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And, Graham, I'd love to note as well that the challenge that Grand Forks faced and more communities like this face is that if they're smaller local governments, they're sharing services with the district or sharing services with others, or bringing in, you know, outside consultants to be able to manage, you know, a lot of our cities, a lot of consultants will take care of your planning, they'll take care of your property disputes. Like, there's. There's sort of a whole system there. How is it that local governments can become quickly overwhelmed? And what would that sort of signal or what would those types of things sort of create? Like. Yeah, what sort of tensions does that create?
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Oh, it's a great question. I mean, once again, every community is different, but I think something that kind of a strong town's approach to disaster resilience here is kind of investing in that human network of local institutions that could have the capacity to provide support, whether within that community or to a neighboring community in the event of a major disaster. And so, like in Grand Forks, we, we had those relationships with the regional district, we had those relationships with community organizations. And the groups that stepped up to help the community out during the flood were then tapped to become part of the community based flood recovery program. And you know, we kind of faced a choice early on. Is this going to be a consultant led external capacity project or is there any way we can leverage those funds to build capacity within our own institutions? And luckily the leadership really said, okay, let's figure out how we invest in that path. And so for people like myself that got involved in the recovery organization, the province paid for our backfill positions and in many cases for the organizations that were involved in the different pillars of recovery, went to up to 12 staff at one point. But many of those organizations retained those staff and then built to capacity to actually use them over time for something that was a benefit. And you know, and that's something that people talk about, build back better. But those, those human institutions can you inject if there's an injection of money happening, how can it be leveraged for something that's going to be enduring, enduring growth for places that don't have the relationships and capacity in place, the burnout is going to go through the roof, there's going to be a lot of turnover and the relationships that those people were maintaining will be lost. And so there won't be the capacity there to recover. So I think the human care, not only for the citizens and the people who are affected by the space, but also the capacity in the local organizations and who we know and how we know each other. That's an investment too.
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C
I like your point there about building that local capacity, because that's a really good point. Because when you, I mean, just an example in personal income, right, somebody who makes 30 or 50 or $60,000 a year generally will take care of their own financial needs. But as that income goes up, well, maybe now you need an accountant, or maybe now you need a financial planner. If you're making $50 million a year, you probably got several staff taking care of your money for you, right? And so use the example of Lytton, who had an annual budget of $1.4 million. They had the local capacity to manage that kind of money, but you bring in hundreds of millions of dollars of federal and state aid. They maybe don't have that local capacity there. And so that's why you get all these external consultants. And I think Graham's point is really good of like, how do we use these events to build the local capacity rather than Just let this happen to us so that we can move forward stronger as a local community. I think that's a really, a really strong point to highlight because yeah, otherwise the end game is the money leaves, the consultants leave and then you're left to your own devices to slowly fall apart. The alternative to that is just that the federal money comes back and you then, or the provincial money or state money and you just are constantly under external control kind of forever as a ward of the state or ward of the federal government, which is again not something anybody local wants. So it's about, it is really about like that grassroots bottom up, building that local capacity to, to, to tend and care for your, your community. For sure.
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One of the local council members there who actually reached out to, and the timing didn't work for her to come on the podcast to discuss this with us, but otherwise she'd be most welcome to join us, said in the article that especially after large disasters with a lot of money, the system does not support good decision making. Uh, people see dollar signs and they want to capitalize in it, on it. Even this whole like system or system of people participating in the recovery process. She said, you know, some are well intentioned, but they're making money. And that, that stood out to me that like that is a symptom, but it is, it is not unique to Litton. It is not unique to any of the communities that are maybe are smaller because even our larger communities really can grapple. They have to make that decision fairly early on. Are we going to support our operations locally or are we just overwhelmed and need to bring in assistance from outside? And I think that a lot of our systems are set up in such a way that your community needs that grant administrator and then the grant administrator needs the additional capacity of, you know, technical consultants that come from out of town or out of state. And the result of that is then you've delocalized it to, you know, like you've removed it from that space. And Graham, in your context, some of the work that you did around the neighborhood, shifts or changes around neighborhoods and things like that, that seemed to me that it was developing in house capacity to be able to address that. Does that set you up for future responses in a way that you think might serve you better than some of the places that haven't had that ability to do that or made that decision to do that?
