- Transcripts
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- Welcome to Voices in Local Government. William Whitson is here to talk about local
government and the city county manager's role in emergency and disaster response and
recovery. Thanks for taking the time to help the ICMA audience literally in the
middle of two storms, William. Thanks for being here. - Thank you, Joe. I'm happy to
be here and happy to do what I can to assist others. - So William has decades of
local government leadership and has led extensive work before, during, and after
Katrina, Harvey, and many other storms, literally, in the EOCs. Important to our
topic today, William also understands the nuance between local government, FEMA, and
state agencies, which we'll get to shortly. So we've seen the devastation from
Hurricane Helene. Milton is on the way. We record this on October 8th.
Hurricanes in the southeast are the current headlines, but local governments have and
will keep needing to prepare, respond, and recover to all forms of natural disasters
in every region. So this is intended to help those in the middle of it now, but
also help those who hopefully can do even more to prepare on the front end before
the next one comes, wherever that might be, unfortunately. icma.org /hurricane
-recovery-resources linked wherever you're listening is where to go to find more
resources on disaster recovery, including a series of upcoming webinars and peer to
peer connection opportunities in the upcoming weeks and months. So a lot of those
will get into finer detail on some of these specific subtopics, but today William is
here to cover the most critical points and kind of just hopefully help everyone
reset, catch their breath and understand what they need to do and just the the most
important things. So William thanks again for being here and let's start right off
with what are the immediate resources that are available to local governments as they
seek to assist their community in responding to the damage caused by Hurricane Helene
or again Milton or whatever one whatever else is coming next so we'll kind of get
into the FEMA stuff but what's what's that first step what are the first resources
so they have help and they're not left us Sure. Well, there's a lot of things
happening all at once. Of course, after you get through the shock of search and
rescue, the state and federal government are amazing at their ability to provide
security, search and rescue and those kinds of things to stabilize the situation in
the community. And then you go into what I'd like to call their two main programs
that FEMA brings to the table and then the states jump in and back them up.
The first is individual assistance or IA. The IA side deals with and this is
something that for the first six months to a year that managers are going to have
to be mindful of and aware of that process that's happening out there,
helping people with food, water, clothes,
housing, FEMA claims, those are the things that begin to overwhelm your community.
Where will people live? How will they come back? And those kinds of things,
how can they pay for all these expenses when they may have lost their jobs and
income? So that's the IA side of it, and it's targeted to your individual citizens,
but again, you as the manager have to understand that your elected officials are
paying attention to that. And of course, the public is paying close attention to
that.
Then on the other side, you take a look at what's happening on the other side with
a public assistance side. That's where the local government managers focus will be
for some time really until the community is put back together. We call that the PA
side and that is you know to basically try and restore you to pre -storm conditions.
Keep in mind that FEMA sees their role as helping you put your community back
together to the way it was right before the storm hit. They have resources and
special funds and processes to make it improved or better called hazard mitigation.
But their main focus is, you know, putting back, helping you put back your roads,
helping you put back your gymnasium, your parks, your city hall,
your county buildings, you know, the infrastructure too, right? Restoring those
infrastructure, yeah, your water lines and sewer lines and all of these things that
it takes to make the community work. And their focus,
like I said, is to put you back to how it was before the storm. They're not
focused, they're special processes, they're special processes to deal with making it
better, It's called hazard mitigation, but those are separate processes.
The main thing they focus on is putting you back where you were as best you can.
One of the things they focus on is the avoiding of duplication of benefits. They
don't want to see you get paid for one thing from FEMA and another thing by the
state. They're trying to avoid those duplication of benefits.
And then the big deal here is documentation, documentation, documentation.
You know having before photos of say a building or or a park or something like
that that you're trying to put back in place a water system is like gold.
Having that kind of documentation, and especially if it's GPS reference and date
stamped. So those are the kind of things on the PA side that they focus on very
early on. And those kind of come from the damage assessment. So with that,
I'll just kind of pause and we'll go into the money part of that if that's okay,
Joe. Yeah. One question first. So what if a town manager from a small community
that's not one of the bigger areas and maybe doesn't have a mayor or any of that,
what is their first step to get the public assistance going?
How do they get in contact with the appropriate representative FEMA or the state
level? What is literally step one to actually start that process? FEMA basically
operates on the old regional system, the 10 federal regions, and for region four,
which is most of this disaster is in Atlanta. But then they go out and they
establish joint field operations in every state. So they will have an operation stood
up in one or two locations in a state, and from there, they go down into the
jurisdictions, they know what the presidential declaration was. If your county was
declared, they're going to show up. They're going to contact you.
