Canton on Emergency Management

Emergency Management Solutions - February 2023

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Featured Articles

Politics and the Emergency Manager

    by Lucien Canton

The 2022 National Preparedness Report – Another Failure in Reporting

    by Timothy Riecker

5 Puzzling Aspects of Media Relations

    by Erik Bernstein

 

Politics and the Emergency Manager

“I don’t play politics!” How many times have you heard this expression or said it yourself? I know I have. Emergency managers like to consider themselves apolitical, that we provide relief to those in need and base our planning on the best available evidence without regard to political agendas. The truth is that politics is an integral and necessary part of the emergency manager’s job. You may not think you play politics, but it certainly plays you.

Leaving aside national politics, which is in itself a major topic for discussion, consider the fact that many local emergency managers work directly for elected officials. For example, in California the defacto  director of emergency services for a county is the sheriff unless otherwise stipulated by law. My own position in San Francisco was as a political appointee to the mayor. In such a situation, the minimum expectation is that you at least support the policies of the elected official for whom you work. There may also be pressure to take an active part in political campaigns.

And don’t think that because you’re in the private sector that you’re immune. Although different from public sector politics, corporate politics can be just as mean and  ruthless. I once lost a position with a private company because my boss became unwillingly embroiled in competition for the presidency of the company and the ultimate winner decided to replace us with his own team.

Assuming you can reconcile your responsibilities with the expectations of your elected officials, understanding the political process becomes essential for two important reasons. The first directly impacts your ability to get your job done: budgeting. In any organization, public or private, there is always competition for resources, usually money. You need to understand how budgets are formulated and how you can influence the process. This means knowing who the key players are and how they can be influenced. My colleagues in California and I challenged the state’s formula for distributing grant funding by showing a united front and leveraging our relationships with our federal elected officials.

A second major reason for understanding the political process is the ability to influence legislation that can either improve resilience or may have a detrimental effect on public safety. One of our Board of Supervisors intended to improve environmental conditions by eliminating the monthly generator tests performed by many organizations. The expectation was that this would save fuel and reduce harmful emissions. My office ended up working with a lobbyist hired by our local hotels, who were understandably concerned about the impact of not regularly testing generators. Together we were able to educate the supervisor as to why these tests were essential and he withdrew the legislation. Having the consensus between the hotel group and our office was the key to our success.

Influencing local legislation is not the only situation in which you may find yourself. Your jurisdiction will have a process to take an “official” position on state and, in some cases, federal legislation. In my case, this meant appearing before a working group of key executives to explain the reasons for requesting an official position. Once the group agreed and the mayor concurred, the city would instruct our lobbyists in the state and federal capitols as to our position. And before you say, “Hey, that’s not really my job,” it’s part of the Emergency Management Accreditation Program (EMAP) Standard:

3.5.2 The Emergency Management Program has a process for identifying and addressing proposed legislative and regulatory changes.

So how do you deal with politics when you’re not a politician and really don’t want to get involved? Here are the five things I suggest:

1. Accept that it’s part of your job – You may not like it but you need to accept that monitoring the legislative process and intervening as appropriate is an important part of your job. Changes to policy and the allocation of resources frequently will require legislation and you need to be part of that process. You need to be aware of when legislation will affect how you perform your program, whether for good or ill.
2. Learn the process – To influence legislation, you need to know how laws are made and the best time to intervene. The most effective way is to educate legislators while the legislation is being developed and before it is introduced. It is much easier to change a politician’s mind before they have taken a public stand. You can learn the process by reading municipal codes or by consulting the clerk of your legislative body.
3. Build a consensus - My old boss, Mayor Willie L. Brown, Jr. writes in his biography, Basic Brown: My Life and Our Times, “No matter how righteous your cause, you’ve got to do heavy political lifting to secure the consensus you need to get anything done in the actual political arena.” Emergency managers are at a disadvantage as we have a very small constituency. However, we can muster support from other department heads, citizen volunteer groups, the community, and businesses depending on the cause. It is not the size of the constituency that matters as much as how many people show up at a public hearing to support your position. Seek allies wherever you can find them.
4. Understand motivation - Unfortunately, most politicians are looking for short term wins that aid in reelection, so be prepared to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” We were able to get funding for a mitigation program to limit residential hotel fires because we found an ally in a new supervisor who was looking for a cause and was willing to listen to our proposal.
5. Do your homework - Just because your cause is righteous isn’t enough. Be prepared to answer how much your proposal will cost and suggestions for how it will be funded. Conversely, if you’re opposing legislation, have solid reasons why it should be modified or withdrawn such as cost, political consequences, and quantifiable risk.

