Larimer County emergency management officials told commissioners on Sept. 8 that the county has joined a pilot project with Texas A&M University to spatially code and map policies and actions from selected plans to find conflicts and gaps across jurisdictions and hazards.

Josh Roberts, mitigation coordinator in the county Office of Emergency Management, said the project — referred to in the meeting as PEERS — is a partnership with Texas A&M’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center and is funded primarily by a federal award the center received; Larimer County provided a $50,000 local match from its budget. “If you can imagine 50 plans in the inventory … we can’t evaluate all 50,” Roberts said. The project team will select a core set of plans (Roberts said the vendor recommended roughly 10) for coding and geospatial plotting.

Roberts described the process as extracting policies, strategies or actions from chosen plans, plotting those items on a map and then analyzing overlap to reveal where plans might conflict — for example, a hazard mitigation plan that discourages development in a zone that a land use plan designates for growth. “Once you put things on a map, it starts to materialize where there might be conflict in the plans, where there might be gaps,” he said.

Roberts said the project launched in August, has students and staff at Texas A&M reviewing the county comprehensive plan first, and is expected to run six to seven months with results available next spring. County commissioners asked about confidentiality and sensitive data; Roberts said the PEERS process is flexible and staff will select the most critical plans to analyze so the project can provide a replicable model for additional plans in the future.

Ending: Staff said the PEERS findings will be used to inform county planning and the upcoming hazard mitigation update, and the county plans to share results with municipal and regional partners and national peers working on plan integration.