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Yeah, and I think maybe sort of shifting to think about, you know, mitigation and the capital program that it takes to build like the city built over 3,000 meters of new dikes, there's new infrastructure. But that was all based on return on investment. We had to show basically that it was protecting areas, existing assets that were, you know, valuable and a lot of those are industrial assets that a lot of those are community based ones. So kind of like on that side, the roi, the return on investment is, is there under the granting programs that we're in, but how the community chose to administer it. During one part of our project we had kind of external project management partners, plus external engineers and external contractors as you typically have. And then later in the program we basically stood up a spectral projects team and we're all on term contract essentially or two of so our own term contract. But it's, it's a kind of having a planner and a project manager and an engineer together doing the in house project management meant that the city could actually take on and take ownership a lot of those kind of decisions that otherwise might just leave the community with external project management. And you'll probably do several hours of podcasts about each of the different projects. But an interesting one with the floodplain naturalization of North Ruckel, there was a buyout program where the city worked with an external consultant who actually did all the appraisals and was the land agent. And you never would want to internalize that function because these are our neighbors in the community. Right. It's kind of you need people from the outside who have that complete independence. And in a way the city was able to provide that kind of oversight and support and capacity in that program. But it's always going to be full of challenges. But then when it gets into restoration, bringing in local and regional resources, whether it's the capital projects or a new addition to offset channel and not going to be a lot of kind of new learnings happen because of that.
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C
I think what's interesting too is the fact of in that quote that she says that it's not that people necessarily don't mean well, it's that the system is built this way. And the way I see it is a system that is built to overcome technical complexities. Right. As Graham pointed out, there's so much going on on the technical side of it of different challenges and different aspects that you know, need to overcome. And this is a system that's built to power through that and to deliver large scale programs and projects and getting through all of that technical complexity. What it's less good at is dealing with the human complexity, the needs of the community kind of get papered Over a little bit or a lot. And it's that human aspect that the system's not quite built to integrate into the process to see are we actually meeting the needs here or are we actually making things worse for everybody once we leave? That aspect of it is not necessarily brought into the system. So it's a system that comes into town and is really good at steamrolling over everything and addressing all the technical problems that you run into. But the human aspect is left sort of as a side thing to be ignored is again, just kind of my impression. And again, it's not just like this particular program. This is how it's always done with road expansions, with all kinds of infrastructure projects in all kinds of ways. When it comes from federal money, it's not nuanced to the local context. It's meant to. To deliver money and deliver projects and. And do it on a grand scale. So that. That's what I notice again here is. Is again that same. That same thing is just happening just on a big scale. And it really is stark because again, Lytton is such a small community and because of the natural disaster starting from zero, the need is so big. So it really becomes quite a kind of a stark exposition of the entire delivery mechanism.
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B
The other thing that stood out in part of your comment, Mitch, earlier, that this is actually every building in our communities needs to go through a rehabilitation or a restoration at some point. This just. In Lytton, because of the immediacy of it, meant that you were having to do it with every structure in the community or nearly every, um, that really stands out like the one. Or what stands out for me is that recovery mode is often one that we are comfortable with things moving more aggressively. We're comfortable even if the costs are a little bit higher. When we are in recovery mode from a serious disaster, we sort of assume that things are going to move. And so in, you know, at the same time that this, that. Or pardon me, near, I think it was in the same year we had significant disasters strike Our. Our roads and the Coquihalla highway and several other highways had to be. They were washed out. So I think we had the heat dome and the, if I remember correct, the atmospheric river in the same year. And it was. It was insane. But they. They basically put aside all of the environmental reviews they seconded, like steel structure, steel materials from other building sites and use it to restore the highway bridges. And they moved at lightning speed. It seemed like in order to be able to move ahead with getting this. These vital Arteries reestablished. And that sense of being in recovery mode to me is, is one of those things that makes me wonder why our communities can't be more adept at saying everyday life actually should have that thread of recovery mode in it. Everyday life of, hey, this building is, has reached the end of its lifespan. It really does need to be restored. And for it to sit as we see in our places, not only because of owner disinterest, because sometimes the owners are willing to go ahead and do a project, but they know that it is just going to be so painful unless you got into a situation where everybody was rebuilding all at once, once, all at the same time. And that can be that, that distinction. And probably what feels wrong here is that nothing in, you know, seemingly so little has been done in five years. And so there's the ballooning costs and things like that. Now, Graham, I'm oversimplifying that because one of the things I think that stands out is that recovery from flood is different than recovery from brutal fires like this. With the creation of hazardous conditions and the unresolved questions of archeological, you know, sites that need to be properly protected. Are those the only reasons why this moved slower than maybe other places that have had to recover, where just a few years later you drive through and you realize like, oh, there's fresh buildings, but you wouldn't necessarily know that some big disaster had hit?
