FEMA Reform at a Crossroads: What Local Emergency Managers Need to Know

Speaker A: And we look at things like California, where there is supposed to be a regulatory process for approving extension of building into pristine areas of the state. But everything has told us that there's been an increase in construction and value at risk in the wildland urban interface because of new construction. And so we're not really solving the problem. We're making the problem worse. And of course, behind that is a very difficult conundrum. I guess some would say it's not a conundrum because we know private property and individual rights is going to overtake some of those concerns. And governments of all stripes have been very reluctant to impinge on that. In a world filled with chaos and

Speaker B: a myriad of risks, there is opportunity. You're listening to Riding the Wave Project

Speaker A: Management for Emergency Managers, where we discuss how we adapt and rise above those rolling waves of hazards and threats we

Speaker B: face and rise to the top. And now your host, the president of

Speaker A: Pinnacle Performance management, Andrew Boyarsky.

Speaker B: Dr. Charles Jennings is a highly accomplished expert in emergency response, fire protection and urban planning with, with extensive academic and practical experience, what we call a pracademic. He's consulted actively across the United States and Canada. He holds a PhD in City Regional Planning from Cornell University, complemented by advanced degrees in fire protection. Dr. Jennings has served in prominent roles, including director of the Christian Ragenhart center for Emergency Response Studies and associate professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Should also mention that Charles is a, uh, very close colleague. Uh, we've worked together over a number of years in different parts of the City University of New York, despite the attempts to try to keep us separate. So, Charles, I want to thank you very much for joining the podcast.

Speaker A: Well, thank you, Andrew. It's great to be here. And I, uh, guess I was avoided as long as I can. So, uh, I'm happy to, happy, uh, to be here today to talk about FEMA and emergency management generally.

Speaker B: Yeah. I should also mention, just before I forget as well, that, uh, you were the founder of the emergency management program at John Jay College, which is one of the prominent programs in the United States.

Speaker A: Yes, thank you for that. In US News, of course, they don't properly evaluate emergency management degree programs, but they have a broader rating that encompasses emergency management, and we cracked the top 10 on the most recent rankings. So that's, uh, very gratifying.

Speaker B: Excellent. Well, I know I have taught the program. Uh, I have been a hiatus thanks to your willingness to let me finish my book. So I appreciated that. As always, a longer bio is on. You'll find at the podcast site, I want to kick things off with the new FEMA report. Emergency management in America has always lived at the intersection of politics and somewhat of ah, catastrophic events shaped, shaped less, I would say, by careful planning than by disasters. Right. We always sort of learn from the late last disaster, last battle that we fought and then we make improvements. Today again, FEMA is at that crossroads and a sweeping new reform, uh, blueprint has been put out that calls for a 50%, uh, workforce reduction, a fundamental shift of responsibility to the states, territories, tribal governments and localities. Basically a simplified approach to individual assistance and a parametric funding model that promises speed but raises some hard question about equity. To make sense of this moment, of what's going on and what it means, uh, historically, I'm going to ask some, some hard questions on this. Is this genuine uh, reform or just another pendulum swing given what's going on? So I guess the first question on that in that moment is, you know, FEMA has reformed before. Usually again it's in the aftermath of disaster, not in anticipation of. So looking at the full arc of the federal emergency management history, I'm not calling you a historian, but certainly you have studied this quite at length. Are these kinds of wholesale structural reforms ever driven by foresight? Or are we just destined to watch these recommendations gather dust until we have the next, let's say Hurricane Katrina that forces us to sort of retrench and go back to what we were doing before.

