This is the March

23rd Red Wing City Council workshop.

Our first item, I'm gonna first just say time frame wise, um, again, I know we go till about 6.15, 620 if we can, but especially on our on our A option emergency um presentation, maybe again if you can stick within that 20 to 25 minutes of a presentation, because I know there'll probably be some questions so that we can get on to our next item too.

But I will hand it over to Chief Warner.

Sorry,

I should have started walking sooner.

Good

evening, good evening, counsel.

We're here tonight in a workshop to be able to provide an education on emergency declaration.

The presenter is Greg Hayes, and he'll be there'll be time for questions afterwards.

And also, if you need assistant chief Nelson is going to be here again, he's the city's emergency manager, so he'll be walking through the process.

So that then we can hand it over to public works.

So, Greg.

All right, thank you.

And Chief Nelson and I did talk.

If I get to that 20 minutes, he's just gonna walk me right out the door.

So promise to keep you uh right on

time.

With uh with what was in your packet, uh, the description of your packet and what we're present in front of you, just it's a very quick overview of emergency management, the process, and really the why.

Why would the why does the city uh have an emergency operations plan?

Why what is this emergency operations, emergency management stuff, and why is it important to me?

And and I'll leave some time, I'll make sure to keep keep uh before the 20 minutes.

So if you have questions, you can certainly grill me with the questions at the

end here.

And

so with that, emergency management.

It's different than in my world of 30 plus years and fire EMS law enforcement, all those other things.

Well, we're on the street, we're we're uh driving somewhere in fire trucks, ambulances, squad cars.

Emergency management is a function of getting those groups together, bringing policy members together, bringing a command group together, and bringing a coordination group together, those three groups to help respond and recover from a given disaster.

In our world today, we think we call it all hazards, so it can be a tornado, a fire, or a flood, it can be things that we saw on TV today, which went into which at LaGuardia uh International Airport to really anything to the parade.

And so emergency management as defined by FEMA is just really a framework, and it operates inside of a emergency operations plan, which the city has.

And so with that, within the state of Minnesota, where all of this is anchored is underneath chapter 12.

Now

I'm not a state agency, you know, employee.

I'm not the director of uh homeland security emergency management for the state.

I'm just a person that's been doing emergency management for a long time, and I work with a work in inside the metro area with a multi-jurisdictional group between all of the uh all of the counties and the city of Minneapolis, and we do emergency management.

I've also helped throughout my years with that emergency management function.

And so I for me doing this professionally, it always anchors us back to chapter 12.

Great thing it outlines emergency management.

The the areas of improvement, it is gray language if you look at it from a legal perspective, which is we want to know from a policy group is what exactly do I need to be doing?

What are those functions?

And when the disaster comes to town, how is it that I'm gonna how is it that I'm gonna get help?

And that help many times is financial assistance.

And there's where it gets gray, as we that's chapter 12 outlines the process, but does not outline exactly what are those fundamental things, how how is it that we have to navigate through it?

So that's where our our cities and county emergency manager will walk us through there.

But chapter 12 outlines that cities, cities uh can have an emergency management program, much like what you have here in Red Wing.

It requires that counties do, and it requires a program at the state because FEMA requires a program.

What is a program?

It is having emergency managers doing fundamental things, having a uh emergency operations plan.

Cities have all of the power and authority underneath chapter 12 that counties do.

Um it's we just have to know how is it that we escalate the system?

And so one of the bless you, one of the uh big pieces is our program within a city with any city within the state of Minnesota is founded the foundation in his appointment, it comes underneath the mayor, and the mayor appoints an emergency manager, and how all that delegation goes is we our mayor appoints typically a police chief or a fire chief, and from there they retain the emergency management function, and typically have a deputy chief or whatever the vernacular is in their leadership that does does the other parts of those emergency management functions.

So that emergency manager part.

Their role is to ensure that we have plans, coordinate and make sure that we have we're talking all the way up the chain, meaning all the way through the state, and and to our partners with inside of the city of Red Wing, who are those school district, business, civic groups to the tribe, and and and how is it that we're going to respond and recover from the tornado, the flood, the fire, whatever might be that disaster of the day.

The biggest piece that you to walk away if you walk away with nothing, um, walk away with this.

Underneath chapter 12, it's the declaration of emergency.

What does that mean for the city?

It that declaration is very easy to do.

It is a couple of paragraphs with our with our city attorney, uh, and it says that hey, said disaster, whatever disaster happened on this given day, the mayor is declaring an emergency within the city.

Within a short period of time, the council needs to come together and ratify that.