- [33:46]
A
Yeah, I mean, the rural, remote nature of it is one part of it, but the province itself is kind of an interesting timing of this one because the province had only brought in an interim Recovery framework in 2019. They had some experience from 2017 floods and fires to our 2018 flood, which there was a huge investment recovery. And the province was trying to figure out its own policy and its legislative tools, which were not designed for the scale of events. They were not designed as well for community based recovery that Grand Forks cobbled together. And there's always a lot of kind of questions when you're trying to build a recovery program out is what's, what's fundable, what's doable, what can we do to respond to. But there's actually an Auditor General's report in March and there's been reporting around it, but that kind of gets into the provincial structural side of it, is that the tools that were in place were just not ready for that type of event. And then later on the same year, the on the Straight river, the washouts, the depths it affected all the roads around this region, that not only all the access to the interior was Cut off. Every single connection to the coast was cut off. And the province was also having to reel with that entire recovery for the, not only the highways, but one of the nearby communities a little bit further east of Merritt, which was washed out largely the lower core of the community during the same pointing 21 fall flood. So I think about compounding disasters that happen together, similar disasters in the same year, or you have a heat dome and then a fire and then the floods that fall and they're not disconnected. So the more kind of shocks that a system has, the less resilience the system has for recovery. And the only kind of way to, I think get over that is to try to understand what are the kind of natural hazard or climate boost and natural hazard events that can create these disasters. A lot of it really comes down to how exposed we are as communities, what kind of danger our planning has allowed people to accumulate in over time. The number of permits in the floodplain or the number of houses being built in a fire interface area. Like those are small investments as well that come down to kind of that culture of risk management that we are defining. So, you know, that's a roundabout way I get to pitch into sort of thinking ahead before the disaster, what, what can be done to reduce that exposure so that there's a better chance for a resilient return. I think that when you wipe everything out in a small rural area and then the system itself is under stressed and not designed for it, that's the perfect storm for a longer recovery and a more expensive one.
- [36:43]
C
Yeah, I think that's a really great point about reexamining your needs and making sure that you are more resilient going forward. It a little bit speaks to sort of Norm's point about in a disaster we tend to be quicker to rebuild things. The view I have is, is that we don't ask these hard questions without a natural disaster. Right. In my city, we're not even close to being able to afford our infrastructure. And this is the case everywhere in North America. If we all of a sudden had a natural disaster where everything got wiped out, the question is, yeah, how do we build back Better. But better rarely means smaller. It generally means bigger. Right. And so, you know, the questions that we should have been asking before, we should be asking even more after a natural disaster is how better might not be bigger, better might be smaller. Right. Maybe you reduce your exposure to risk by reducing how much infrastructure you actually own. Right. Instead of 12 foot lanes, maybe they're 10 foot lanes. That's less pavement so that if you do hit natural disaster again, you have less to replace. Right. And in that kind of vein. But also then it also reduces your financial risk going forward because if you were struggling before the natural disaster, building back bigger is definitely not going to be helpful. Even if you are more resilient to natural disaster shocks, you'll be less resilient to financial shocks. And so really it requires that big picture view of what do we look like going forward. Does everything we have today meet our needs and are there ways to meet those needs in a smaller fashion or in a less expensive fashion or a less risk exposed fashion to whatever those risks are?