Speaker A: That's a great question. I think the, to understand the current moment in emergency management and we mustn't have, you know, to use a colloquialism, main character syndrome. Nobody cares about emergency management. Okay, Unless you live maybe in California, uh, or you've had a hurricane or disaster within the last year or two, we're invisible. Okay? And people think, I mean people think, you know, I do a lot of work right, in fire and ems, and my God, they think they're the center of the universe. But nobody's thinking about us. So we are a small piece of a very large, uh, set of, uh, for lack of a better term, reforms that are been unleashed or in process on the federal bureaucracy. And that is separate and apart from the political, uh, I would say the purely political or legislative side of the House, no pun intended. And there is a very strong ideological component to the reforms generally in the federal government. And so to try to extract emergency management from that, or to try to say that that's not relevant, then we are somehow a, ah, bubble, uh, untouched by all these other forces. I think is a mistake. Uh, as much as we in the professional societies, uh, and this is the same in many other professions, there's a push to not engage with some of those things because they're deemed as either being partisan or political. And we are neutral professionals, which I believe that emergency managers, um, should, uh, be technocratic, should not be clearly identifiable with a particular political mindset. Having said that, of course we live in political systems and we're appointed by political actors. So to get back to your question, I think the. Well, there's two components here. One is the female, and I'm blanking now. It was a task force or what was the name of the, uh, group that. But anyway, the internal advisory. Yeah, the Advisory Council report, which I've reviewed. And then parallel to that, although certainly not keeping up with it in terms of attention within the industry, is the legislation, legislative proposals in Congress, and notably the Fixing Emergency Management for Americans act and those kinds of initiatives. Uh, and so I think both have to be looked at. The key thing, I think, to understand is that the FEMA Review Council report, uh, if you look at it and look to some people's mindset, I have a PhD in City and regional planning. Uh, I teach in a program in public administration. Uh, and so obviously, if I have a bias, it's a bias toward believing that government can work and that public policy is a legitimate discipline and through studying policy and its implementation, we can improve and make better policies to get better results. Now, if you don't believe in any of those things, and you think the government is essentially a drain on resources, evil, and basically a bastion of slackers, uh, ideologues who don't agree with your ideology, then you're going to take a different look. And so I think the Review Council report really glossed over or didn't really engage at the policy level nearly as much as it could have in terms of making really concrete proposals for reforming the legislative and regulatory framework that governs disaster aid and FEMA programs generally. So that was kind of a long after that. I'm not even sure I answered the

Speaker B: question, but, uh, I think that you did. And I want to touch upon that, a build on that, and that's to get to the issue around staffing. The proposal calls for cutting FEMA's workforce by roughly half. Now, I'm not sure exactly, you know, did not pinpoint exactly where those cuts in staff might come from. But what does from your point of view, the historical record, tell us about the relationship between federal staffing levels? You Know, and we're not just talking about fema.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: There's also other federal uh, agencies that, that, that have a role that may not, you know, as a national weather service certainly has an impact. Right. As far as weather forecast, forest service,

Speaker A: all kinds of things going on. Yeah. So I, you know, uh, well, go ahead, I'll let you.

Speaker B: I'm sorry. So you, I think you're beginning to answer the question, which is what's it tell us about those staffing levels and what's the risk calculus here? That for the local emergency manager or for county or state emergency manager that they need to think about?

Speaker A: Okay, so the risk calculus. Well, the risk calculus at the federal level there is no risk calculus. Okay. So this is not a, I don't think, ah, by any means an objective, impartial exercise. So you can sweep that off the table for the state and locals. Uh, essentially that risk calculus is the federal government pushing stuff from their end of the table over onto yours. And some of that's going to fall off onto the floor, uh, and you're going to be left picking it up. And we've seen across other agencies, FEMA is very much, their headcount is very much related to service delivery. Right. And so, um, you know, it's not unlike the Veterans Administration or people doing food safety inspections. You know, if you cut the number of inspectors in half, you're going to have less inspections. Now are there policy ways to get around that? Yes. Are they effective? Maybe not. Uh, have they been evaluated rigorously? No, but I think, uh, in some sense it's a hazardous time because a lot of these responsibilities. Right now you're living in a gray area where FEMA seems to be withdrawing right or wrong with a legal basis or not. I won't say that it's illegal, but uh, regulatory expectations that are there. And then of course we have the public who assesses the efficacy of emergency management efforts and their calculus is not going to change. And of course they don't necessarily have a good understanding of how the disaster system works. And even as a college level instructor in emergency management, the first thing you do in our 101 or our introductory class is explain to people that FEMA is not the primary agency for dealing with disasters and that they only exist at the beck and call of state governments. And they start local, they build up and they end local. And so the public very much is, I think in many ways misinformed and it's difficult to get through that. And of course the press who works on uh, These issues often gets it wrong. Um, and so it's difficult. So to put it in stark terms, I would say expectations haven't changed. If anything, expectations may continue to increase a little bit and uh, guidance, resources, et cetera, are really kind of uncertain right now in terms of what's going to be available. And certainly if they go through with a 50% reduction in staff, that's going to have impacts on FEMA's ability to, uh, provide service and support to, uh, state and locals, notwithstanding bureaucratic actions within fema, like requiring the FEMA administrator to sign off on contracts of a certain size, which is just a bureaucratic paralysis technique and it's been ineffective and has had negative consequences already. I think we've been fortunate, uh, from a federal standpoint that we haven't had, you know, we haven't had our difficult hurricane season. And so a lot of these impacts we haven't been able to fully explore.

