ABSTRACT
CONTENTS Introduction............................................................................................ 158 Hurricane Katrina ................................................................................... 158 Financial Resources and Impact on the Tax Base.................................... 159 Personnel Considerations ........................................................................ 160 Asset Location and Planning ................................................................... 161 Unintended Opportunities ...................................................................... 162 Communications..................................................................................... 163 Cooperation and Planning with the Local Business Community............. 163 Cooperation and Compacts with Sister Cities ......................................... 165 Utilities ................................................................................................... 166 Media Relations ...................................................................................... 166
Conclusion.............................................................................................. 167 References ............................................................................................... 168
Introduction Long Beach, Mississippi, is a small town on the Mississippi coast of the Gulf of Mexico. It is also a resort town and bedroom community to other areas along the Gulf Coast where residents maintain employment. These include jobs in the vibrant casino industry in Gulfport and Biloxi, if the residents are not retired. As of July 2005, the population was approximately 17,283 residents according to the middecade estimate based on the 2000 census (U.S. Census, 2005a). Typical of many small jurisdictions, the town’s ability to autonomously provide for disaster mitigation and response is limited by practical considerations of limited financial resources, a small tax base, and limited manpower. Disaster relief is generally funded to neighboring county seats or large population centers and the small towns have to rely on processing through the larger staging areas. More often than not, their needs are overlooked as there are just not enough resources to go around. The federal system of government requires state governments to call in the federal resources if the state wants to. In turn, the state authorities are in control of the allocation and apportionment of their own resources and those of the federal government if they are forthcoming. When funds and relief supplies are released, these usually pass on to the county administration as divisions of the state government whose responsibility includes providing relief to the local governments in their jurisdiction.
