Special Board of Aldermen 06-08-2021 Page 2
Mayor James W. Donchess, Corporation Counsel Steven A. Bolton, and Emergency Management Director
Justin Kates were also in attendance.
PRESENTATION
Emergency Operations Plan
President Wilshire
Tonight's special meeting is for an emergency operations plan presentation by Director Kates so I’m going
to turn it over to him.
Emergency Management Director Justin Kates
Thank you very much President Wilshire. I’m going to share my screen here. Okay does everybody see
the screen okay?
President Wilshire
Yes.
Emergency Management Director Justin Kates
Perfect. All right. So the purpose of tonight’s meeting is to do an overview of the 2021 emergency
operations plan update and this is something we actually planned to have this as the 2020 emergency
operations plan update. It was planned to be released last year around the same time and unfortunately
due to COVID, it put us a year behind. So there were some challenges with that but there’s also some
benefits that we'll talk about a little bit later. The goal here is just to give everybody an overview of what
this document is and offer an opportunity for you to ask questions about the city’s emergency plans, the
processes that we use for a variety of sizes of types of emergencies, and where we’re headed in the future.
So what is the emergency operations plan? There’s a couple of key things that it’s really meant to do. The
first being getting a high level overview of what the responsibilities are of the various city divisions and
departments and what they’re required to do during an emergency response or long-term recovery. So as
an example, it identifies what key activities the Fire Department would responsible for during an
emergency, or the Public Works Division, so it goes through those types of things and I'll go into more
specifics about how that is outlined in this plan.
The second thing that it does is it talks about we receive assistance from others whether it be from the
State, or whether it be from the federal government, and how that assistance is... (internet connection lost)
let me just move to another spot. | think my WIFI isn’t in a great spot here. Stand by one second. All right,
let’s try this again and hopefully in a better spot with WIFI. It looks like my signal looks good. I'll share my
screen again here. | apologize for that internet connectivity is a critical thing in remote meetings. So the
second bullet here we talk about emergency assistance and the idea there is how do we receive assistance
from the State or how do we receive assistance from the federal government, and what’s the process for
receiving that assistance, what’s the trigger for us requesting assistance when we’re in a situation where
we need additional assistance beyond what we’re capable of doing within the City.
The plan also covers the procedures and processes that we use to manage emergencies of all sizes within
the city. One of the key things that this does is it talks about the difference between what we would say is
routine operations — the way that we operate in the city day-to-day. When people call 911, they get
assistance from the Fire Department, or the Police Department, or emergency medical services, or in other
cases they might receive some sort of assistance from Public Works. Those are routine operations. We
provide service every day here within the city but what does that shift to an emergency operations type of