And if you don't hear from them, you need to be in touch with the state in your
area and some of the county and other maybe state representatives and federal
representatives to get their And how, how does that work between the manager and the
elected body, whether it's a council or mayor or et cetera, how, because it can get
dicey on who's in charge or who needs to do what, how does the manager balance
that? Right. Um, in Florida, one of the things that best practices we have is that
we pass a resolution prior to the impact of the disaster and spell all all that
and then at a certain point in time the baton is passed from the commission to to
the manager and then of course it's passed back after the emergency conditions are
are subsiding. So basically those kinds of conversations should have taken place if
they didn't take place. It's important that you work with your local officials, local
elected officials to clarify that because there needs to be a clear line of
communication between the manager, the administration, and the county EOC,
and then to the state EOC, and of course the federal government. Okay. Because it's
not necessarily contentious. It's just that people are trying to help, but then maybe
duplicating or making slightly different decisions. So if that agreement was not in
place prior the best thing to do for the manager or our audience is to just maybe
ask /tell us and then just clarify and get it in writing I would think is helpful
as well. That way everyone's on the same page. Yeah absolutely and Joe again another
best practice is you know in my opinion if it's not in writing it didn't happen
that's that's kind of the way FEMA and the state and these situations roll because
these recovery operations go on for years and documentation is very, very important
to have a clearly outlined and organized in that manner. - Okay,
and then let's transition back to that documentation. You referenced it earlier,
including like the timestamped GPS stamped images to show a clear before and after.
But again, as no matter what the topic is, the audience knows the city county
manager can only do so much at a time and delegation is important,
even if the staff is smaller. But who could or should be that point in person on
the staff to literally be in charge of the documentation process? Sure, I think
that's again back to another best practice. And Again, everybody's financial situation
and staffing situation is different, so I don't think there's any one right answer,
it's just that you need to think about that. What is going to be the communication
process? Because everything on the PA side, the public assistance side,
all the revenues and that kind of thing flow from the damage assessment. They flow
from the documentation of, okay, if it's a storm that had tornadoes,
it's gonna do a certain kind of damage. If it was a flooding event, it'll be
different kind of damage. So every event is different. You need to establish clear
communications on your team. And then how is that information gonna be delivered to
the local officials at the county, at the state in the federal level.
This next question can get tricky. And again, as I said in the beginning, we can't
cover every detail today. So we'll have this topic again in the future. But the
short version and /or where to maybe go look this stuff up, but what buckets of
costs are reimbursable? You kind of stated this is not intended to necessarily
improve things unless it's to mitigate future risk. When when the local government is
trying to respond and decide where to spend the money on The assumption I hesitate
to even use that word, but on the assumption that it'll be reimbursed later Is
there a way to look that up or try and get? Not necessarily approval, but
understand before spending the money is this reimbursable or not?
Absolutely in that kind of logic of what counts and what doesn't.
How does the process work? That's very important. And before I cover that
specifically, let me go into the general financial side of it. From the local
government's perspective in a long -term recovery, you're going to have different
buckets or pots of money to draw from. And I would encourage you, of course, to
get very familiar with your insurance situation, because that's going to be one of
your first go -tos. Then obviously, there's the PA or public assistance funding
offered from FEMA and the state, and I'll go into the specifics of that in just a
minute. Then there's, you know, your general fund budget that you have, your
reserves, and the potential for special assessments, again, depending on your and what
the the laws say but let me just also throw out one of the the revenue sources I
found in Harvey which wasn't well advertised because I don't think the federal
government really wants you to know much about this it's kind of a hidden jewel if
you will good that's why you're here tell us yeah but you know if you're really
hit hard I mean it I mean, it's tough to send a tax bill to a slab or to an
empty lot, okay? And you may not be able to get the finances, you know,
secure. So one of the options you may need to consider strongly is what they call
a community disaster loan. Community disaster loans, there's a special part in FEMA,
it's a special process you go through to fill out forms, kind of document the last
two or three years of your financial situation, and then they will loan you up to
five million dollars the last I checked. I mean, they may have changed the limits
recently, but it's up to five million dollars. And the great thing about that is it
can be spent for salaries. It can be spent for fuel. It can be spent for things
that are immediate needs to get you to the next stage of the disaster, it's kind
of like a bridge loan in a way to get you going and keep you out of financial
trouble. And so that's one of the things you need to think about early on. So
let's go back to PA, what's eligible, right? The biggest cost you're gonna have,
typically, and again, every disaster is different, but typically it's gonna be
category A, what FEMA calls Agoria A, which is your debris, and they will,
depending on the match required in the federal disaster, and it's my understanding
that it's nearly 100 % for this one, they will help you remove the debris in terms
of the cost. You still have to, you know, do it the correct way and have site
monitors and, you know, all the federal processes that go with debris removal,
but debris removal, and it's only for public rideways. If you go into private
streets, that's going to be an iffy area, and there's all kinds of rules associated
with that. Category B is your emergency protective measures. Those are the measures
you took before, during, and right after the storm to protect life,
property, safety, that kind of thing. I'll just give you a quick example, if you
had a flooding event and you noticed that, hey, a bridge was washed out or a road
was washed out and you had to go purchase some barricades or emergency cones,
that is reimbursable as long as it's documented and it's within this exudant period
for category B and they typically publicize when that category opens and closes so
that you're well within that window, and that's something FEMA does. Category C is
your roads and bridges. Category D is your water control facilities or dams.
