Public Safety Committee - Regular Meeting

Safety Committee on this February 2026 to order at 04:55 p. M. At this time, our roll call to my right, I have Alderman Alderman Kiana.

Bring the joy. Present.

Alderman Dick Brown, thank you. Alderman Dyeisha Conti is on her way and will be here shortly, and Karma O'Neil is present. Next up on our agenda, I have approval of the agenda. I'll entertain a motion for approval of today's agenda.

Yes. I move to approve the agenda.

Second. All those in favor please say aye.

Aye.

We have business miscellaneous approval of 01/21/2026 regular meeting minutes. I'll entertain a motion to approve those minutes.

Yes, I'll move to approve those minutes.

All seconds. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Alright. Motion passes. I'm very excited today. On our agenda, we have our general discussion ID seventeen twenty six, Office of Emergency Management. Director Kevin Simmons and staff, are you gonna be joined by all of your staff?

Eventually, I am.

And welcome. Thank

you. Kevin Simmons, the emergency manager for the city of Annapolis. So you all have a treat today. You won't be hearing from me the whole time. So I brought the staff, and we have a very robust presentation, which we're gonna give an overview of the office of emergency management like you've never seen it.

So our presentation objectives is we're gonna briefly introduce the the emergency management staff and highlight emergency management program and provide some of the key emergency management planning focus areas of focus. And we're also gonna talk about special events at your request. And detail preparedness, response, and recovery efforts for the recent winter storm, which we're actually still compiling after action information. So we may not have some of the answers, but we're working on them. So I'm a go ahead and start with our mission statement.

You've heard this before, especially being on the finance committee. The city of Annapolis officer of emergency management provides strategic leadership coordination and subject matter expertise to effectively manage the city's all hazard prevention, protection, mitigation, response, recovery efforts, fostering a resilient community, and a strong culture of safety. So who are we? Let's go ahead and meet the team. So you all know me, and you all know Dave Mandel. He's the deputy director. Dave is a University of Maryland School of Law graduate with sixteen or fifteen

years. Sixteen?

Sixteen years. He's the longest tenured person in the office of emergency management. And you have MK Severowski. She's the senior emergency management planner, a Millersville University Pennsylvania graduate with nine years tenure in OEM. Up on the right, Andrew Whitiquin.

Andrew is a emergency management planner one, a University of New Hampshire graduate with one year tenure. Patrick Kumar is emergency management planner one, Susquehanna University Pennsylvania graduate with one year tenure. Then we have Kyle Lebkowski, EM grant specialist, a New Hampshire University graduate with one year tenure in OEM. So we're stealing them from the University of New Hampshire.

Love it.

And finally, our most recent acquisition is Corina Rosenbaum. She's a training and education outreach public information for us, Tulane University in Louisiana graduate with less than one year. So this is this is my staff.

Welcome. Thank you guys for coming today.

So just to talk about before we get into it, just talk about the highlights. We respond to emergencies of all kinds. We manage plans, and I say we have about 50 of them. We conduct training and exercises, especially saw that in December when we did the citywide exercise that kinda led up to the storm. People tell me that every time I do an exercise, whatever the exercise is, it plays out in real time.

So I gotta be careful in what exercises I choose. We do community engagement, oversight, and consequent management of special events. From 2010 to 2024, OEM has brought in $23,000,000 in in grant funding, which supports every department in the city of Annapolis. It just does not go to us. Our staff is available twenty four seven three sixty five.

We provide administrative oversight to various special programs that'll be substance use disorder programs, which we we share with the fire department and the police department and the mayor's office, warm and relief program, which everybody's familiar with at Pitmore, and the Food Friday program. You might have heard about that, madam chair. Emergency management has a connection to every city function and community lifeline That we work with all stakeholders, city department, shared services, health department, department of social services at all levels of government and community. So what are our challenges? So we we have the smallest budget of all the city departments.

Our budget is $762,000, where everybody else is in the millions. I'm the only one with a k behind mine. But my my budget is supplemented by grants for the last fifteen years. And just the last f y '23 and f y '24, we brought in $624,000 of grants supplement my budget. And again, it doesn't all go to my budget, it goes to all of the departments.

In FY '24, 05/3000 again. And then if you look at FY '25, a big goose egg, zero. That that funding has been on hold. That funding has been delayed. We don't know if we're gonna receive that funding. So our our budget ask is gonna be to help supplement what we didn't receive in grant funding. So expect to see see that coming soon. Any questions so far? No. Okay. Let's talk about some of our planning program highlights, and we're gonna start with special events. And I wanna invite Patrick Kumar.

Alright. So I'll specifically be talking about special events and our role in it. Good afternoon. My name is Patrick Hammer. I'm a planner, emergency management.

So OEMs support special events that impact the city through through resource operations, residents, and visitors, including events that have the potential to create cascading effects, and as well as those others identified by city leadership. What we do is we provide enhanced technical planning for resources, operations, public safety, logistics, and deconfliction. We develop and implement planning products such as incident action plans, EOC action plans, maps, weather forecasts, and etcetera. We can activate our EOC if required and have necessary capabilities required for effective special event management. We coordinate between city and any supporting agencies.

So we work very closely with Maryland State Police, Maryland Capital Police, all the other state and local agencies that are in Annapolis. We conduct and we provide resource management. So that's helping ordering things from different departments that goes through Ross if it's a large enough special event. We also handle the activation oversight of our community emergency response team, also known as CERT, and the volunteers used for special So the the most likely time you see them, there are parade marshals, so they help conduct a safe and effective parade. They watch for, you know, people being raw fairer, not following the parade rules, and things like that.