If you’re thinking, “If I’d wanted to be a politician, I’d have run for office,” you’re right and I’m in total agreement. But if you want to do the best for your community and your program, if you want the resources you need, if you want to avoid bad legislation, then you have no choice but to get involved in the political process.

Emergency Management Solutions - January 2023

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Featured Articles

Strategic Planning

    by Lucien G. Canton

Federal Coordination of All-Hazard Incident Management Teams

    by Timothy Riecker

5 Crisis-Causing Customer Service Mistakes to Avoid

    by Erik Bernstein

Strategic Thinking

When I first became involved in emergency management back in 1989, things were much simpler. Emergency Management was by and large considered a second career and emergency managers were predominantly male with previous careers in other services such as police, fire, and the military. we were tactically and operationally oriented and our focus was almost exclusively on the development of local emergency plans. The emphasis on civil defense planning that had characterized previous decades was being replaced by the concept of all hazards planning and the focus was shifting from strategic national issues such as nuclear war to planning for local disasters.

Things have changed. While the professionalization of emergency management has continued to increase, so has the complexity of the issues with which we now deal. One of the biggest changes that I have seen in emergency management is the shift from purely operational planning for local disasters to the consideration of more large-scale strategic issues. This is the product of our experience with regional catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina. The problem is that consideration of strategic issues requires that we put aside personal feelings in favor of an objective assessment of risks that could affect the people we serve.

Consider the over politicized issue of climate change for example. Despite how we may feel about the causes of climate change and on which side of the political debate we come down on, the fact remains that sea rise is occurring and that storms are becoming both increasingly frequent and more violent. Forecasts for 2023 suggest that it may well be one of the hottest years on record continuing the pattern of record droughts across the southwestern United States and affecting agricultural production. As emergency managers we need to deal in facts, not in political rhetoric and we need to be focused on the potential impacts that are occurring.

Another issue of concern is growing political violence within the United States. In her recent book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them political scientist Barbara Walter traces some 20 years’ worth of research on the issue of civil wars and concludes that the United States may well be close to civil war. She notes that two key indicators of a potential civil war are a 21-point polity scale, with minus 10 being full autocracy and plus 10 being full democracy, and a five-point scale measuring factionalism. On the polity scale the United States went from a + 10 to a +5 after the January 2021 storming of Congress and has since returned to a + 8. Walter notes that civil wars tend to occur when countries become factionalized not based on politics but on other issues such as race and religion and to be initiated by once-dominant groups who are experiencing an erosion of privileges they believe are theirs by right. Her opinion is that the United States is well within the danger zone for potential civil war.

How do we deal with strategic issues of this sort? Our traditional approach has been operational: creating contingency plans based on the military model that we have been using for generations. I suggest instead that we think more in terms of adaptable strategy that considers the risk associated with these issues and determine how we can repurpose what  we’re already doing. Climate change clearly demands a focus on mitigation and long-range community planning, something that emergency managers aren’t particularly adept at. Civil war would most likely be targeted political violence, something for which we’ve already been preparing for with the war on terrorism. Our emphasis should not be on producing new plans but rather considering how we can adapt existing plans to these emerging threats.

Strategic thinking requires that we acknowledge potential threats, identify the risks associated with them, and consider what we would need to mitigate, respond, and recover from those risks. Isn’t this what we have always done? This has always been the basis of all-hazards planning. What’s required is to expand your thinking beyond short-term operational response to long-range strategy.

Emergency Management Solutions - November 2022

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Featured Articles

Conflict Management: A Neglected Skill

    By Lucien Canton

Certificates and Certifications

    By Timothy Reiker

Why It Pays to Educate Your Employees on Crisis Management

    By Erik Bernstein

Conflict Management: A Neglected Skill

One of the most important leadership practices required of an emergency manager is the need to inspire a shared vision. Our principal job is bringing disparate agencies and groups together to achieve a common goal. However, each agency or group has its own set of priorities and operating culture that are sometimes at odds with what we’re trying to achieve. This inevitably leads to conflict. Unfortunately, conflict management is a skill often neglected in emergency management curricula.

Conflict is not inherently bad. Indeed, it is an important part of the planning process. We solve problems by being open to alternative approaches and understanding different perspectives. However, when conflict descends into an us-versus-them situation, it can have dire consequences and lead to a complete stalemate.

In her recent book, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out, journalist Amanda Ripley identifies high conflict as “a conflict that becomes self-perpetuating and all-consuming, in which almost everyone ends up worse off.” Such a conflict is generally binary; that is, it forces participants to choose one side or another and cuts off any consideration of alternative courses of action. In many cases, the original cause of the conflict is subsumed by larger emotional issues.

