We appreciate and value the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation’s (DCR) efforts to outline a Community Outreach and Engagement Plan (COEP) for flood protection and coastal resiliency planning. The “whole community” approach outlined provides a useful, high-level overview of the Department’s intentions.

In particular, the City of Hampton appreciates DCR’s commitment to “leverage partnerships” and to “align and integrate COEP process with existing federal, state, and local programs to provide additional resources and synergies.” We request that DCR make explicit its intent to collaborate with local governments’ existing flood protection and resiliency planning efforts in this document.

Many Virginia localities have already conducted local whole community planning for flood protection and coastal resiliency. Some have established plans, programs, and initiatives – including robust community outreach and engagement strategies – which are already advancing critical efforts to document and respond to flood risks. We respectfully request that this plan acknowledge these efforts and its intentions to continue treating those programs as assets to addressing the challenges of flooding statewide.

The City of Hampton recognizes specific challenges and opportunities related to these planning efforts that can be addressed through alignment and integration between state and local planning efforts to advance the COEP’s goals:

1. Integration and alignment through collaboration can maximize the impact of limited state and local staff resources. From the City of Hampton's perspective, this COEP reveals significant overlap between state and local resilience and flood protection outreach and engagement goals, strategies, and audiences. Where possible, aligning outreach efforts to provide two-way knowledge sharing for qualitative data, information sharing networks, events, and more could multiply the impact of limited resources available to conduct this type of outreach and engagement.
   
   
2. The COEP states an intention to facilitate the participation of diverse stakeholders, and particularly “those who live and work in hazard zones.” This is an important and valuable goal. However, different but overlapping planning efforts that request feedback from the same individuals multiple times can create outreach fatigue in communities that are repeatedly asked to provide similar information. By collaborating with local governments who may have recently conducted similar outreach at local levels (i.e., to neighborhood organizations, local businesses, faith-based groups), the state can help to avoid outreach fatigue and build strong stakeholder relationships to inform planning.

3. Collaboration between DCR and local planning efforts can help to maintain clarity in communicating the differences between local and state roles and responsibilities for coastal resilience and flood protection planning. Many stakeholders engaged by a broad-reaching, state-level outreach effort will be unfamiliar with the distinction between state and local planning. Some may be unfamiliar with work that is already underway by the locality to address their local concerns. If local planners are invited to attend and observe state outreach and engagement efforts, they will be better equipped to articulate responsibilities for flood mitigation that ultimately reside with the locality.

Thank you for the opportunity to review and provide comment on this plan.