So to go over the planning process, again this is a really general look. Every event's different. We're also not involved in every event. As I noted on this previous slide, it's really the larger events are the ones that are identified by city leadership. That first starts with a permit that's submitted to either the city manager's special event coordinator, Felicia Nolan, or directly to Reckon Parks.

So there's a lot of events that happen on their property which we help them with. There are some events that don't require a city permit. And in that case, we talk directly with the city organ with the organizer, of the event. Or like I noted earlier, if it's a partnering agency, so Maryland Capital Police, if there's something on state grounds that still has effects, that may impact the city, we still work with them and we can actually work see their permit. We follow it up with communications with the city, special events coordinator.

And typically, we also talk directly with the event organizer. We do that through having planning meetings, so virtual or in person to discuss specifics of the event, issues that we might see arise and see if they have a solution. And if not, we can help them find one. From those planning meetings, we form if needed a planning product. So that's what I was talking about earlier.

The incident action plan and EOC action plan or other products. And and the incident action plan is what's most common on these really large events. It dictates what each city department agency and supporting agencies is going to have their role. It's clearly written out. We pull everyone together and have an operations briefing.

So we typically have that in person but sometimes it's virtual. And we discuss everyone's roles and responsibilities. That's kind of the last time to pull everyone together and answer any questions. And then during the day of, depending on the event, we may activate our EOC or we'll have someone forwardly deployed to a location to help coordinate and also assist with messaging. So a lot of times these special events have a traffic impact so we do a lot of advanced message and day of messaging to help the citizens and visitors of Annapolis know about that.

And then after an event we typically do an after action and we learn from every year. So every year we may have a lot of repeating events, but there's always room for improvement. So we take that really into account and try to build off of what's done the previous year to do better. This is just some statistics from last year. So just focusing on our major events, we had did over 477 planning operations hours, so that's working the actual event.

That's 200 and six sorry. 623 total hours and that's in addition to our other duties. So special events is only a small portion of our portfolio, but as being in the city and being very important, we do take it very seriously and spend a lot of time on it. Those are the events that those hours came from, and that's a total of all of the staff, all of our different hours. Upcoming in this year, twenty twenty six, you can see a list of the special events.

The first one being Saint Patrick's Day coming up next month. We have MLK, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Annapolis two fifty, Family Day, Annapolis Pride, and Military Bowl. There's also a lot of other events that pop up between now and then and we tackle each one of those as they rise.

I would say that that 06/2023 is very conservative. That doesn't talk about the pop up events. I know like March 7, have something that's shaping up to be a larger event, a community rally that's gonna go from cavalry at 301 Rall Boulevard to the State House that just pops up out of nowhere. No kings that pop up out of out of nowhere. So I would say, again, this is the six twenty three is pretty conservative. Would say that we do a lot more. That's one of the primary things that we do. And it takes a lot of time from staff.

Chief, are there specific people that are leads on different parades, or is it working together as a team?

We they are leads, and then we work together as a team. So so AJ, who you'll hear from later, he has the Saint Patrick's Day parade. And I think last year, you had the Saint Patrick's Day parade. Was it

Last year, I had pride.

So Andrew had pride. They all I mean, everybody takes turns in in being the lead, and then we support them. And we coordinate. We bring police department in. We bring the fire department in. And we coordinate everything and then we move forward to to have a a good event. But they all cross train, and everybody can actually take their place in leading these events.

Thank you.

Are you done? Okay. Other woman.

You're gonna put me on the spot.

You know, I I I thought I gave you some warning.

Yeah. You did.

So so this is gonna be a big event for us. Gonna be a big event for the police department, the fire department, public safety, and all. And you and I have talked about the impact that this is gonna have on the city of Annapolis. We look forward to working with you on this. Maybe you can give us just a a snippet of what's going on with this.

Sure. So on a regular year, when America's not getting ready to celebrate two hundred fifty years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The city has a parade and fireworks. This year, the Annapolis two fifty Commission has been working with local partners, and it's really going to be a two day celebration starting with July 3. We're showing a movie in conjunction with the Annapolis Police Department on the grounds of St.

John's College. Hamilton will be played on duo screens with the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra opening up and playing prior to that. So there'll be a lot of action on that side of town going into the evening, probably 09:30, 10:00 into the evening. And then the next day it starts, there are neighborhood bike parades throughout the city. There's a big focus on the Eastport bike parade for children.

There's going to be a live presentation by Lafayette and Marquis as reenactors basically in Eastport. There will be activities starting at Maryland Hall in the morning, moving to People's Park early afternoon into the early evening, alongside activities happening at the State House starting I believe at noon. Inside and outside of the State House, there will be a parade that will be ending at the State House this year instead of an Napa City dock, followed by the Navy Marine Corps band playing right before fireworks. So really two days of events, hoping to bring in all parts of the city and visitors. I would guess that we're probably gonna see an influx of 10 to 15,000 people coming into Annapolis wanting to partake in what we're planning.

Maybe that's an overestimate, but I think we had 10,000 for the Monks last week. So I don't think it's out of

Yeah it was actually 12,000 for

the Monks. Was it?

Yes. And I think it'll probably be more for Annapolis two fifty. And I can't wait to start getting with you and start coordinating and making sure we have a great event.