A key point to keep in mind is that both sides claim the moral high ground. In The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy academic and political commentator Thomas Sowell makes this point, showing how disagreement is viewed not only as wrong but morally reprehensible. In one example, he shows how the War on Poverty of the Johnson administration was conceived at a time when poverty in the United States was declining and against the advice of experts who pointed out that the proposed program would increase poverty. When the program was assessed in later years and the experts were proven right, those that spoke out were pilloried as morally bankrupt for not acknowledging the many people who had been provided financial assistance under the program, even though the goal of the program was never achieved.

Ripley notes that there are many factors that exacerbate high conflict. Some are internal, such as confirmation bias and group identities. Others are external, such as humiliation, corruption, and conflict entrepreneurs who seek to benefit from the crisis. This makes diffusing high conflict particularly difficult. The key seems to be understanding what Ripley calls the “understory”, the issue behind the conflict. This means understanding not just the original cause of the conflict but the reason why that cause was important.

After a series of hotel fires in San Francisco, we pulled together a planning team to address how we could improve our response. We realized quickly that we would also need to consider mitigation and recovery issues rather than focusing solely on response. As part of mitigation, our fire marshal offered to conduct on-site fire prevention classes at each residential hotel. This was opposed by local homeless advocacy groups on the basis that residents would not come to hear the classes. Instead, they proposed that they hire one of the residents on a small stipend to encourage attendance and provide pizza at each class as a draw. The city agencies felt this was a ploy to obtain additional funding for advocacy programs, a belief that I shared. However, with hindsight, I believe the real issue was not the funding, which was minor in terms of the money already being provided to the advocacy groups, but rather community visibility, an issue with which the groups were constantly contending. We did resolve the issue amicably, but had we had this understanding at the time it would have saved us a lot of time and effort.

Understanding the understory requires listening to the other side. This is not just giving the appearance of listening but hearing what is being said and feeding it back to the speaker in a way that lets them know they have been heard. It sounds simple but it is decidedly not. It takes training and practice. As I mentioned earlier, this is an area in which many of us have received little or no training. However, the ability to manage conflict and, particularly in the current political environment, to defuse high conflict is an essential skill for emergency managers and one we should be emphasizing.

Emergency Management Solutions - October 2022

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Featured Articles

Disaster Insurance: A Stacked Deck?

    By Lucien G. Canton

Incident Management Is a Technical Skill

    By Timothy "Tim" Riecker

5 Tips to Help You Prepare for Online Reputation Management

    By Erik Bernstein

 

Disaster Insurance: A Stacked Deck?

Some years ago, my colleague Valerie Lucas did an analysis of data from the Emergency Management Accreditation Program (EMAP) and found that emergency managers performed better in preparedness and response than in mitigation and recovery. This was not altogether surprising since many emergency managers at the time came primarily from tactical or operational backgrounds. The skills developed over a career in various emergency services were easily transferred to preparedness and response. However, mitigation and recovery are strategic in nature and require a more nuanced approach that is very different from that required for operational tasks. As emergency management has evolved, so has the need for emergency managers to be more strategic in their thinking.

This need for strategic thinking demands that emergency managers be more adept at identifying and addressing strategic issues that can affect community restoration, particularly as related to mitigation and recovery. It is only within the last few years that we've come to realize the importance of planning for long term recovery and to recognize the value of the harm reduction achieved through mitigation. As we've become more cognizant of the strategic issues involved, we have begun to realize that our approach to community restoration has serious systemic issues. This is particularly true when dealing with issues related to insurance.

Insurance becomes important when one realizes that most of the funding provided for recovery and reconstruction comes from insurance and not from the government. Following Hurricane Harvey in 2017, for example, insurance accounted for 61 percent of assistance dollars, amounting to $16.2 billion. Of that 45% was provided by the National Flood Insurance Program, with the remaining 55% was provided by various private insurance. However, insurance company practices often create major barriers to community restoration.

In a 2016 documentary on Hurricane Sandy, Frontline made the case that there were significant systemic issues in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP). The documentary found that the federal government did not have data on whether the fees charged by insurance companies for administering the program had any relation to actual administrative costs. Further, the government had no idea what percentage of profit was being earned by the insurance companies and whether those profits were reasonable.

As costs to the NFIP continued to increase following events like Hurricane Sandy in 2012, congress began to pressure insurance companies to reduce costs. As a result, insurance companies began a program to significantly reduce the amount of payout provided to disaster victims. While much of this was accomplished by simply denying claims using a convoluted adjustment process, Frontline found evidence of fraud where reports of damage were altered to deny claims. Where these fraudulent reports were successfully challenged in court, the NFIP reimbursed court costs to the insurance companies but not to the victims.