- [38:35]
B
So yeah, Graham, you talk to your own city leaders and then folks in the region as well and more broadly and appreciate that about your work. Is there a lesson from this story that you would want most local leaders to carry with them that you know, especially if you're a listener, you are a local in your community. And so what we're talking about certainly has corresponding effects in your place as well. These might be lessons that you can pass on to your local leaders or if you are that local leader to be saying, hey, I know that aid type of disaster is looming. We don't know when but we know that it's due to come. And in that context we can actually learn the lessons from past events in order to be ready for or this time around and still to be caught off guard by some elements of it. But what are some of the lessons that you want to pass along, Graham?
- [39:25]
A
For sure, thanks for that opportunity. I was thinking about what's the best way to frame this in a strong towns message. And one of the ways that I think Knees will respond to is that there is a real business case for resilience. And in the case that fiscal health of a community that understands its own infrastructure debt or deficit, understands its asset management commitments and what it costs to maintain a community that understands those things will start investing. You know, they'll curry an unreserved balance. They'll have reserve funds for their different infrastructure assets and they'll be looking to be proactive. If they're opening up the road, they're going to look at all the things that need to replacing. So kind of that's the business side of a municipal service. We talked about the human side and the institutional density. There are also investments that will be that might be whether or not a community can come back from a disaster. That is absolutely the case. So there is actually a study that came out a couple of years before this event. But Gang Chen from Albany at State University in New York, he looked at basically 20 years of fiscal data in New York State and looked at how do governments, local governments, deal with disasters and how well are they financially off after the disasters. And the ones that did best had substantial sort of unreserved balances or accumulated surplus as some might call it. They had a buffer. And that buffer was able to be used to feed money to carry over things. You know, if you're going to be waiting for reimbursements from other agencies when you're doing repair, if you have something to kickstart it, those communities generally did the best. And I think it's a question of how do we keep our communities being able to grow and thrive in the future or just be in a future in a way that people want to keep on being there and investing there. It's trying to figure out how to invest in those systems that keep people wanting to be there. The other day I was downtown for lunch and there was about eight different bike packers. So people with mountain bikes taking the rail trail that goes from the coast through to the Rocky Mountains. There's a big race happening. And I was so excited. They showed up in downtown Grants works, having lunch at a beautiful little cafe on a sunny day. And I was like, that's that people wanting to come to a place because it has those things that connect people.
- [42:08]
C
Yep.
- [42:09]
B
Yeah. And your, your comment just makes me think, you know, if, if we were to approach it in a strong towns way, we might also say, all right, if we have $10 here, we probably have $10, what can we do with it? All right, let's make sure that we do that ten dollar thing. Let's also do the $100 thing. Let's also do the one thousand dollars thing and involve the community in saying, if we have now, you know, each of these sort of stages, but rather than starting at all right, we need $26 million for our community center. Starting with what's the lowest sort of rung that we can just begin to address? Because that, that period of inaction feels to me like one of those things that really stands out. And just building upon that, Mitch, any lessons and then we'll go into the down zone.
- [42:52]
C
I mean, I don't know. I think this is tons of lessons already, right? But yeah, no, obviously, I think the questions that come, I think the big takeaway is the questions that should be asked and that seem obvious from an outsider view in a natural disaster are the questions we need to be asking Every day we need to be continually asking how do we become more resilient or more anti fragile, Just even further than that every day. Right. Every time infrastructure comes up for renewal, that we're not automatically rebuilding it the same or rebuilding it bigger, that we're actually reevaluating how we can make ourselves more resilient from a climate perspective, from a financial perspective, from every kind of risk that we can, we can address. Perspective. Right. That we need to be doing that constantly through just regular, the regular maintenance and replacement cycle. That we are constantly reevaluating and getting to a place where we have a stronger talent. Yeah.