Category E is public buildings, equipment and contents. Category F is utilities.
And Category G is your parks and recreation. So what happens is FEMA allocates based
on the damage assessment funds under each of these categories and you have to
develop projects and track them of what the damage was and what is it going to
take to correct that damage. And it's a lot of documentation and organization and
then you also have to follow the procurement rules of FEMA and the state if you're
going to be using their resources? Within those buckets, what about cost share?
You mentioned that for certain, maybe some of those first categories, it is either
at or near 100%. What about the rest of it? Should there be an expectation where
some of this money is coming from FEMA or the federal level, some from the state,
and And some of it is going to be eventually on the tab for the local government.
How does the split breakdown? - Yes, sir. Every disaster is different and it really
is driven by the presidential declaration. And then of course, how the states work
with it. The typical public assistance requirements are 75 % federal,
25 % local, state local, which which is basically in Florida, we split that 25%,
12 .5 local, 12 .5 state. But again,
it depends on the severity of the disaster with the presidential declaration had
actually in it, and then how commerce appropriates the money.
But basically my understanding is that's not so much an issue this time because of
the high damage in the fact that they may have declared it 90 to 100%. You just
have to check with your state, check with the FEMA folks,
and just understand that the more federal money you use, the more state money you
use, you have to tie it to appropriate policies and procurement practices that they
want you to follow and the big one being two CFR part 200 and you need to get
you an attorney or get you some trap staff that's well trained and well versed in
this because that is what I call the golden rule he who has the gold makes the
rules and that's basically the federal and state government and their procurement
processes may be quite a bit more rigid than what you do at a local level on a
day -to -day basis. You still have to follow your own policy, but then you have to
also comply with the state and federal policies as well. - Okay, and circling back
to that documentation a little bit, what is the standard to be considered good
documentation? You gave a really good example with the timestamp GPS for certain
imagery, but that's not Always the case if you're literally on the ground documenting
what happened to whether it's City Hall or the school whatever it is Whether photos
writing what is the level where later? Yes, this is good documentation and it's
smooth Maybe a hiccup here or there, but it all kind of works out first You know
we thought we were documenting this but then it turns out these are just notes by
someone on staff and there and the decision -makers Aren't accepting accepting it.
What level does it need to be to? Yeah, just think of yourself as going to court.
You know, that's kind of the advice or approach I use.
You know, notes are great, but you need to know who was the note taker. Where were
they? Did they document the date and time that they made
Um, this is FEMA and state on site when that damage assessment was done.
Yeah. Someone is someone from outside of the local government, whether it's FEMA or
elsewhere, signing off on this in real time. Or is it like we did all this and
someone's reviewing it six months later just to try and get the money flowing or
both. Yeah. Well, that's what happens is it gets written up. It gets put into
projects. and then it gets sent into what they call the FEMA portal. Again,
you have to have good connections and software. Excel is excellent for that kind of
thing. You just need to have somebody in your finance office, all on top of that
along with your project officers in the utility department, in the police department,
in the department and what I would do is make a team approach and I've even found
it depending on the cost benefit okay everybody's different but I would call in
extra help and maybe a private CPA firm or somebody that's used to being very anal
if you will and in very focused and in the details because the details matter And
that's what happens is these projects get written up.
