Application Exercise 1

Application Exercise 1 PUAD 620 Spring 2025 Instructor: Dr. Larry Thomas Instructions: Your response to the questions raised in Application Exercise 1 should be written in an essay format and submitted to me via Canvas as a Word attachment. To submit your materials, please visit Canvas and find Application Problem 1 under the Assignments Section. Responses are to be submitted by 11:59 p.m. on March 11, 2025. All papers must be each student’s own work product. Consultation between students or with other third parties regarding this exercise is prohibited. The rules relating to plagiarism apply fully to this paper, as they do to all other student work products. Your paper will be run through Turnitin. Please cite when relying on or paraphrasing another person’s work. Use an appropriate citation style (APA preferred). If needed, put the bibliography at the back of the paper. Papers must be typed and double-spaced, and an easy-to-read font size (Times Roman 12 point preferred) must be utilized. The papers should be approximately five (5) pages in length. Under no circumstance may the paper be longer than six (6) pages. Pages that exceed the six-page limit will not be graded. Late papers will be penalized in accordance with the policy specified in the course syllabus. Should the Government be the Insurer of the Last Resort? After heavy rains, a mountainside in the small town, sixty miles northeast of Seattle, gave way, burying scores of homes and taking forty-four (44) lives. Search and rescue workers labored for months to recover all the bodies, the last of which—44-year-old Kris Regelbrugge, was not discovered until four months following the slide. The local emergency management director, John Pennington, was grief-stricken. “We did everything we could,” he told reporters. He added, “Sometimes big events just happen. Sometimes, large events that nobody sees happen. And this just happened.”1 A retired architect who had a weekend home in the slide's path and lost many of his neighbors told the Seattle Times, “We are not a bunch of stupid people ignoring warnings.” He explained, “We all make risk assessments every day of our lives. But you cannot make a risk assessment on information you do not have.”2 That quickly became the backstory. Residents would not have built homes in the area without knowing the risks. The slide was unpredictable, and local officials had done all they could. And then a freakish act of nature took scores of lives. Critics sharply disagreed. They pointed to logging above the slide and previous slides in 1949, 1951, and 2006 in the same area. Soon after the 2006 slide, new construction quickly resumed, and new residents moved in, apparently unaware of the risks they were taking. International landslide expert Dave Petley, a professor of hazard and risk at Durham University in the United Kingdom, was sure the slide was predictable. In his “Landslide Blog” on the American Geophysical Union’s website, he wrote, “I’ll nail my colors to the mast—to my mind this was a foreseeable event, and as such the disaster represents a failure of hazard management.”3 Petley was not alone in his criticism of the incident. In 1999, private geomorphologist Daniel Miller authored a report for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that warned of the possibility of “large catastrophic failure.” In a post he wrote for CNN, he said, “As a scientist, I knew that material [on the hill above] would someday be on the valley floor.”4 This all paints the central dilemma that constantly plays out across the country. The feds often know a great deal about the risks but do not have the authority to act. Local governments have the authority to act, especially through zoning requirements. Still, they often cannot collect all the technical information—and sometimes do not have the will to interfere in local development. New Orleans officials had known for decades that their citizens were at risk from big storms. Just a year before Katrina struck in 2005, a Federal Emergency Management Agency simulation, Hurricane Pam, pointed to the devastation a Category 3 storm would cause. Evacuating the city, the exercise found would be a huge problem. But when the storm hit, the city was woefully unprepared. Along the northeast coast, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration had long predicted that low-lying areas were vulnerable to storms, and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change backed up the warnings. Superstorm Sandy’s devastating wallop in 2013 confirmed that too many residents had built too many properties on land that was too vulnerable. That does not prevent citizens from looking to the government as the insurer of the last resort. When natural disasters devastate local communities, a warm-hearted nation invariably provides help. Even small-government conservatives rally around government aid when their communities are affected, and such emergency aid is one of the government’s most important roles: banding together to help the few in need. However, such short-term federal relief efforts have often planted seeds for future disasters. By assisting local communities in rebuilding, federal programs have often created targets for the next natural disaster in an ongoing cycle of devastate-rebuild-devastate. Since the mid-2000s, change has begun to take place. The federal government’s recovery aid after Katrina and Super Storm Sandy has required tough new zoning and flood insurance requirements, including raising living quarters above flood levels and prohibiting rebuilding in the most endangered areas. However, the underlying policy dilemma remains whether to make the federal government the insurer of last resort, with the responsibility for salvaging the housing decisions made by individual citizens and zoning policies set by communities. Many Americans argue for a smaller government. However, every natural disaster calls for more governmental help (Houston, Puerto Rico, Southern California, and now Florida) and for the afflicted and tighter governmental rules to prevent problems from recurring. That inevitably leads to the searching questions about whether the government could (and should) have prevented individuals from making decisions that put them in harm’s way. Moreover, we tackle the toughest questions at the worst possible time, trying to frame smart long-term strategies in the face of unspeakable human tragedy, and that is a tough way to make good policy. Progress is being made. The new risk-based zoning and flood insurance policies that appeared after Katrina and Sandy are steering investments away from the areas at greatest risk. But we still have a long way to go in sorting out who should oversee what. We cannot stop natural disasters, but we need to do much better in setting federal, state, and local policies that help people figure out how much risk to take and what kind of help the government will provide when disasters strike. Questions to be addressed: What role should the government play in balancing its regulatory power (to prevent citizens from doing things that potentially expose them to risk) with the need to provide citizens with information to make informed choices? Did local zoning officials in OSO adequately inform residents of the potential risk of building homes on the hillside? Did federal, state, and local officials share information well enough so that decision-makers at all levels had adequate information about the risks involved? What role should the government play in compensating citizens for the damage they suffer from natural disasters? In addressing the questions above, apply the readings associated with this topic, including the purpose of policymaking, the reasons the government gets involved in solving public problems such as natural disasters, and the factors that make policymaking in this problem area so complex. How does the decline in the public’s trust in government and increased political polarization affect the ability of the government to make good policy choices? Reminder: All papers must be each student’s work product. Consultation among students or with other third parties regarding this exercise is prohibited. The rules relating to plagiarism apply fully to this paper, as they do to all other student work products. Your paper will be run through Turnitin. Please cite when relying on or paraphrasing another person’s work. Use an appropriate citation style (APA preferred). If needed, put the bibliography at the back of the paper. Papers must be typed, double-spaced, and utilize an easy-to-read font (Times Roman 12 point preferred). The paper should be approximately five (5) pages in length. Under no circumstance may the paper be longer than six (6) pages.