Speaker B: So one of the striking claims in this report is that there's a disaster industrial complex that's grown up around federal disaster funding contractors, consultants. Dare I say that we have actually been a part of that. Yes. And uh, other intermediaries who profit from the complexity of both the preparedness and mitigation side of things. And then, you know, right of boom, so to speak. I'm sorry if I'm using parlance, but you know, left a boom before, uh, right of boom after an incident happens with the recovery efforts and all the funding and support that comes with individual assistance and public assistance, et cetera. Is that just, is that a new phenomenon or really. I mean, emergency management has always struggled with this dynamic and what's changed, what would actually be required to dismantle it ultimately, it seems to me like it's a paradox if you're not, I mean, in other words, if the federal government's retreating in terms of its funding and its capacity, there's going to be a natural gravitation towards that, if I'm not mistaken.

Speaker A: Uh, that's. It's a great question. Um, I think, and I can't say because there's always been private contractors who were very instrumental or crucial to FEMA's mission. Right. I think where it has, in my observation, gotten more so is this people who are working directly with, instead of not working supporting fema, they're now supporting state and locals, basically dealing with fema. And yes, so I think that is a problem. Uh, I'm not anti contractor and as you just point out, we both worked as contractors in the different circumstances, but you're making. Well there's twofold. One is they're making up for a lack of capacity within state and local government. And the second is that the interaction with fema, ah, across the regulatory regime through which they implement their programs is so complex that a normal person can't deal with it, that just doesn't know it. And the sums of money are just staggering compared to most agencies. Normal kind of throughput and their ability to oversee uh, money coming in and deliverables going out. So what I would suggest, and it wasn't part of the question, but again as a professor I think that there's a real role for the uh, academic community in particular emergency management programs to be a source of expertise and kind of uh, peak, uh, excess capacity building for emergency management organizations which would benefit the emergency management programs. And the other benefit, the huge benefit is you are basically getting those skills and capabilities into the future emergency management workforce. Uh, which is one of the big issues. As somebody who's trying to place students in entry level emergency management jobs, we know it's like oh well if you're in New York City, what's the best way to get a job in emergency management? It's have a pension from the fire department or police department and then somewhere down the line is yeah, getting a master's degree in emergency management that might help also. But you know we, we need to think about that because you know we did work on uh, a large project, federally funded that I thought was very innovative, uh, very good. And when you bring in these consulting firms, they are national in scope and their talent is national. And so the minute that project ends, all that uh, knowledge and expertise gets on the next flight out and they're gone and they're no longer available, they're no longer making a contribution to the day to day kind of climate of preparedness and capabilities in that community. And so I see more uh, closer linkage with academic programs as really a solution, solves a lot of problems, uh, in terms of its strengthens the academic programs it gives, it creates uh, uh, a stream of qualified people that can go directly into jobs. Um, and it also keeps that general expertise in the area because once you do that work, and the beauty of academia is that to the degree faculty are involved as they should be, if you can get know, willing faculty, they don't go anywhere. Right. So the expertise that we built up from years of working with local governments, you know, or state governments, you know, well where could we find that expertise? Yeah, well right in the same office they've been in for the last 15 years. Right, uh, that's there, that doesn't go away. So I think that's, that can be an important, maybe not a way to replace it but I think people being more intentional about engaging these consultants and then I think the level of government at which these decisions get made, I think things local governments, some are so small, some have such limited capacity that they're never going to have the ability to do this without somebody else coming in to do it. Should it be done at the state level? Should it be regionalized? Should there be uh, like an emac and we have floating the northeast or the mid Atlantic version of uh, a fill in the blank disaster consultancy which is all government employees who kind of come together when necessary and they get deployed and they do their things and they fill this stuff out. So those are all experimental ideas. I think they've got some potential. But of course pulling the rug out on a bureaucratic reform is not the way to launch those kinds of initiatives. So uh, you know, so we'll see.

