Board of Aldermen 03-16-2020 Page 10
President Wilshire
Director Kates, you are up.
Director Kates
Thank you. So | just wanted to start off with a couple of simple comments just to set the stage here. In
many cases in the career of an Emergency Manager they deal with some sort of catastrophe, you
know, we’ve seen disasters that are very large in scale. We think of the common ones; 911, Hurricane
Sandy, Hurricane Katrina. When you look at the scope and the magnitude of a disaster like that, it is
typically regional in nature. There’s only been one example that | can recognize where we’ve had a
National Disaster Declaration and that was for Hurricane Katrina and the only reason that that took
place was because of the massive exodus of people who evacuated the Gulf Coast to every State in
the Country. So it wasn’t even that those States were being impacted by the disaster, it was just the
fact that there was a massive evacuation.
In this case, every Emergency Manager across the Country is dealing with this crisis; every City
Department, County Department, State Government and then the Federal Government is dealing with
this crisis. We have so many different mechanisms ranging from the Emergency Management
Assistance Compact where we can move resources across State lines to help each other out during a
disaster, Mutual Aid among local communities. None of that works right now because everybody is
being impacted by this disaster. So what we have in the community is what we have. We have to
leverage not just those City resources, but also the Community Resources.
The other thing | just wanted to just mention before | explain what the City is doing regarding the
responses, the importance of information sharing. One of the things that we have been challenged
with over the past few weeks is while the City has been working remarkably well together with all the
Division Directors, the Department Heads, it has been unbelievable the amount of collaboration even
just the work between what Public Health and Emergency Management has been doing. We quickly,
early on identified Public Health takes the lead on the Public Health Response and Emergency
Management initially was focused on supporting and assisting with identifying the critical Government
functions that needed to continue during this incident.
We are in a moment now where we are getting these reports from the State, from the Federal
Government which we are learning about as Government Professionals, at the same time citizens are.
So when we hear an announcement that we are shutting down schools on the 5", guess when | found
that out? It was at the same time everybody else did. It presents a lot of challenges for us as a local
government to be able to react quickly and try to adapt to those types of conditions. So | will say the
key statement is we have to work together as a City. If we can work together and we have to share
information, we are going to be in much better shape than if we don’t because we are not able to rely
on the State and Federal Government to assist with that.
So just a brief overview of what we’ve done so far. We have been working on this initiative over the
past few weeks now really focused on ensuring that the City Departments have all of the resources
that they can possibly get to enable some ability to function during this crisis. So they have gone
through a process, an exercise with our team to identify what are those essential functions within their
organization? What are the things that they need to do in order to make those essential functions
occur? So whether that be supplies, staffing, access to some sort of an information technology
system, all of that needed to really be documented so that we could provide recommendations on
what functions needed to continue if we had to curtail services.
