In Case Of Emergency, Read Blog

Thanks to the Hometown Security blog, I saw that some Florida retailers had voluntarily lowered their prices on emergency preparedness supplies to encourage Floridians to prepare for Hurricane season.

I’ve been an advocate of getting the corporate sector far more involved in advance public preparedness, such as providing more discounts and developing integrated marketing campaigns, so I’m happy to hear about Florida’s effort. One reason this happened is that the State suspended its annual “tax free” holiday on emergency preparedness supplies this year due to budget cuts.

As readers may remember, I have been pushing my state of New York to adopt a tax free holiday on emergency supplies to coincide with the anniversaries of 9/11 and Katrina . And last month, my local Assemblyman Jonathan L. Bing introduced legislation to that effect in the State Assembly as Bill A11206.

In addition to the tax incentive, state and local governments should be more aggressively working with the business community to create marketing partnerships making preparedness supplies more accessible and less expensive. These are win-win opportunities that will increase civilian preparedness while building traffic and sales for the stores and suppliers. The Florida initiative is a good start.

Btw, I’ve added the Hometown Security to my blog roll. It describes itself as ”Homeland Security news with a local focus,” which means there is a lot of news on community and citizen preparedness like the story I linked to above. Written by John Bowen, a Senior Fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Preparedness (NISP), Hometown Security offers consistently interesting content. I recommend you checking it out at hometownsecurity.blogspot.com/