Yes. It should be fantastic. As you know, Annapolis was the home to many of the signers, and a lot of the important things that were going on two fifty years ago. So we wanna do a lot of commemoration. There's gonna be some art displays, and music, and banners downtown. So people should be prepared to see a lot going on.

Sounds good. Let's get to planning.

Alright. Thank you.

Thank you. I wanna invite Kyle Lipkowski. We're gonna talk a little bit about special program planning.

So like chief mentioned earlier in the slideshow, we over we provide introduce yourself. Oh, I'm sorry. Kyle Lebkowski, emergency management grant specialist. So like chief said early in the slideshow, we oversee a lot of special programs and one of those being the winter relief program. Being with the cold temperatures as they have been over this winter, it's pretty important program for our office and the whole city as a a whole.

But the city of Annapolis Winter Relief Program, it was originated and started in 2010. This is the sixteenth year. Our mission statement is nobody dies from exposure on the streets of Annapolis, with our primary goal being given give patrons a place to seek shelter during potentially life threatening low temperatures. Our secondary goal is to connect the patrons with services such as the Department of Human Services, Crisis Response, Community Service Office of Community Services, and the Department of Health, Substance Use and Treatment Recovery. We use Bless and Tech Ministries, a nonprofit organization to staff the warming centers for activations, and our office provides administrative oversight.

So first time in sixteen years we did lose somebody. We had that terrible arctic blast that lasted a week or so. As much as we tried to protect folks, we even opened up Pitmore for twenty four hours so they could stay there. We still lost a young lady that we all knew. And all the women I know that you knew her as well. So this still stands, nobody dies from exposure on the streets of Annapolis. That's our credo and that's what we're all about and we're gonna continue to be all about that.

Can I ask a question about that? Yes. Given the fact that we've had some twenty four hour stays and it's seemingly more days of cold temperatures, How are we doing budget wise on that? Is that something that we need to Not be

very good. It's something that we we're actually dealing with now. And Kyle, you wanna talk a little bit more about that?

Yes. So we pay the staff for the activations. We are out of money in the budget that we use for that. So I know we've been in talks about maybe getting some some funds put in to that account to help us get through the rest of the season which ends April 30.

And we typically this is the second time in sixteen years that we've had to do this, and the city's been great in understanding and wanting to make sure that vulnerable populations like this is safe and they give us what we need. So I'm not too worried about that there. So we're in the process of getting the funding now.

And will that cause you to seek additional funding for next year? Add to that? So

You know, I I thought about that. I did not request any additional funding. We we get about $37,000 for that. So a lot of the years that we have, we make it through because it's not, you know, that cold. This was a particularly brutal winter and we spent a lot. We never typically, we'll have twenty four hour days, but it'll be like maybe three. So we had eight actually this year. So to answer your question, I didn't ask for any more. But we'll see what happens in next season if I need to increase

Thank in my you. We support increasing that budget. Was

that a question?

No, was a statement.

Okay, thank you.

Just continuing, so a little bit of an overview. So right now, we are in the Pip Moyer rec center. We're in the Aux Gym. We operate from 7PM to 7AM, or like we talked about a little bit, was the twenty four hours twenty four hour operations as necessary. So our threshold for activation is 32 degrees.

That's with or without wind chill. Usually, the wind chill pushes the temperature a little lower, but that's what the feels like temperature is or at our director's discretion. We notify all our partners via distribution list on email, and we coordinate to set up for those activations. Our staffing is usually one staff member to every 10 patrons with a nightly supervisor. So going off, not only was it a very cold winter, but we saw numbers reaching over 30 in a couple activations, which actually brings in another staff member for that night to make sure that we have the correct staffing numbers. Patrons are also given a cot, a blanket, and a pillow to sleep with, and they will also receive a hot meal when they stay overnight.

So I do have a question. Excuse me madam chair. First off, I have got to acknowledge the work that Alderman Conte did during this time. And she cooked meals herself and she brought food for these patrons. I'm just, that is the definition of working for the people. So I do want to call that out. Secondly, with that being said, do you all need support with food? I mean if someone wants to donate or offer some support with that when the time comes, if the time comes where it's this severe, how can they be supportive?

I know Blessing Tech receives a lot of food donations. If anybody does would like to donate food, I know we can field those and I can give them to Blessing Tech or if we talk to them directly, they'd be more than happy to accept. I know they get some donations from restaurants, some local restaurants around here. So those go to the patrons when they stay over.

So recently we had acting city manager, Vicki Buckland, was having dinner at Chicken Ruth's and she talked this place up. And they said, you know what? We have a lot of food at the end of the day. You know, we would throw it out, But if we can donate it and that's what they have. She bought a a bunch of food up to the up to the warming center. So we have a lot of cases like that. We have a lot of cases like that. So if somebody thinks that they wanna do a donation, they can just give us a call, (410) 260-9167. And we'll be glad to to work with them on that.

Thank you. Can you repeat that phone number, please?

(410) 216-9167.

Thank you.

Sure it wasn't 260?

Nope, he got it right the

second time.

Okay. What did I say the first time?

If you combine the call center with the

main one. Yes, that's it.

Let's not discount the call center. Alright. Thank you. MK, I think you're up.

