The Oregon Resilience Plan – Critical and Essential Buildings – February 2013 85 <br /> <br /> <br />directed Oregon Emergency Management to establish a seismic rehabilitation grants program, and <br />allowed the Department of Administrative Services and the Oregon State Treasurer to issue bonds to <br />finance seismic rehabilitation. <br />In 2007, Senate Bill 1 provided funding to establish and staff the seismic rehabilitation grants program. <br />The first opportunity to authorize a bond sale for an inaugural round of seismic retrofit grants came in <br />the 2009-2011 biennium. The legislative assembly authorized $30 million for seismic grants, divided <br />equally between the program for K-12 schools and the companion program for emergency response <br />facilities. The first round of K-12 grants directed $5.6 million to projects at twelve schools in eight school <br />districts in the spring of 2010. As the recession deepened, the governor chose to rescind $7.5 million of <br />the original authorization for the program, limiting additional granting during 2009-2011. Three <br />additional seismic grants were awarded to K-12 schools (including two URM buildings) in early 2011. <br />These grants marked the end of the first funded cycle of the program. <br />On the final day of the 2011 legislative session, the legislature authorized $7.5 million in new seismic <br />grants for K-12 schools during the 2011-2013 biennium. These grants, announced in Fall 2011 and <br />funded by a bond sale in July 2012, directed $7.2 million to seven K-12 schools. To date, the Seismic <br />Rehabilitation Grants Program has funded retrofit projects at 22 schools, about 2 percent of the need <br />documented by the Statewide Seismic Needs Assessment. <br />During the short 2012 session of the legislative assembly, legislators passed Senate Bill 1566. The bill <br />directs the state’s Department of Education, which communicates with parents about student <br />achievement and school performance via an annual report card, to inform the public in that report that <br />a database of seismic ratings exists and to provide a web link to the ratings. Further, the bill asks school <br />districts to advise DOGAMI when they rebuild or renovate schools, so that the state can share <br />information about the upgrades. The first reports submitted by individual school districts are now <br />posted on the DOGAMI website, although the agency has no funding to integrate information from the <br />reports in an update of the statewide database itself. <br />Given both the limited impact that existing policies have had on restoring resilience in Oregon’s schools <br />and the uneven success that Oregon school districts have had passing local capital bond measures for <br />school rehabilitation and construction in recent years, an evaluation of Oregon’s approach to <br />characterizing and addressing the seismic vulnerability of school facilities is in order. Past outreach using <br />the results of the Statewide Seismic Needs Assessment has emphasized the threat to life safety and the <br />possibility of mass casualties in collapsed school buildings. By contrast, the gap analysis we have <br />performed as part of this resilience study focuses on quantifying the state’s ability to resume public <br />education after a region-wide Cascadia subduction zone earthquake, given what is known about the <br />condition of the state’s school facilities. With the anticipated level of damage to those facilities, the <br />disruption of public education could extend considerably beyond a full school year, particularly in the <br />coast and valley regions—a factor that could impede Oregon’s economic and social recovery for years <br />after the Cascadia subduction zone earthquake.