They get sent into the portal. They get sent in to see, OK, well, does this line
up with an eligible cost? And that's what you have to measure it against,
is because you're basically trying to establish that, yes, this indeed happened. It
happened this way. We estimate the cost to be this. And therefore we are asking for
that reimbursement in order to mitigate that cost. - Okay, and like you said earlier,
they're not, FEMA's not there to just help you improve things, similar to regular
insurance for individuals. Like if you're, you total your car or your basement
floods, you're gonna get paid out X amount. And if you want to spend more to
improve it, it might be a good time to do that because you're working on it
anyways or replacing it anyways but then that kind of goes back to is that is that
the manager's call is that the council's call and that this might be a topic to
cover in on a future date and more yeah that's a separate a separate webinar but
our podcast but I will tell you that it's kind of a collaborative effort because
FEMA is going to give you the what they perceive as their boundaries right baseline
yeah and where the corners are.
Different FEMA people come in. You may change them out. Different FEMA people have
different experience levels. You have to read the rules and be able to advocate for
the most generous allocation you can, but have solid documentation to back it up.
Okay. For now, at least one of the Last and key topics on the financial side is
overtime pay. As you said earlier, best case, this was written in a policy,
official policy is in place before the disaster hits. But sometimes it's not. So
walk us through, I guess, both scenarios. If it's already clear on what happens, and
that's relatively easy, but are the areas you're based out of Florida where this is
kind of the norm, Unfortunately, but other places, not as much and they might not
have taken care of this on the front end. So how does the local government handle
overtime pay, which is even more complicated as these people are still people dealing
with their personal lives and their families and everything else in the aftermath of
these storms? So how does that work? Yeah, absolutely. So, of course, the best
practice is to have that decided up front and to have a overtime policy that's
federally compliant. All right, so let's say you missed that ship, right? You missed
that boat. No problem. What you have to do, again, is to document. You have to be
aware of the federal standards for overtime pay, follow the FLSA,
Fair Labor Standards Act, and make sure that whatever you're proposing
is reasonable, they use the reasonable man test, right? And it's not a situation
where it's considered a cookie jar where you can kind of keep dipping just because
it's federal money. There has to be logic to it and there has to be an emergency
situation to it as well. So if you cannot get staffing and there's a critical
safety issue, or there's a critical protective measure, or there's some sort of
policy directive that has to be carried out to keep people safe or to keep
something from getting worse. Then, okay, I think that you can manage through that.
And again, you'd have to work with that FEMA officer assigned to your jurisdiction.
You'd have to work with the state. Understand that the state in many cases,
especially in flora. They're your best friends. They're there to help you to back it
up and make sure that documentation is clear so you don't have a clawback. You
don't want to get in that situation and to do that use the reasonable man standard
and make sure that it's what a reasonable person would do as opposed to just oh
here's a bunch of federal money I think I'll take advantage of it. Plenty more to
talk about on this, and we will in the coming weeks, but we'll kind of let the
financial and the documentation sit there for now. But we also wanted to cover the
personal side of it. So you've been through these before, like literally through
these storms and helping in the aftermath and working every day for months.
But can you talk to the audience about the importance of not going in alone and
taking time to yourself, which again, it's a little bit of a catch 22, especially
when the pressure's on and people are depending on you. Even on smaller scale
things, I think a lot of times people understand this and they hear it and they
kind of nod their head but then they don't actually follow through on it. So just
talk to the audience about your experience and maybe even lessons learned if you
didn't do it the first few times around, first what you know now, but how, whether
it's the city manager or the people on the ground documenting the devastation, which
is tough to deal with, how can they best get through it? - Absolutely. It is
difficult. Let's go to the human side of it, right? You're a manager or a leader
in a community that was beautiful and it had its history and it had its character
and now it's gone. And you have to allow for that sense of loss.
You have to understand that the community is hurting. You have to understand that
your staff is hurting. You have to understand that maybe even you are hurting. And
to do that, attitude is everything. And you have to find the discipline and find
the strength to take the long -term view of things. what took hours,
maybe a day to destroy, can take many years to rebuild. And I'll just tell a quick
story of one situation that I ran across. We were helping in Hurricane Katrina.
We brought in teams to coastal Mississippi and we're working there.