If we can Thank you skip for that. The That's really important for people to know about that program. My

name's Mary Kate I'm the senior emergency management planner for the department. So I'm gonna briefly give some kind of context into what our planning program looks like and how that folds into what we did for the winter storm we had recently. So when we talk about planning, it's kind of a vague term and it means different things to different people. Right? So if you're looking at the graphic, the far left side is the type of planning that we do.

There's policy, strategy, operational, and tactical. And we refer to the higher level of this planning scheme as policy and strategy and the lower level of the scheme as operational and tactical. And basically what that means is the higher level, so your policy and your strategy kind of dictate what you're going to do and then your operational and tactical say how you're going to do it. So then the next column over is an illustration of like the category or the element of that type of plan. So we do everything from assessment and analysis to strategic plans to operational based plans and then incident support and actually direct incident planning.

And then the final column is just kind of an example of each one of those areas of focus. And those are on there because you're going to be hearing and seeing a lot of those the more that you get accustomed to emergency management and our planning process. So for this particular presentation, the ones that you're going to hear most about are the EOP, incident action plans, EOC action plans, and then the bullet points to the side overall, basically this is just saying that you know we develop and maintain a variety of plans. Those plans support every single department, every single city function, and they are specific to anything for the city that could be considered a threat or hazard. So not every plan is the same.

So where we have incident action plans, that could be up to 20 IAPs a year. Right? So it's it's not one plan per bullet. It could be 10 plans per bullet. So like the director said earlier, we have at least 50 plans a year that we're consistently going through.

Some of those plans that are listed up there support multiple areas. So for example, our hazard mitigation plan, a strategy and an operational plan. Each of these plans that we talk about, they all have their own maintenance schedule, their own training schedule, and their own legal requirements sometimes. Which basically means that we can't do every plan every single year. We don't have the capacity and it's not something that any local jurisdiction reasonably has the capacity to do.

So we do have to prioritize which plans we focus on and we have to really think about how we're setting up these maintenance and training schedules so that it's feasible, it's realistic, and we can implement those lessons learned when we update them. And we have to work with all of our stakeholders to complete these plans. This is not a process that is done overnight. This is a process that takes months, sometimes even years to complete. For example, the hazard mitigation plan has to be done every five years by law. And it takes every bit of those five years to get that plan updated and promulgated and pushed out to the public. So that's kind of just the overview of how the planning scheme works with some examples.

So can you talk a little bit about the three plans that we're prioritizing right now? Yep. COOP, COG and EOP.

Can you hit the button for me? So we're gonna talk about COOP, COG, and EOP. So our emergency operations plan is what is called the EOP. That's basically our foundation document. That dictates how the city is going to handle and coordinate any type of threat or hazard.

So this is what we kinda call the bible. Right? So it tells everybody what their roles are, how we're gonna do things, how we prioritize our resources, how we work together, who we work together with. And it's broken down into a base plan, operational chapters, and then annexes. So those annexes really get into that operational tactical sphere where the roles and responsibilities are more clearly defined for each of those partners that have a role for that particular threat or hazard that we're talking about in that annex.

Continuity of operations is a big one. We do an assessment with city leadership to determine what those essential functions are for the city. And then this continuity structure basically says how we're going to deliver those essential functions regardless of what's going on. So in the event, you know, we have a power outage, the city still has to operate and maintain those functions. How are we gonna maintain daily operations and handle the incident and make sure that those essential city services continue?

That's what COOP is in a nutshell. And then we have COG, which is continuity of government. So how we are actually making government continue to run, which is separate from COOP. It's a little bit similar but you can't have those essential services run if you don't have a government behind it to keep it running. So they do overlap a lot but they're two very distinct sets of plans. So like I said earlier, we don't have the capacity to do every plan every year. We do have to prioritize and really think about the core plans that need to get updated. And as a department we decided that those are the three we're going to focus on for the next bit.

Thank you.

So now we're gonna go into the winter storm. So we're gonna focus on the planning, preparedness, response, and recovery for this event. So when we talk about preparedness, it's largely pre event. This really kind of comes down to planning, training, and exercises before something happens. So we had our 2025 winter season after action. So that went over everything that we learned from the last season and what we were looking to do in what's called corrective actions to fix it for the next time that this event or something similar were to happen. We conduct after actions after almost every major event or incident. We're always looking to improve and we're always looking to do better. So that's a standard. We had the citywide exercise which the director mentioned.

We tend to kind of forecast what we're going into for the next season. So the 2025 exercise scenario was based on a winter and ice storm. So that was a good opportunity for our departments and our partners to come together and kind of talk through how they were going to handle this type of incident for the city. We conducted our winter weather tune up. So that's something that we do annually.

So we bring public works together with other departments and we kind of give them a refresher before the citywide exercise that says, hey here's the new things that are happening when it comes to public works with snow plan. Here's legislative changes that impact how we're gonna do things. And it gives people an opportunity to kind of put their heads together and work together to kind of help figure out you know potential solutions for things that were left you know unanswered for in previous you know seasons or if something came up in between the two seasons and we want to have a plan for it. We also provided an opportunity for our EOC representatives to come and get like refresher of their own to make sure they understood what their roles were, their responsibilities, and get used to the EOC systems and softwares that they would be using. Because when we move into an EOC environment, it mirrors their day activities, but it's done a little differently.