Speaker B: I want to change points of view on this recommendation, this report, this, I guess it was originally called FEMA 2.0 but there's a part of it cites a uh, move to a formula based parametric payouts for individual assistance that promises speed but with any type of formulas uh, you know they have winners and losers and, and historically when federal assistance has shifted to more of a standard model, you know there it has unintended consequences. So what's happened to communities and populations who don't fit nice and neatly into the formulas? Is there a way to get better efficiency gains without reproducing potential equity failures? Or basically what uh, we would might consider unfair treatment that we've seen before?

Speaker A: No is the short answer. I mean I think if you look at the Review Council report there's a lot of tap dancing on the parametric triggers and all that stuff. And then they say oh well we'll kind of work with state and territorial and tribal entities to work out all the bugs. But don't worry, this is what we're going to do. You can get if you had full fulsome participation from a broad spectrum of uh, state and local, tribal and territorial entities sitting down and looking at that, the first thing I think it would be very difficult challenge to get them to agree on something that wouldn't be some kind of mealy mouthed generalities. And the second is um, well that's probably the, it's going to be tough to do. And so the other Thing is that, you know, there's two. The other cross cutting, or not cross cutting, but overriding issues with federal disaster aid going back to its origins. But if we look back at, for example at uh, Hurricane Katrina and the federal disaster rate that went out, or we look at more recently the COVID Inflation Reduction act, the direct subsidies to households, which I don't know how else that's disaster legislation, um, at the time of the event, FEMA gets pilloried for being slow. And then a couple months after when things start to calm down, then FEMA gets pilloried for enabling fraud. And so some of that is just the nature of the political system. But I think we need to be very careful about falling into those traps because the same people who today are talking about bureaucratic efficiency will be talking about fraud after the next disaster. And so the parametric as it's put in that document, which I think is pretty breathtaking, is that we don't think disaster aid should be conditioned on actual losses, which to me is kind of staggering from a kind uh, of fiscal accountability standpoint. And so you have the, depending on how those triggers are set up, if a community, two communities get hit with the same event, very similar event, depends on the level of preparedness and you know, the resilience and the building stock and all that stuff. And so to say, well, community A is going to get the same as community B seems that at the outset to be problematic. Ah, now having said that, should there be, uh, this is where I talk about going into the details of the regulation and how things are implemented. And the legislative backstop for that is, you know, should we roll that out in terms of individual assistance or should it be, you know, you know, how can we do it? But I think it's, I don't think it'll ever be implemented the way it's been set out. Uh, I think it's uh, an insurmountable uh, task to get there. But it's an interesting policy goal and certainly anything that ideologically the idea is, well, if you get rid of bureaucracy, uh, that's a, that's a win and of itself and we should be able to know, use these models to, to do it. Uh, so, uh, I, I think there's a lot of, I think implementation is going to be very challenging.

Speaker B: So moving it to, we're going to, moving it to from let's say recovery back to the left of boom side and mitigation, um, funding and then that sort of area. So the hazard mitigation program has been Chronically slow, sometimes taking years to move money to projects that prevent potential disaster or making the disaster even worse. The reform process to fix that is supposed to, you know, address that need. But the question worth asking as part of this is historically, why has mitigation funding always been slow? And is it a bureaucratic structure, the political incentives or something more fundamental that does this to the reform to actually is part of that root cause? As to why it's slow and cumbersome,

Speaker A: I mean, I think, you know, the regulatory regime around the program is pretty extensive and there's a host of, you know, environmental and procedural and fiscal issues that get swept up in it. The other problem is that it's somewhat, if you're talking about pre disaster, uh, it's somewhat elective. And so if a local government the decides they want to do these things, then that's out there. If a local government doesn't, then they don't. And that can be not always directly related to the magnitude of the risk that those different communities might face. Uh, that is to say, and I see this in consulting all the time, I get hired by clients who are probably in the top 25% of the industry because they want to do better. But clients in the bottom 25% either have no interest in it or don't have the resources to engage a consultant to come in to look at a problem. And so the glaring problems kind of keep rolling along and we end up doing, uh, interventions into places that maybe aren't the worst off by a large measure, uh, in terms of their preparedness, uh, you know, in terms of, I'm not a real expert in the hazard mitigation grant program. Uh, and there are people who are so, you know, I think the big issue there is from my perspective, we have now, which we didn't have 10 years ago even, or uh, we now have national, very good national level data on the built environment, on hazards, on vulnerability. And so I don't know that this shouldn't be an exercise that devolves down to the state. And there is a quote unquote, objective assessment of, you know, where's the worst spot? Looking across the portfolio of credible disasters that we have and why aren't we just identifying those from on high and then going in and saying, hey, you've been identified as, you know, you're number one, you're the worst for flood risk, you know, in the state. Congratulations. Uh, now here's your, you know, your planner and your engineer and you're going to, we're going to provide Staff support. But you're going to have to do some of this stuff to get around that. And some uh, of that violates. Well, it doesn't really violate federalism because, you know, at the state level, states kind of could trample all over cities. Right. They're superior legally. At the federal level there is the tension between federal and state and there actually is, you know, something there. But at the state level, the state can kind of trample on localities and they can force them to do things.