We had a rotation in and out, working through EMAC, crossing the state lines,
and trying to help this sister community that we had adopted, and our mayor wanted
to go. I was like, "Okay, great, mayor, that'll be great. I'd like for you to meet
the mayor of the city we're helping." As we got the opportunity to go in,
we were doing all kinds of things. We were restoring their utilities. We were
helping them navigate the financial difficulties. We were helping their IT
infrastructure come back up and our mayor is sitting there talking to the mayor of
Long Beach, Mississippi and he said there's debris everywhere,
there's destruction everywhere with seven foot high with boats on top of that and he
stood there and he looked at the other mayor And he said, "Mayor, I think what you
have here is a real opportunity." And I could have just died and crawled under a
rock. But I'll tell you one thing, our mayor had that vision thing.
He could see that it was gonna come back. It was gonna be stronger. It was gonna
be better. And I went back to that same place where that conversation took place
five years later, and you would not believe the transition that that community had
pulled off by working together, by employing some of the practices and techniques
that we brought to the table, 'cause we had just been through the storms in '04,
and this was in '05. And, you know, you gotta have that faith. You have to see
that longer vision and understand that your community is going to come back better,
stronger, and all those kinds of things, but you can't go it alone. You have to
have others who have been there. You have to have that vision and you have to have
that self -discipline, not only for yourself, but to help your staff as well because
they are recovering as well.
That's a positive story, despite the trouble on the front end of it.
Yeah, it was terrible. I mean, there was piles of debris everywhere. There were
boats on top of that. It was just mass destruction, a tangled web. And yet,
from that chaos came order in a better community.
Yeah. And the way your mayor said that in the moment like you said you might have
been like oh my god I can't believe you said that way, but yeah, it might take
something that elect him at home Well, but but it might take something that jarring
to hear on the other end of There he's right as bad as we feel and as devastating
as this is right now He's right and we have to take that mindset to move forward
Right. It's hard to quantify this is yeah, Courage is the right word. So it's not
that there's an exact right answer. Everyone's different. Everyone's staff is going to
be different. But what do you think is the appropriate level of time someone can
actually put in on a daily or weekly basis before diminishing returns and burnout
where, OK, you're still there at work, but maybe you're making mistakes or you're
slipping up on some things because you're literally burned out, tired. - Yeah, well,
of course that's an individual answer, but I will just stay from my point of view
that a good six months, you need to take some sort of break, some sort of day or
two here, there. And there is in Florida, we have something called mutual aid where
you can actually call another jurisdiction and they can come send someone you know
you can tag out. I think other states I think I hear Kentucky is helping with
those kinds of things into Tennessee I mean in North Carolina.
These are the kind of things we need to do for each other. We're colleagues, we're
professional colleagues. There's an International City Management Association. There's a
State Management Association. You're not alone. There are people that you know manage
communities all over this country who can step in and Take care of your job for a
few days to give you a break and you ought to call on your colleagues You ought
to call on those who have been there before you ought to step up and do it not
only for yourself but for your community and your team because when you do get
exhausted when you get when you could be making a mistake that would cost millions
of dollars, or God forbid somebody's life. So you want to make sure that,
yes, you work hard and you do right by your community and your elected officials,
but you also have to take care of yourself and you have to take care of your
team. Yeah, and it's not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of strength to be able
to make that ask and to do it. But again, there's that courage, there's that
courage word again, because long term recovery is for the courageous, it's not for
the faint of heart. Yep. And ICMA will be following up not just with technical
webinars, which there will be some of that to explain some of the details, but also
peer -to -peer networking and just a chance for people to jump on a call and discuss
things or ask questions and get some help. So more to come, more details to come
on that. The website is icma .org /hurricane-recovery-resources,
linked wherever you're listening. William, thanks for your guidance today. You'll kind
of be one of our point people moving forward on this topic. Also special thanks to
ICMA Southeast Regional Director Randy Reid, Amber Snowden and everyone else behind
the scenes and of course to the thousands of dedicated local government to see
response professionals serving the public. So thanks again, William. Hopefully this is
a good first step for people to move forward. - Yeah, thank you, Joe, and just a
shout out to everybody who's in the trenches doing it. You have our respect, our
support, and go get 'em. We know you can do it and we'll do everything we can to
be the wind beneath your wings.
Guest Information
William R. Whitson, ICMA- Ret. President, Local Government Visions, LLC
Topics
FEMA Individual Assistance.
FEMA Public Assistance.
Cost and reimbursement and documentation.
Assign someone on staff as the point to understand FEMA reporting requirements and ensure compliance.
Categories of reimbursement and cost share between Federal, state, and local.
Policies for overtime pay.
The importance of not going it alone.
How to take care of yourself and staff.
Resources
ICMA Hurricane Response Resources
Leadership Before, During, and After a Crisis