So in order to have that seamless coordination, we needed to make sure that they understood what they were doing and how they were going to do it. And then right before the event, after we got some credible forecast from the National Weather Service, we conducted those pre event operational coordination calls. So that says, hey guys, something's coming. This is how we're gonna handle it. This is kinda how we're gonna set things up. And then based off of the totality of circumstances and what actually happens with this winter event, this is how we're gonna handle it going forward. It's kind of like a game setter and expectation setting. So when we actually activated the EOC, we started off at enhanced level which basically means we're doing extreme monitoring. Right? We're not pulling in people yet.

We're kind of evaluating everything we're taking a look at what resources are needed. That was on the Friday before that next day. We actually moved to a partial activation, which means we were bringing people in to perform some of those emergency essential functions and those city coordinating functions in order to respond to this winter storm. So our EOC is made up of senior policy group, a red team, and a blue team. And so the red team and blue teams are basically shifts.

So the red team's up first and then the blue team comes up second. And what that does is when you're having continuous operations, it allows people an opportunity to, you know, work and then have a rest period. So when you're running, you know, through, you can't be burning people out. So we alternate red team and blue team and we did that for a total of 11 operational periods for this specific event. So at all times twenty fourseven three sixty five you had somebody from the red team, the blue team, or emergency management skeleton crew with on call crews managing this event.

And how long are those shifts? You said 11

operational There's 11 operational periods and they vary based off of where we're at in an incident. So I think the longest we had was about eleven hours or so. And within that eleven hours we allowed for a two hour transition period. So that way when the red team is finishing up and the blue team is coming on, there's no gap in information sharing. Everybody's in alignment for what we need to do for the next operational period moving forward.

But they were approximately eleven hours for the most part. Every operational period had incident objectives that were set by senior policy group and their priorities. So first and foremost, we always focus on, you know, protection of life. We had effective coordination and situational awareness, timely and responsive support to external customers, maintaining those essential city services, that drawback to COOP, which is why it's also important. Tracking, managing, and coordinating those resources effectively, and then maintaining public order.

So that was kind of like the overarching goals that the senior policy group gave us for this entire event. So those objectives carry through all of those operational periods. So when we talk about staffing and in person and what that means, this is a basic overview of what that looks like. So we had policy and EOC management. We had the joint information center which basically takes all of the public information to the city and from the city and puts it in a coordinated fashion.

We had our operations section, so we focused on infrastructure, transportation and parking, public safety, public health and medical support, health and human services. We had our planning section which was staffed by our emergency management staff. We had logistics out to make sure that the people that were working could eat. We had finance and admins and that includes employee support making sure that the employees knew what was going on, that all of their communications were handled appropriately. We also had the call center activated and we had support from our department, police, mayor's office, transportation, and community services help staff that call center.

And then we had allied agency representatives. So we had BGE, our state emergency management department. We had the Maryland National Guard come out. This also just kind of reflects that there's so many different moving pieces and so many different agencies and stakeholders that we need to coordinate with. And they help support the city during most of our incidents that were at a partial activation for or higher.

So looking at this slide, all of those individuals that you saw on the previous slide, this kind of shows you where they are relative in an org structure. And so this is important because it shows that one we're following what the national standard is for incident management. And two, it shows how we are coordinating across and up and down. So all of these people are involved. We're not operating in a silo.

You know, we're all working together. There's an organization structure that you can see and you can see where your role is and how that role impacts and relates to other roles in this structure in order to manage any incident or event. So like I said, it's using a national standard. It makes sure that the roles are clear and effective among all of our departments and agencies. And the good thing about this structure is that it's scalable. So back when I said that we were starting at enhanced for activation, our org chart didn't look like this because we did not need to build it out that far. But we had the ability to, so by the time we went to partial activation this is what you got. But the rules stayed the same, right? The communication stayed the same. You just got to build it out a little bit differently to meet the needs of the incident.

You're done with that. Yep. Lot lot of work for seven people. Lot of work for seven people. Wanna invite Dave up. Dave Mandel.

Thanks.

Thank you. Good evening. Dave Mandel, deputy director. I feel like one of the words most used so far, particularly with MK's portion of this presentation, is coordination. There's so much coordination going on on so many levels.

She talked about the departments and and all the the details involved in preparation and activation. Andrew's gonna be up next talking about the integration of the call center and how that worked with coordination. But what I'm gonna discuss is some of the higher level coordination with the senior policy group and the mayor and the decisions that were made at a very high level during the storm. As you can see there on the slide, the mayor, upon the declaration of state of emergency, local and state, requested national guard personnel and equipment, and I'm gonna talk more about that in the next two slides after this one. He also ordered the implementation, excuse me, of phase three of the snow emergency response plan.

And what that does is that restricts travel to essential travel only, and it also prescribes the exact guidelines in terms of how long the response will take to clear snow emergency routes, snow connector routes, and the tertiary roads. We all know those terms now, I'm sure, after this storm experience. So that set the tone for the response that we had as a city and certainly in the emergency operations center. Other key discussions among the senior policy group, and you can see the members of the senior policy group on the right side of that slide there, government operating status was a major point of discussion. The city was closed.

We say the city was closed. City offices were closed. When city offices are closed, the emergency operation center, by definition, is always open twenty four seven, three sixty five. Emergency response will always happen. So offices may have been closed on that Monday, the twenty sixth.

And then we were at a two hour delay the next day, Tuesday, and then on time after that with liberal leave in effect throughout the week. So that was a decision at the top levels of government by by the administration after discussion among the senior policy group. You you also know about the free use of city garages. That was in place from Sunday the twenty fifth all the way to I'm sorry, Saturday the twenty fourth all the way to Sunday the first over a week to give folks the opportunity to move their vehicles off of the snow emergency route so the plows could do their work again. I'm seeing the nods because I know we all know having gone through the storm how important that was.