Speaker B: Can I push back on that?

Speaker A: Sure.

Speaker B: I think every state is a little bit different. Well, yes, they treat each locality county government. Some, uh, states don't have a county government like in Connecticut, for example. And then you have states like Delaware or Rhode island that do have county governments and probably have more government than they really care to have in some cases. And certainly here in my home state of New Jersey, uh, we do not have any shortage of governments and government control. But the, it's interesting as far as the, there is actually much more heavy state intervention and regulation within New Jersey as comparison with, you know, a, uh, state like Connecticut, that Connecticut government is a little bit weaker when it comes to localities in terms of what they do. So anyway, I, we may have a little bit of a differing opinion.

Speaker A: Well, I'm, I, I, yes, I, I, I agree that certainly, you know, all states are not equal. But that is by and large, I mean some, you know, I guess I'd have to look constitutionally across the different states to see uh, if some of that. But in terms of legislative oversight, you know, that's certainly there. And in terms of, uh, and maybe, you know, I'm backpedaling a little from my initial formulation, but the name and shame, you know, is still useful. Right. So the state can still put out, you know, here's our list of the worst 50 issues facing the state and here's money we would make available to fix them if you're local, but your local government said they don't want to do it, so we're going on to someplace else. And I think, uh, that's always a way that could work. And I think that is important because we have this analytic capacity. And the other piece is that, you know, as much as we, you know, the Constitution and the way our government's organized in the US Was not taken in, you know, it was obviously before we were nearly as interconnected, uh, economically as we are now. And so impacts in one community ripple across others. And so there is a, ah, legitimate, you know, you can say, well, you know, this is, we see this in the examples of a lot of, you know, people who look at, uh, I mean, I was. Mabel Butler was an elected official in Orange County, Florida. Um, talked about the issue of externalities. And she was from the relatively less prosperous part of Orange county. And she used the analogy, which is colorful, but that sticks with you is you know, mosquitoes may breed in my district, but they bite asses all over the county. Meaning that we can't just sit back and let something fester because it's going to. It's in the common interest to make sure that these uh, problems get addressed. And so I think that's a potential different avenue of looking at this that we didn't have open to us not that long ago in terms of really having very reliable, granular, really good data to enable us to really understand what some of the impacts might be, um, of events from a holistic across a large swath of territory.

Speaker B: So building on that beautiful statement that you just made, uh, of uh, mosquitoes and I'll paraphrase using the Yiddish term tukasis, to larger picture in terms of migration, let's say, whether you want to recognize it or not, climate change and uh, extreme weather hazards and how they're impacting where people are moving to. Right. Uh, we saw that with Katrina. We're looking at right now, we're a good 21 years out from that. And you know, the city of New Orleans has not recovered and much of that population migrated elsewhere, many of them to Houston, many with them to other areas of the country, etc. So that reconstitution, it affects ratables within those tax, uh, and that tax area. And I had this conversation with someone locally and, and I've actually had this conversation with someone out in California when I was out there for a conference. Uh, my point being is, and then this gets to back to the state issue, which state does have some have control over insurance regulations. So as far as insurance impacts and what they'll cover in certain parts of the, of the state, California is grappling with that as far as wildfire is concerned. Florida state, like Florida is dealing with it when it comes to uh, hurricane event, flooding, et cetera, those sorts of things. So ultimately, but I think to the point here is nationally we're grappling with this and as whether it's something happening in another part of the country, it will impact us nationally as a country because, you know, we have to deal with those changes in demographics in certain parts of the country. As an example, folks Moving from California to Colorado changes Colorado, uh, and puts more strain on those resources, water resources, roads, infrastructure, et cetera, et cetera. I know that's sort of a broad statement, if you will, but as far as those implications with that, um, what's your sense as far as how we're. Are we grappling with it, are we dealing with it or are we just dealing with. Okay, we're just dealing with the fallout as it comes rather than sort of planning that migration and thinking through that.

