Blue Skies: moving THIRA, SPR, and LMS beyond spreadsheets

One program, two purpose-built workspaces

Blue Skies is planned as a new NextGenEM section with a shared overview and two distinct workspaces. THIRA and SPR will operate as one connected capability-assessment cycle. The Local Mitigation Strategy will manage plan governance, mitigation projects, working-group activity, funding opportunities, adoption, and recurring compliance. They will share platform services without forcing unlike records into one generic item type.

THIRA will move from outreach to approved targets

A THIRA cycle will begin with versioned scenarios, capabilities, targets, measures, participating organizations, and deadlines. Coordinators will assign only the relevant questions to each discipline or agency. Contributors may respond through a secure invitation, facilitators may capture answers during a workshop, and staff may enter information returned through an approved alternate channel. A stakeholder matrix, workshop command board, target editor, evidence review, and consensus workspace will carry the cycle from outreach through reconciliation, approval, submission, and a locked archive.

SPR will continue the same assessment

Approved THIRA targets will become the starting point for the Stakeholder Preparedness Review rather than being copied into a separate workbook. The SPR workspace will record beginning capability, capability lost, sustained, or built, estimated current capability, mutual-aid effects, confidence, priority, evidence, and the resulting gap. Gaps will be organized through Planning, Organization, Equipment, Training, and Exercises and connected to owned, time-bound improvement actions.

LMS will manage a living mitigation program

The Local Mitigation Strategy workspace will cover the five-year plan cycle and the work between formal updates. It will track plan sections, requirement crosswalks, jurisdiction contributions, representative and alternate participation, working-group meetings, public input, annual reviews, post-disaster reviews, approvals, adoption resolutions, commitments, and official plan artifacts. Dashboards will make missing contributions, overdue reviews, participation risks, and adoption gaps visible before they become compliance problems.

Projects and funding will have separate lifecycles

A mitigation project will retain its own hazards, location, benefits, costs, responsible organization, schedule, supporting documents, STAPLEE assessment, ranking, decision, and status history. Funding opportunities and grant applications will be related records, allowing one project to be considered in more than one funding round without overwriting its permanent history. Allocation, cost share, selection, submission, requests for information, technical reviews, awards, implementation, and closeout will remain visible as distinct steps.

Shared services will reduce duplicate administration

THIRA, SPR, and LMS will use common organizations, jurisdictions, contacts, representatives, alternates, hazards, deadlines, tasks, meetings, attendance, votes, communications, documents, comments, approvals, reminders, dashboards, and exports. The same foundation can produce agency packets, workshop agendas, assessment reports, Mitigation Action Plan appendices, ranking reports, annual compliance packages, meeting records, and adoption packages without making an exported spreadsheet the system of record.

Documents will remain evidence, not the workflow

Existing workbooks, documents, PDFs, correspondence, maps, and GIS packages will be inventoried, deduplicated, classified, and linked to the records they support. NextGenEM will preserve original names, paths, source cycles, file hashes, versions, and final or superseded status. Required spreadsheets and PDFs may still be generated for outside submission, but staff changes will occur in NextGenEM. Large GIS products will remain in appropriate managed storage or an authoritative GIS service.

Permissions and audit history are foundational

Access will be scoped by role, workspace, organization, and jurisdiction. Contributors will see only assigned questions or projects, while coordinators and approvers will receive broader program views. Sensitive individual-property mitigation records will have a separate restricted boundary and will not appear in ordinary dashboards or exports. Every consequential field change, status transition, assignment, score, vote, reminder, communication, document version, approval, submission snapshot, and sensitive-file access will leave an attributable history.

Recurring work will be scheduled and reviewable

THIRA and SPR cycles will roll forward from versioned templates while requiring explicit revalidation of carried-forward targets and gaps. LMS will support semiannual meetings, annual updates, post-disaster review windows, the five-year update countdown, jurisdiction adoption follow-up, project-owner attestations, and evidence-aging reminders. Coordinators will review recipient groups and message content before bulk reminders are released; overdue rules will escalate work without silently changing its status.

Delivery will proceed in controlled phases

The first phase will confirm terminology, authorities, required outside formats, security boundaries, and migration rules. Shared Blue Skies services will follow. THIRA and SPR will then be delivered as the first complete vertical workflow, followed by LMS governance and compliance, LMS projects and funding, advanced plan production and GIS connections, and finally validated historical migration and spreadsheet retirement. Each phase will have its own authorization, data-quality, accessibility, reporting, and operational acceptance gate.

Important boundaries remain visible

Before implementation, the team will confirm whether NextGenEM produces Polk County inputs or a complete regional THIRA submission, the current FEMA and state formats, voting and good-standing rules, external-contributor access, public-records retention, GIS ownership, and the authorized handling of individual-property records. The current-cycle material is best treated as a migration and pilot opportunity rather than a reason to rush an unvalidated replacement into service.