And you you also know about the $5 Park Place garage deal to to encourage folks to to use the garages and and keep the streets as clear as possible. Emergency management also coordinated the purchase of hotel rooms for the entire city. And I think, Kyle, you're gonna get into more of that in a minute, I won't I won't dwell on that. But that was something that was authorized and approved at the highest levels of of city government, that senior policy group. Several departments took advantage of that of that opportunity.

We'll talk more about that. Finance enabled a cost code in the system so the city can track all the costs related to this storm. We do not think reimbursement will happen to be clear per the guidelines that the FEMA and the federal government laid down in terms of what is eligible for reimbursement and what is not. But we're always prepared should something change. Next slide please.

Okay, I mentioned the mutual aid. Now, the first thing we did, in terms of mutual aid, we always have to exhaust all avenues and resources and contractors and partnerships that we have at the local level before we go up to the state level to request additional assets. And that's something we very rarely have to do, but this was an extraordinary storm. And and we had to do that with this particular storm with regard to loaders and and different types of plows. We made that request, and the state highway administration filled that request just the next day with with very short notice.

And the city used these assets for three days, as you can see there on the slide, just to give a little extra time on the roads with these crews and get the roads as clear as possible towards the end of that first week of the storm. So so we use what we call the my EMAC. It's the Maryland Intrastate Mutual Aid System. System. It's within the state of Maryland only.

There's a national compact as well but this is just the Maryland state compact where we look to our partners and then we look to the state if we can't get those assets any other way. And that's how we filled that need during this particular storm. Also using my EMAC and this emergency declaration as I mentioned, we were able to request the National Guard. The mayor requested the National Guard for high clearance vehicle support and EOC coordination. The National Guard was amazing.

They were doing everything we asked them to do and some things we didn't ask them to do. We'd find them doing missions that we that were helpful that we couldn't have even expected. So we were thrilled, I I would say, I think it's fair to say, by their by their service and support. What they did most of the time was provide transportation to facilitate staff rotations, especially in the warming center. The director mentioned twenty four hour, eight days of twenty four hour activations.

Those folks were socked in, right, like the rest of us. With the snow having fallen and then they'd spend obviously long hours in the warming center. Folks had to get home, new folks had to come report, know had to work that out. So there was a period of time where only the guard, the National Guard was able to facilitate those transports. Also moved critical essential personnel to the EOC, you can imagine, for the red and blue team shift, as M.

K. Was mentioning, and other transports needed for essential operations. We were prepared to use them for more should we need to shelter, should we need to do a mass evacuation. We had contingency plans and in fact we said get ready, know, after we do a shelter we're gonna need you to move all these cots in a certain place. So we had more contingency plans that we didn't need to use. But we didn't make great use of them to transport personnel mostly. They were great to work with.

So Dave was in charge of the mass evacuation if we needed to based on, you know, no power, no electric power, etcetera. So you see that big vehicle that they have there. We were prepared to move mass amounts of people with that in combination with our transportation. So we had a plan together for that in case we had lost.

And a lot of cots. We said how many cots can we fit in the back of that thing? So we we had all that figured out.

Okay. I wanna invite Andrew. AJ?

Good evening everyone. Andrew Widekin. I am a emergency management planner for Office of Emergency Management. So we have the Annapolis call center activated for this event as part of our joint information center to support Neapolitan's during this winter storm, and it responds to non emergency inquiries from the public. So the JIC is kinda serves as like the central nexus for all news inquiries that we might receive, and then also allows us to do public messaging to keep the public informed.

So mostly it's made up of public information officials from various city departments. And the Annapolis call center is part of that JIC. So OEM staff and the call center staff received 745 calls over the course of this entire winter storm event, and a lot of the calls were in relation to plowing sidewalks, parking garages, and then icy roads and road salt. So a lot of these calls were put into a tracker for public works around to. It was a much slower process because it was not a traditional snowstorm as we typically see here in Maryland.

It wasn't dry snow event. It wasn't a wet snow event. It was ice blocks, concrete snow. So it did take a while to eventually get around to a lot of the streets and a lot of the neighborhoods within the city.

I wanna applaud you for the fact that you were categorizing categorizing the calls. So at one point in time, I called and said, how many people from this street have contacted you because I kept urging them to and you were able to very quickly send me a breakdown of, you know, 17 callers from this two block radius, which I appreciated. That's really helpful for us for future incidents so that I will now know kind of where I want to spend some more focus if we have another snow event and making sure that that street is, you know, a higher priority. Or I know that there was some question from some of the plow drivers like is this an emergency route or not? Not marked that way on our original map, but now it is.

People were wondering like this, we were told that the street's wide enough so we don't have to move our cars. And now we have to move our cars. So that was really helpful information. So I applaud you all for those kind of details that you were able to provide us very quickly. Thank you.

And we had a record setting day, think 155 calls in one day.

Sounds right. Yeah.

With that being said, if you don't mind, I think the rest of the council members may appreciate something like that. Just knowing what calls were taken in our ward. Maybe it's sometime whenever you're available. Knowing what calls were from our ward as well as if you wouldn't mind. I know we didn't receive the slides but if we could get this, that would also be helpful if you could send that to us to add to our drive that we have. The slides.