Speaker A: No, I don't think we're. I don't think we're planning it. There's people, there's elements, you know, within the federal government. Uh, I mean they're, I think, slowly being crushed. But there are elements that look at these questions, right? We have a whole position that, you know, climate change doesn't exist, you know, which of course the insurance industry and industry and private industry all believe in and act on. But we pretend it doesn't exist for a federal policy standpoint. But the. Well, I don't know. So, yes, uh, we're ignoring it. Is it going to bite us in the tuchus down the line? Absolutely. It's going to have, I think, huge consequences. If we look at just things like Florida, uh, and the impact of the property insurance premiums. Um, uh, I think there's, you know, uh, there's a lot there to be concerned with in terms of long term sustainability. You know, I look at, I get a lot of stuff on high rise building construction and new high rises and Miami is booming for tall building construction.

Speaker B: Y.

Speaker A: It's like, okay, how's this movie going to end for Miami? And so, you know, there's some irrationality, but that I think is the fundamental, one of the fundamental issues. Uh, and it's even called out in the FEMA council report, uh, this whole issue of land use regulation. Well, land use regulation in our system, the federal government doesn't have any, you know, basically no control over local land use laws, local governments or federal, you know, state governments. Some states are pretty much hands off, some locals are hands off. Uh, and of course up against that is you have the notion of private property. And what is it taking, you know, in terms of if I regulate this land and say, well, you can no longer build an apartment complex on this plot, now it's lost value and so now I can go to court and get compensated for that. And we look at things like California, where there is supposed to be a regulatory process for approving extension of building into pristine areas of the state. But Everything has told us that there's been an increase in construction and value at risk in the wildland urban interface because of new construction. And so we're not really solving the problem, we're making the problem worse. And of course behind that is a very difficult conundrum. I guess some would say it's not a conundrum because we know private property and individual rights is going to overtake some of those concerns and governments of all stripes have been very reluctant to impinge on that. But I think that's increasingly what we need to consider. Uh, and I think the other piece is that we have urban policy in the United States, which is not to say it's a conscious urban policy. I would say at this point we may have an anti urban policy, but the reality is that we, we have. Our land use decisions across the United States have been very far from rational, certainly very, very, very far from optimal. And if we look at things just like providing public services and uh, supporting infrastructure the way we do development is absolutely, it's terrible. It's the exact opposite of what we should be doing. And then if you inject race into that then all bets are off. And again now I'm crossing into the realm of forbidden discussions at the federal level.

Speaker B: Keep going, keep going.

Speaker A: It's. If we can, we can pretend that uh, none of this has to do with race and everything is you know, uh, all you know, impartial economic market decisions. No it's not. And we see the distortions that causes. Right. I mean I live in a city with kind of uh, middling to poor public transit network and it's like well why is that? It's all because people the same age old stuff of essentially fears about the other coming into my community that basically kept uh, the system from, from growing in a, in a, in a healthy way. And as a consequence there's these, all these downstream impacts not just for people in a day to day system standpoint, but then how are they going to move around not just to get the jobs, but how can we move people in the event of a natural or some other kind of an emergency. Right. How do we get people out of one area and into another? Right. And so we are all living on top of that collage, uh, or assemblage of biases and policy and mistakes and good things, bad things and uh, indifference, uh, which gets us to where we are today.

Speaker B: I want to bring a conversation back to the emergency manager who's listening to this conversation. Someone who's managing. Let's uh, Say a county or a regional program, or even in a small town that's planning for the next fiscal year. What's your honest advice?

