All right.

We will call the work session to order, and I will turn it over to the city manager.

Good morning, Mayor and Council.

Hope everybody had a great MLK day of service yesterday, participating in events all throughout the city and the county over the weekend.

And so today we're happy to be back in front of you with the 1130 work session.

And the topic is emergency public information and crisis communication.

The item is going to be presented by Rand Northam from the communications department.

But Robin Deacle is going to tee it up.

Thank you, manager.

Good morning, Mayor and Council members.

I'm Robin Deacle, the communications director.

When I started interviewing about two years ago with the city, I had all these questions about crisis communications.

What do you know about communicating in crisis?

How can you help us do it better?

Well, when I came on board, one of the first things I did was meet with our emergency management director, Chief Griffin, and we got to work.

And the city follows operationally to respond to crisis, the national incident management system, which is a nice big name, for just a scalable system you can use to respond in crises, whether that is the event that happened at North Hills on Friday or the hurricane in the western part of the state, Helene, and all of the response that happened as a result of that.

The most important thing you can do in those emergency situations is have a single point of contact, which is what the communications department is charged with covering.

And I was very fortunate about a year ago to bring on board Rand Northam, who has overseen creating a lot of policies and procedures and practice to help us do that well.

And I'm going to turn it over to him now.

Thank you.

Thank you, Robin.

And good morning, Madam Mayor, City Council members, Madam Manager, Madam Attorney.

I'm Rand Northam, Communications Department Assistant Director for Public Affairs.

And today I'm going to briefly set the scene about crises and emergencies and how we communicate about them.

We have been working hard to set us up better, including getting communication staff involved earlier in the process for large-scale events.

A lot of that progress is thanks to strong focus on training.

And we'll look ahead to what you can expect next.

First, let's define a few things.

PIOs are first responders.

We are ready to respond when we are called, including nights, weekends, and holidays.

An emergency may come on quickly.

And like Chief Griffin says, it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

It is the city's duty to our residents and community members to be the reliable source for information, especially when it comes to public safety.

Since I started with the city last February, we have held three communication specific trainings, in addition to other trainings and exercises hosted by emergency management and other outside agencies.

We have developed templates for situations we can anticipate so that we are ready to get messaging to the community as quickly as possible.

And we lead with the actions people should take to be safe.

So this is a very basic example of an emergency alert message we may send.

This brief version is an example of a message you might receive on your cell phone, and I'll talk more about that in a moment.

We'll put similar messaging on other channels like social media and our website, where we can also give a few more details.

In 2024, we signed a contract with Julie Parker Communications.

JPC has been in Raleigh twice with two more trainings coming up this year.

These trainings are open to all city departments.

We look at local and national examples of communities that have experienced emergencies and crises, and we discuss how we would respond in those situations.

We cover a wide range of topics and we make sure that there is a local focus during exercises to get as close to real world experience as possible.

And here to hear directly from JPC, here are Julie and Christopher.

We're here to help Raleigh get ready for communicating in a crisis.

Cities will face a crisis.

What we don't know is what exactly will that crisis be.

When the crisis happens and all eyes are on you, that is your time to shine or to sink.

Preparing for that through training is so important because it allows us to put the reps in of communicating with the public when a crisis is occurring, even though we're not sure yet what that future crisis will be.

But it lets us have a plan in place and a process in place and make sure all the team members know what their role is when we're communicating with the public in a crisis.

So we love the ability to come in, to talk through best practices, to do practical exercises, have people put their heads together, different perspectives around the table will bring all sorts of good ideas to fruition.

We don't want to wait until an actual crisis to see if our plans work, see if our operations work.

So we have these tabletop scenarios, which are fixed fictional incidents, and we put our teams through the ropes and we try and break the process because we want those mistakes to happen.

We want if there is a broken part to happen during a practice, and then when the real incident comes, when a real crisis is impacting our community, we're much better prepared to effectively communicate through it.

We create a safe space where it's okay for mistakes to be made.

Because as a group, we talk through that, and we talk how that could be perceived by the public as a misstep.

What our training seeks to do is make you feel confident enough to say, we had a misstep.

This is what we're doing about it.

We want the public to know, and this is how we're gonna work to prevent this from ever happening in the future.