We didn't get in.

Sorry, continuing on. So many of the calls that came through the call center were following the end of snowfall for the snowstorm, primarily during recovery efforts between Monday, January 26 and Friday, Friday, January thirtieth twenty twenty six, as you can see on the graph on the far right. The call center received 566 efforts calls of the 745 total during this five day period. And we had staff from different city departments that worked the call center during these days where the call volume was at its peak, and they received just in time training. So they had little or no call center experience at all, and they were faced with a tall task and they did not waver from the challenge that was presented in front of them.

So, and again this event that we had, we received the highest call volume of all time that the call center has ever received for this event. And as I said before, it was a slow process because the snowstorm was much different compared to a traditional dry or wet snow event.

Higher than COVID.

Higher

than And I I wanna give a a shout out to a lot of city employees who helped us out in the call center. As you can see, it's a lot of moving parts. It's only seven of us and we're managing everything. So we needed some help. Transportation came in with about a half dozen folks. The mayor's office sent down some folks. APD sent over someone. So I'd like to shout out and thank them for their help in the call center making that work.

Great.

And we have to just thank you, director and the staff. All jokes aside, y'all really did you at, I felt that you did your best. And I think for the response we heard we do have to debrief about everything. But secondly to that regard, don't think frugally when it comes to asking what you think you all need. Because we're talking about these grants and how you've been receiving in the Ks all these years. It's about time, especially seeing what we just dealt with and knowing the environmental impacts to come, that you request what is required to keep you all functioning well.

A pre thank you for your support. Okay Kyle.

Like Dave mentioned, decision made by the senior policy group was about essential employees and accommodations. So we believe that essential employees carry an elevated level of duty and responsibility in serving residents of Annapolis. Hotel accommodations for essential employees improves the coordination and streamlines the decision making while also enhancing employee safety during our EOC activations. Our office has signed agreements with the Fairfield Inn which is right across from the police department and the Hilton Garden Inn off West Street for standard room rates to utilize during emergency situations. And on your right there, there is a by department breakdown of hotel costs.

So we coordinated all of that. There was a total about 50 bookings that we made. We did use every department paid for their own. We're doing cost codes and looking at what we're going do and how we're going to charge it to the winter storm if that is the case. But the total city cost overall was $12,010.68

So that second paragraph we talked about improves coordination and streamlines decision making. That's OEM speak for if they were home, they might not be able to get back to the city of Annapolis. So we had to keep them in hotels so they would be ready for their shifts. And that's the premise behind all of this.

Does that 12,000 include feeding them Or just the hotel accommodation?

Just the hotels.

Hotel had breakfast though.

Yeah but we, in EOC operations we pay for food, make sure everybody was fed because they couldn't get out. Another

big focus for the storm is supporting our vulnerable populations. So on the left there, the special assistance roster. It's a registry maintained by OEM. It identifies residents who may need additional support before or during during or after emergencies. So this is voluntary and confidential. OEM and its partners conduct special assistant roster checks during the storm and register new throughout the event. And residents can sign up by calling the OEM main line at (410) 216-9167 or emailing oemannapolis dot gov.

And that's for anybody that's like needs dialysis or

Special assistance Special assistance of any kind. Correct. And we did receive calls over that and we coordinated within the EOC to make sure that people got to appointments if needed or got medication if there was something from the pharmacy that they needed.

Thank you.

And you mentioned food and folks who work and you've seen some eleven hour shifts in the EOC and we had to make sure everybody was fed. So we did get considerable donations of food. We had donations from Chick fil A, Mission Barbecue, Knights of Columbus, and Papa John's. I wanna give all of them a shout out for helping us

fantastic.

I had a quick question about the volunteers for the snow. We do wanna thank our Navy and Shipman for supporting us there. Now how were they dispersed in the city? Was it mainly in a specific area? Was it a on call? You know, we need you over here today. How has that been? I'll share why in a moment if you want.

I can speak to that. So they had some limitations in that they weren't allowed to drive vehicles around the city during the height of the storm. So the strategy with the volunteer midshipment has always been to shovel in the area around Gate 1 where it's heavily residential, densely packed in and there's so many properties and folks in need that use their services. They had more than enough work and they went out in shifts. Mostly on the Sunday the twenty fifth when the snow fell.

They were in teams and they did three hour shifts throughout the day. So I think there were three three hour shifts. A total of 15 or 17 individuals if I'm recalling correctly. There were a couple cases where people would call into the call center and say hey I have someone particularly in need. They're maybe unable to shovel their walk and if it was sort of in the vicinity we'd call over there and say hey can you direct the midshipmen two or three blocks away, know within reason to go for this specific address. So we did target that as best we could. But for the most part they had to follow their, obviously their military schedule with formation and certain points where they had to take care of that. And then they would shovel after that in the area around Gate 1.

I already asked because I know a lot of these public housing communities, and this is something I'll be working to change, they were barely held liable for them not shoveling the sidewalks and some of the driveways for the elderly population, particularly in my ward. And so I think it's important that if it's not gonna be the midshipman, that if we do have volunteers, that we do our best to maybe send them out in the other parts of the city and not just in Ward 1.

Just going back to the middle piece. So just to reiterate on the winter relief program. During this event, the warming center was open for two zero four continuous hours of operation. During that time we had four sixty four patron visits. So we do sign in sheets every activation, so every twelve hour period, morning and night.

