House panel approves working group and $36,000 request to study Office of Recovery and Resiliency placement

The House Committee on Water & Land on March 25 passed HR58/HCR64 directing the Office of Planning and Sustainable Development (OPSD) to convene a working group to evaluate establishing and placing an Office of Resilience and Recovery. Committee members agreed to add language allowing each county mayor to designate their representative to the working group and inserted a $36,000 line item in the committee report to support OPSD participation.

The measure, which the committee considered with testimony from state resilience staff and county partners, aims to identify the appropriate administrative home and membership for an office that would support long-term disaster recovery and resiliency planning. Mary Alice Evans of OPSD told the committee she “strongly support[s] this resolution” and asked the House to accept a technical amendment replacing a county civil defense representative with the mayor or the mayor’s designee to allow local flexibility.

Luke Myers, branch chief of the Office of Urban Resiliency in the governor’s office, described ORR as “a special project that was created by [the] governor post the Maui wildfires” and said one of the office’s main priorities is “looking at long term cost, and fiscal tracking of the investments that have been made and working on the state's recovery operations plan.” He told members the office coordinates long-term recovery support functions with federal and county partners.

Committee members pressed staff on funding and staffing. Evans and Myers both recommended allowing the mayor’s designee to be a recovery/resiliency subject-matter expert, not exclusively an emergency-management specialist. The committee adopted OPSD’s suggested membership change and added language to include additional legislative members by later agreement.

The committee also inserted OPSD’s budget request into the committee report: a $36,000 line item (BED-144) to support OPSD’s work on the working group. The committee voted to adopt the amended recommendation; the chair recorded the motion as passed and ordered the amendments included in the committee report.

What the measure does not do is create a permanent new office today. It directs OPSD to convene a multi-agency, multi-stakeholder working group to study how an Office of Resilience and Recovery might be established and where it would best sit administratively. The committee said it will ask for periodic progress reports as the working group convenes and develops proposals.

A copy of the amended resolution and the committee report will be distributed to participating agencies and county offices, per the committee’s instructions.

Ending: The committee adopted the chair’s recommendation to pass HR58/HCR64 with the OPSD membership amendment and the budget insertion.