But fraud isn’t always necessary, given the requirements that insurance companies have put in place for making claims. For example, insurance companies frequently demand itemized lists of building contents before approving a claim. These lists often request information that most homeowners don't have at the best of times, let alone following the destruction of their home and records. This information may include such things as date and place of purchase, initial cost, and current market value. In addition, there is may be a factor for depreciation which further lowers the amount of the claim. In a series of books related to insurance and recovery author Sean M Scott discusses these practices and methods for working with an insurance adjuster. In his presentations, he demonstrates how the contents of the “kitchen junk drawer” or the bathroom cosmetics drawer can have high replacement costs that can never be documented.

One further area of concern related to insurance is the proliferation of insurance fraud by unscrupulous and often unlicensed contractors. This is common after disasters. These contractors will approach homeowners while they are still in a state of shock from the disaster and get them to sign contracts for home repair. In many cases these contractors will convince the homeowner to allow the contractor to bill and receive payment directly from the insurance company. If any work is actually done, it is often shoddy and subpar.

Our concern as emergency managers is that if the system is failing the people we are intending to serve, we need to be advocates for reforming the system. For too long we have ignored strategic issues such as these and focused solely on response related issues. Response lasts a relatively short time compared to community restoration, the goal that is our ultimate end state. A flawed system that prevents us achieving that goal does no one any good. it is time we looked beyond response to consider how we can do the most long-term good for those we serve and that means becoming involved in larger strategic issues such as insurance reform.

Emergency Management Solutions: September 2022

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Featured Articles

Is an Economic Crisis an Emergency Management Issue?

    by Lucien G. Canton

NIMS Change – Information and Communications Technology Branch

    by Timothy "Tim" Riecker

How Much Pain Does It Take Before You Care About Crisis Prevention?

    by Erik Bernstein

Is an Economic Crisis an Emergency Management Issue?

During the last recession, a colleague of mine in a neighboring county proposed that his office become involved in planning for the economic impact of the recession on his community. He received considerable pushback not only from his elected officials but especially from a good part of our local emergency management community. The consensus was that since this did not address disaster response, it was not an emergency management issue.

I received similar pushback when my office became involved in a potential garbage strike in San Francisco. I had been asked to provide maps to the mayor’s staff who were planning for the strike and then invited to help select possible collection sites because of my local knowledge. It soon became evident that the planners were faced with a problem in assessing the sites because of the many agencies involved. I suggested they form multi-agency teams and pointed out that this was something our office had considerable experience in doing. Within a couple of hours, our office had created and staged several such teams using our emergency plan. The pushback again came from emergency managers who felt a garbage strike was not an emergency management issue.

This goes back to an issue we have yet to fully resolve in the emergency management community, “What is emergency management?” Emergency managers of my generation frequently came to the profession as a second career. We tend to be comfortable dealing with disaster response and hierarchical organizations and view our roles as primarily response oriented. This is one of the reasons the introduction of the comprehensive emergency management model with its emphasis on mitigation and recovery planning was a hard sell and still has implementation problems. But emergency management is not static and is continually evolving, so maybe it’s time to recognize that we have responsibilities beyond just responding to a major disaster.

If we are truly committed to all-hazards planning, we need to be cognizant of anything that has the potential to harm the communities we serve. I wrote recently of the need to for emergency managers, particularly those in senior positions, to understand political economics. This becomes even more critical as we enter another economic downturn.

While an economic recession may not in itself seem like an emergency management issue, it increases a community’s vulnerability and anything that increases vulnerability should concern emergency managers. People with limited resources are not able to prepare for disaster by stockpiling emergency supplies nor do they have disposable income to afford insurance or to perform repairs to damaged structures. We can also expect to see an increase in the homeless population as people lose jobs and homes, which will place increased demand on shelter and feeding operations following a disaster. There is also the possibility of increased crime and the potential for civil disturbance.

The impact of a recession goes beyond just increased vulnerability of the local population; it will also have a direct impact on our ability to respond. High unemployment and home foreclosures mean a reduced tax base which will result in budget cuts. When a community is struggling to fund essential services, the logical choice is cut contingency services, such as emergency management planning, training, and exercises.

While emergency managers may have a very limited role in dealing with an economic crisis, we need to at least be aware of the issues and proposed response being formulated by elected officials. More importantly, we need to consider the potential impact of such a crisis on our ability to prepare and respond to disaster and to plan for increased vulnerability and reduced resources. Most of all, we need to acknowledge that if we are truly dedicated to all-hazards planning, anything that has a negative impact on the communities we serve is indeed an “emergency management issue”.