Texas Citizen Planner: Community Planning for Hazards

Texas Citizen Planner

The Texas Citizen Planner program is an innovative program for community leaders who want to understand more about community planning and how it shapes development, not for professional planners.

You may begin with the Planning Foundations course that covers legal authority, policy tools, and best practices or start with this Community Planning for Hazards course. If you want to enroll in both courses, there is a bundle option at a discounted price.

Community Planning for Hazards

In this online course, you will hear first-person perspectives about strategic approaches other Texas communities have used to link risk management with their ongoing community planning and vision. The art of good planning is about injecting long-term considerations into near-term actions. Communities that integrate hazard mitigation principles and factor in long-term risks into their existing plans stand to make their communities more resilient and less prone to disasters.

Each unit includes reading materials, case studies, and engaging instruction from planning leaders, practitioners, and researchers.

Unit 1: Tools and Strategies for Hazard Planning

Instructor: Earthea Nance, Ph.D., PE, CFM

The objective of this presentation is to discuss the best practices in flood hazard mitigation planning. The field is currently in transition with both old and new paradigms that are guiding practice across the state of Texas and worldwide. The content is designed for public officials with a general familiarity of the subject, but who seek a deeper understanding that is relevant to practice.

Unit 2: Collective Impact for Resilient Cities: How innovation in planning and design can help cities accomplish more

Instructor: Katie Coyne, AICP, SITES AP, Certified Ecologist-ESA

Many of the barriers we face when prioritizing and designing projects come from the differences we bring through our values, goals, past experience, the language we use, and individual perspectives. In this talk, we explore ways to coordinate across scales on multi-functional projects that target increased resilience through a more effective and collaborative process.

Unit 3: Planning for Community Resilience through Hazard Mitigation

Instructor: David Jackson, CEM

One challenge of making our communities more resilient, is operating in an environment where there are a lot of variables and unknowns. Keep in mind that the decisions we make today have far reaching consequences. Are the decisions we are making today taking risk into account? Are we positioning our communities for resilience tomorrow, 5 years from now, 10 years from now, and 50 years from now? This online course is eligible for 3.5 Certified Floodplain Manager (CFM) CECs through the Texas Floodplain Management Association (TFMA).