Note on date: The transcript of the meeting indicates the meeting was held on Wednesday, October 1, 2025, at 4 p.m. However, per instruction, the date provided for this summary is October 3, 2025.
Meeting type: Special meeting warned at a special time. Present: Board members Liz (presiding), John, Isaac, Oscar, Amanda, Peter, and others. Chief Simons (Fire Chief and Emergency Management Director) presented.
Okay. Let's call the Brattleboro Select Board meeting of Wednesday, October 1st, 2025 to order. This is a special meeting at a special time, 4 p.m. And the physical location for this meeting is the select board meeting room at the municipal center. But many of us are joining from Zoom. And the public is welcome to do so as well. So this is a special meeting. John, has it been properly warned? Yes, it was properly warned. Thank you. And is there anyone either in the room or on Zoom who would like to participate? Zoom, uh Seth, is there anyone? Um seeing none. Very good. Then we will begin our regular business, which is the approval of the emergency management plan. So John, would you like to introduce uh Jay and we'll begin? Yep. Um thank you, Liz. So uh Chief Simons uh serves not only as our fire chief but also as our emergent emergency management director. And in that capacity, he's put together this uh local emergency management plan and he will explain why we do this and what it's for and um and go through some of the components and then uh if you have any questions, we're happy to answer them. That's wonderful, Jay. Welcome. Thank you. And thank you, everybody, for having this special meeting. Uh, as John says, I I put together the emergency management plan. This this plan is vital. Uh this plan is vital not only for our organization, our response posture, but also it you know allows us to get FEMA funding and state funding should we have an emergency in Brattleboro. Um just to provide some kind of clarification on this document. This is what's called a base document. So this document is intended to be short and concise and not speak to specific emergencies. As we build up this program, we'll build out incident response plans. And the idea behind those is you know, those are hazard specific. So our we might have an incident response plan for flooding. We might have an incident response plan for wildfires. And why those are specific plans is they sit on the shelf, and when that happens, we pull that specific plan off the shelf. And that just keeps everything organized. So rather than having a document with incident response plans in it that's like a thousand pages long, you have hazard-specific incident plans with a base document that just contains the vital information. Um, base document is we have an emergency, we need a resource. We pull this document out, we flip to our resources page, and we call that resource. Uh, if we're concerned about uh some vulnerable uh people in the town, who are those groups of vulnerable people that's contained in this document? Uh who sits on the emergency management team. Should we activate an emergency operations center? That's also contained in this document. Um this document will be most of this information comes from our old emergency management plan uh that was approved in 2024. A lot of this is carried over with that, and then some new information from some of the stakeholders that I've met with uh since my time here. Uh so some of the things are new and fresh, and I went through and updated all the names and stuff. So that's the document uh for your approval. Great. Um I'll open it up to the board if any board members have questions. Thank you.