Speaker A: Well, I think the practice of emergency management continues to be increasingly important in spite of this whatever sideshow that's going on at the national level. And so it's not going to go away. Uh, we still need emergency management education. We still need emergency managers. Are there going to be as many jobs in the field? Probably, maybe not. But I think in the long term, as we move toward these goals, assuming they even hold, I mean, this may, this may be just a fever that breaks, and there may be no meaningful legislative reform. And this, like so many other initiatives, uh, is just going to basically be forgotten and things will just kind of go on as they have. But the thing I would say is you have to know the risks your community faces, uh, you know, the relationships that you need to make. If you aren't empowered to make those relationships and you're not in a community where you get that support, then you really need to think about going somewhere where you do, because otherwise you're just a placeholder and you're going to be left holding the bag when something happens. And you look at some of the failures that we see in the press, ah, and I'm not going to enumerate any of them, but you look at what's going on in the background of that, and in many cases it's like, well, this is a totally dysfunctional bureaucratic organization. Either they're too small or they're isolated. They don't have any power, they don't have any headcount, they don't have any authority. How do we expect them to be successful on those things? On the positive side, you're kind of the master of your domain as a state and local, and so you have the ability to fix it or at least make those things available. And I think most, you know, local governments and state governments, you can make the argument people want to do the right thing. And so, you know, get, get the support from partner agencies, build those relationships. And unfortunately, you're left with the burden, particularly now with. Because there's not much at the federal level, clear information of having to educate your elected officials. But I still go to communities where, you know, I'll ask them like, okay, you're the emergency manager. Well, what's the last time, you know, do your, uh, elected officials have training in nims? And they're like, no, it's like, okay, how, uh, about your DPW director? No, it's like, okay, uh, you know, but that. Not to turn the question, I know we're wrapping up on time, but this, the part of. This is the fault of the Fed. So if we can beat up the Fed some more is, remember post 9 11, right. And we're going to roll out NIMS and we're going to reclaim, require the NIMS cast, and everybody's going to be compliant. Everybody's going to have to go through the training is 100, 200. Everybody's got to know those. We're going to have exercises. Some places have done it, and a lot of places it's just fallen off. And the federal government has never stepped in because they're deathly afraid to sit in judgment on anybody, in part because the local elected official is going to come down on them with both feet. You know, how dare you tell my beautiful emergency management director, my sheriff or my fire chief that they're bad because they didn't do this training. And then they'll turn around and if it's an incident halfway across the country, they'll sit there and they'll bemoan the lack of training and blah, blah, blah. And we need to put this in regulation. I mean, you just look at the football in the global sense, that is flood insurance. You know, in the United States, I mean, it's a, it's talk about it. It's a yo, yo, right? Yep. You know, we're going to reform it. We're going to. They're going to. People are going to have to pay their own way. And then it's like, oh, my God, those market signals are unpalatable. And so. Okay, well, let's backpedal. So we're all for Louisiana paying their fair share for flood insurance premiums, but not in Rockaway, not my constituents, because these are, you know, that's no fault of their own that we built this on a land that's subject to flooding. So local emergency managers, to try to wrap it back into your question, is that you're left holding all this. And it's a very complex, uh, dynamic. But you are uniquely empowered to be able to understand where the vulnerabilities are and to act on those, to have the relationships and don't lose sight of the basics. Right. We've had events where. Flooding events which won't get into the particulars, but, well, gee, we never got a warning from the weather service, you know, or we got a warning and we never communicated. Do you have sheriff's deputies out on the road? You know, how hard is it to park next to the creek and gee, the water's rising. Let me get on the radio. Something's wrong here. You know those old school techniques. I think a lot of agencies are failing to leverage the resources of the community that they have. Right. Uh, and I think if you're a fire chief, you're a police chief or a sheriff, you know, you're part of the system. And local emergency managers need to leverage that. They need to have a close relationship with those boots on the ground in order to accomplish their mission. And uh, then when they don't, I think that's where we see failures.

Speaker B: Well, Charles, I know that we could probably go on for quite some time and I'm glad that we finally had the opportunity to have you on the podcast. Uh, you've been hard to get on the podcast. I appreciate that.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's been a, it's been a busy time. But uh, but I'm glad and just uh, thank you for the opportunity and, and I'm certainly as a, I'm a professor emeritus and so I'm out there. You can find me and uh, you can get my email and uh, you know, I'm happy to, to talk with anybody about these kinds of issues.

Speaker B: Thank you. And so I will post Charles contact information and some links to what Charles has spoken about. Dr. Charles Jennings, uh, as I can say proudly, is a colleague of mine and someone I've worked very closely with, uh, is an expert in emergency, uh, response, fire protection and urban planning with extensive academic and practical experience. Uh, and he's also a consultant. So I want to thank you again, Charles for coming on.

Speaker A: Thanks Andrew. It's been great.

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Speaker A: You've been listening to Riding the Wave

Speaker B: hosted by Andrew Boyarski, president of uh,

Speaker A: Pinnacle Performance Management and clinical associate professional

Speaker B: professor in emergency and Project management at

Speaker A: NYU and John Jay College.