- [43:58]
B
Yeah. And the best time to do that is today if you're looking for the opportunity. I was reading the Asset Management BC magazine for fun because that's what I do. And basically it seemed every other article was how do I get people to think about this ahead of time? How do I get people to pay attention to it? And I feel like the disaster readiness magazines probably have the exact same questions always how ahead of time can we begin to do that? And that feels like, you know, if, if you're a strong citizen in your community asking those questions and beginning to probe what types of structures do we have in place. I love even the very practical recommendation, Graeme, of having not a reserve fund or something that is able to be tapped into. It may include like borrowing capacity to be able to do quick responses, but then crucially not diving into that unless there's real need, you know, in case of emergency, true emergency, break the seal and then use that as a way of responding. So this is, this is heavy, but it's also important discussion and I really appreciate the conversation but let's go into the down zone where we just really shift gears and talk about something that we're taking in that can be something you're reading or watching or enjoying that stands out. Mitch, you've done this before, so why don't you go first?
- [45:12]
C
Well, okay, so I'm reading the Babysitter's Club series. Not directly. My youngest has gotten into it and it turns out they've re edited the entire series and they're re releasing all of the old Babysitter's Club books but in a new updated fashion. So I was really. The thing that was interesting to me is in rereading them with my daughter. Is that how current it was? I was like, wow. Because I was really expecting it to have really 1980s cringe, 1990s cringe, like oh, that doesn't. But I was like, wow, this has aged surprisingly well. Yeah, they've been re edited and so any references to cassette tapes have been updated to playlists and whatever. So it reads a very current. Even though the storylines are all exactly identical, it reads very current. And so that was very. Yeah, a nice surprise anyways, to see that. So, yeah, it's fun to see stuff that we read as kids that our kids are getting into a kind of new version that stays pretty close to the original.
- [46:20]
B
I didn't even know that that was allowed. That's awesome. So you've got babysitters and boxcars with spiders.
- [46:26]
C
Exactly.
- [46:30]
B
Awesome. Graham. That's hard to follow. Go ahead.
- [46:33]
A
Oh, boy. Well, there's probably the big wing that comes to mind and maybe I'll take the down zone and call it the doom zone here for a moment. But one of the best climate change books that I listen to audiobooks and podcasts. That way I can go garden and do other good things while doing it. But Kate Marvel, she's a climate scientist who builds these Earth system models and. And plays around with what happens if you do different things. She kind of understands the Earth system better than many people kind of in the world. But she wrote a book called Human Nature and Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet. And it's a delightful read by Courtney Patterson. Is just. I would absolutely recommend it. I just finished it last night. But, you know, I'm someone who worries about the big system problems. Like, I read on global tipping points and understand what's happening with climate change and the effect on our communities. And I'm trying to find ways to translate that to practitioners, to planners who are working in the policy areas where we have to adapt to these events. And I found Kate's approach in her writing should be just so warm and friendly and full of humor and brutally honest sometimes in a way that, like, oh, people might just have feelings that they could actually rant about stuff. Well, I think there is. There is a lot of, you know, kind of mythological reference. And anyways, it was. It was a good wish and a lot better than reading the IPPC report.
- [48:06]
B
There you go. I love it. I'll have to. I'll have to look for that. And Mitch, I should have dipped my toes in the babysitter's club, but, Graham, you've taken the cake on that one. On my side, actually, I'm going to a book that I picked up at Mitch's house that my son is now reading, and I'm reading it with him is the Blackthorn Key. And it's just a series. It's great escape literature, it's juvenile fiction but it's fantastic. And so that's my item for the down zone. We're at our time. We have probably disasters to prepare for, emergencies to think ahead to and I think as we close I'm just grateful for the chance to chat with both of you. Graham especially welcome to Upzone as a first timer. Glad to have you on.
- [48:52]
A
Thank you very much for the test, for the conversation.
- [48:54]
B
That's great. And Mitch, good to have you on as well.
- [48:57]
C
Yeah, fun as always.
- [48:59]
B
And we'll be back same place, same Batcave next week. So keep doing what you can to build stronger communities. Or as I'm trying to make it my slogan, take care and take care of your places. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a non profit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a strongtowns member@strongtowns.org membership.
- [49:36]
C
Sat.