So four sixty four people visited the warming center at that time. Or there were four sixty four visits. A lot of those patrons ended up staying most of the time, if not all of the time. And then multiple activations exceeded 31 plus patrons which required an additional staff member to be called in. And our staffing cost just for that eight day period was $8,740

So Alderman you talked about helping the elderly and volunteering. Things got so hectic and we couldn't find someone to actually shovel out a senior. So actually Patrick went out there and took care of it. So we have to be agile, we have to be fluid in the office of emergency management. So in the sake of time, I'm gonna go ahead and move on to the last part of this and talk about messaging priorities And invite Katrina up here sitting next to me.

Lucky.

Okay. I'm Karina Rosenbaum. I'm the training exercise and outreach coordinator and public information officer. So, I'm going to talk a bit about what some of our messaging priorities were before, throughout, and as we were cleaning up after the storm. So prior to the event, we were focusing on making sure that we were communicating the forecasts, the hazards, and what people could do to stay safe.

So we're sharing national weather service information, cold weather protection tips, know, making sure people knew what what to do far ahead of the storm so that they had adequate time to adequate time to take action. Throughout the storm we were focusing on making sure that we're informing residents of service continuity and providing timely updates on things like city closures, the evolving sidewalk rules, updates on garage parking, transit, and anything else that we are seeing that we're getting a lot of calls about or that we're seeing a lot of interest about. And we are also focusing on operational transparency. Doing our best to highlight what was going on in the EOC demonstrates some of the work that various agencies were doing both to build trust but also to combat rumors and misinformation and provide a little bit more insight into what was happening in the Yosee. So prior to the event, about five days forecast updates and some preparedness actions just sharing that there was, you know, the possibility of this storm coming.

Once the governor put out a state of preparedness, that was something that we echoed as well. And then on Friday the twenty third, that's when the National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning and a cold weather advisory and we made sure to push that across all of our social media platforms and our various messaging platforms. And on Saturday when the phase two parking restriction was made we put out a voice call that went across to all residents making sure that everybody knew when that parking restriction was going to go into effect. So when I say we're putting it out across all platforms, we have a Facebook account, X, and Nextdoor. And then we're also sending out texts, mass texts, emails, and voice calls through the alert Annapolis Mass Notification System.

And we put out alerts through our mobile app, the Prepare Minneapolis app. So on Sunday once the snowfall started, we reposted a video put out by the mayor's office with Chief Simmons talking about some the things that people could do to get ready. And that was something that residents And really continued to highlight what was going on throughout, through the EOC. And as the as we're moving into cleanup and recovery, we're making sure to share any updates to parking especially if we're seeing a high influx of calls come in or seeing a high influx of questions coming in from residents. We're doing our best to be proactive in addressing those concerns through our messaging.

And alongside all the content that we were putting out, we made sure to be amplifying messages from the mayor's office and from other essential departments as much as possible. So to show a little bit of our reach, Facebook was the platform identified here because it has the most representative and the most comprehensive data available. However, these statistics are pretty much mirrored across all the platforms. So the content that received the most engagement was pretty similar across all platforms. So across the period of the storm from the twenty first to the thirtieth, we put out 14 different posts not including content that we're re sharing.

And we saw almost 40,000 unique viewers taking a look at those. And that was almost about 67,000 total views. So what that really showed is that people are sharing and revisiting our content. They're coming back and looking at it and making sure that they're getting the right information, making note of those tips. People were engaging with it, commenting, letting us know that they appreciated what we were putting out.

And what we saw by the top post is that residents really seem to enjoy getting that inside look at what was going on in the EOC. Our top post was highlighting our call center operations. So we shared some photos of our folks in the call center taking calls and explaining what that process looks like. And I think for a lot of the residents who are kind of just hearing a voice on the other side of the phone, this was really helpful in showing the behind the scenes. And these are just highlights of some of the photos and some of the images that we put out throughout the week.

So we made sure to highlight our, the National Guard, the governor's visit to the EOC, and all the different activities that were happening within the EOC and within you know the call center and

the event.

Awesome.

Thank you so much. That is exactly what I wanted. I set out a few weeks ago and talked with Kevin and said I really wanted to have an overview so that the public really knows what you guys do, how you do it, and why you do it. And I think it's really important for the public to understand how our public safety divisions work and work for them when they have complaints or kudos or whatnot. I really think that you putting a face strategic plan behind all of that is really helpful for people to understand how our city works.

So I appreciate all the effort you put in. It was a really great slideshow. And can you share that slide deck with us and the rest of the council? That would be fantastic. I think that it's good for us as a resource when we do go in and are meeting with our constituents to be able to say, this is exactly what goes into some of the planning that you see. Whether it's fun festivals and parades or not so fun snowstorm events, other type of weather events. That we have the support of your staff and the knowledge and expertise of your staff really paying attention to every detail. So thank you.

Thank you. And I wanna thank the Public Safety Committee for their support, not only now but over the years that I've been here. And also like to thank my public safety partners, the fire department and police department, Chief O'Malley and Chief Megaz, because I think that we have about the best public safety in Maryland.

I agree. The three. I agree. Do I have anything from my colleagues? Anything to say or add? All right, thank you so much. I appreciate you all coming. And Thank enjoy the rest of your evening.

Thank you.

I will entertain a motion to adjourn.

I move to adjourn.

Second. Second. Oh, second. All in favor say aye.

Aye and blessings.

Aye, alright. Meeting adjourned.