Dallas County Emergency Management Commission - Regular Meeting

Take roll off there. If we can give introductions and roll calls.

All right. Let's call the meeting to order. First, you want to do that first?

Yeah.

All right. We'll do introductions. Clint Robinson, Lockheed Fire.

AJ Seeley, I'm the Emergency Management Director. And then I'm actually going to go down by jurisdiction name so it's easier for those online. So we'll start with Adele. Hearing none about. Hearing none, Clive. Dallas Center.

Hi Cal, Dallas Center Fire. John Lillian, Dallas Center Fire.

Very good. Dawson. DeSoto.

Ted Davis, City Council.

Thank you, Dexter. T.J. Morehouse, City Council of Dexter Fire.

Thank you, Granger.

Granger?

Probably on there. Okay.

Grimes?

That's impaired. Linden? He was off mute there for a second. Oh, Grimes. Gotcha, Grimes. WENDON.

Am I technically supposed to do that?

Thank God. PERRY.

Dirk Cavanaugh, mayor. REDFIELD. SHORTS. URBANDALE.

MIKE CARDWELL, URBANDALE FIRE DEPARTMENT.

Joe Herman, Mayor. We already got Waukee, West Des Moines.

Craig Lou, City of West Des Moines.

Woodward. Nothing heard. Sheriff. From Lincoln. Good. Supervisors. Tim Chapman. All right. We got Carl Harris from Bowdoin, just walked in the room. And then Grant, if you want to... Introduce yourself as a new employee for us. Oh, you want to give your quick background?

Hi, I'm Brianna. Louder.

The speakers have to pick you up.

I'm Brianna from Omaha. I moved out to Des Moines about three years ago when I got a job at the Des Moines airport as an operations supervisor. I oversaw day to day operations there, respond to emergencies. The last big emergency that I responded to was a Delta aircraft that actually slid off the runway in the middle of a blizzard.

All right. Very good.

I'm sure everyone diligently read through all 199 pages of packet this time around. So take a motion and a second for agenda approval. Second. All in favor?

Aye.

Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Any open forum items for anybody?

I have one thing we had the house fire. Last month outside of town and we had a firefighter that was injured, which. And so that spurred a. and they they're all the only finding was that we need and I know some of the other departments need better accountability board and there was talks in the past of like I think the county like everything the county getting the same one it all worked together I just want to see if that's something we could go forward agenda for the Ellis fire chiefs tonight

I don't know if there's grants I'm not sure or something, but we can decide on a consistent Accountability board that's probably step one and up to we can opportunity I think they have fire chief meetings tonight.

Maybe I wish for the accountability of the tag system that works with your system in your trucks, right?

I'll crow we don't use the accountability boards like you guys have I know several the Metro Department what the county chiefs did

A long ago, several years ago, we outdates you.

We just need something so that way we're not going to come back and anybody else has it. That was the only thing they had. That's great.

All right. Approval of minutes from January 15th. Take a motion and a second. Second. All in favor? All right. Next item is payroll changes.

All right. So these were sent out with the packet. These are part of the county's HR pay plan. So this is just pay raises, which includes a cost of living adjustment and then also a step increase based on performance. So again, this is in line with the county's structure. I'd be happy to take questions if there are any.

Motion for that motion. Okay, I got a motion to have a 2nd for the payroll changes. Okay. Any other discussion. Take a motion or take the vote. Please all in favor.

Hi.

Hi. Uh, bulk in Dallas County, I will alert procedures.

All right, so I'll try to be brief on this. The. We've talked about our Alert Iowa program several years now. So Alert Iowa has a few different features. One of them, the main thing we try to push in the preparedness environment is subscriber-based alerting. So you can sign up for your city. You can elect to get emergency alerts for that location. That's sign up, right? There's also reverse 911, which allows us to reverse call all the landlines that are geolocated. As you might expect, that number of landlines is quickly dwindling in today's era. So we have about 10,000 of those still remaining, but most of that's in a corporate environment. And then the last thing that we are able to do in the system is wireless emergency. That's similar to the tornado warning that you get on your phone. We can send those for things like civil emergencies, whether it be curfew orders, law enforcement warnings, hazmat warnings, that type We first used this in my almost eight years of being here in 2024, and it worked fairly well. We've also used it more recently in the last five months or so on an incident up kind of by Boone County line, but the state actually set that due to some technical issues. So it's a really great feature set for us. One of the things that we've long been aware of is the gap or challenges associated with the cities that cross Polk and Dallas counties. So he worked with Polk County probably for the last nine months to really work out all the bugs associated with this process and try to figure out how we can minimize duplicate alerting but still reach the intended audience. So functionally, the very top level, what this continues to allow us to do is dispatch centers We'll be able to send subscriber-based alerts, so that's like those that signed up with the text message, but the more advanced options like reverse 911 and wireless emergency alerts will remain restricted to EMA staff. Historically, that's just been internal to us, EMA staff. Um, we would recommend that this expands and includes both Polk and Dallas counties. So that when there's an incident here, the county line that happens to cross over. They would be allowed access to do some alerting inside of Dallas and vice versa us for them. So, we've worked out procedure wise, um, the criteria for what it means for an actual eligible alert. We've worked all of those things out. So, the policy before you today really kind of. codifies and approves all of those processes, and us to continue to work with Polk and put this kind of plan in motion.

So we've got a motion on the floor to approve the policy that is in the packet, which also includes having AJ be the point on policy and making changes to that. Motion on the floor. Do I have a second? Second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Anyone opposed? All right. Discussion on the outdoor siren project.

All right. So this is kind of a new topic item to us. Polk County approached me very recently in the last couple weeks, and they have been considering a Adjustment in their testing schedule from Saturdays at noon. Wednesdays at 11 a.m. so this has been discussed in a lot of subcommittees in Polk County, but was formally presented at their commission. Yesterday functionally what this would do for us. So the testing remains the same. We're still going to do once a month. And I'm not asking for action today, but something that you would consider. And as we move forward, be open to, I think it's really important that we're all together in a single strategy, because as you could see on the map there, which I only picked small quadrant, we have about 85,000 people that live in the West Metro inside of Dallas County. And if we have more than one policy regarding activation or testing, it gets really confusing for people. and also for our agents. So what I would ask you to consider over the next couple months before our next commission meeting is adjusting that monthly test to Wednesdays at 11 a.m. This will allow us to more effectively have support staff in office and in the field to actually monitor for activation. So one of the challenges we have today is getting a person to each of the siren sites And we'll occasionally work with fire departments to really force people to go do that. But if we just moved it to Wednesday, we have public works employees, other staff that are more often available and would really help to streamline that process.

So that's kind of the reason for the recommendation.

There's some other alignment why we chose Wednesday at 11, things like the National Weather Service weekly radio test, the National Weather Radio Test. And so it would align with that on the first Wednesday of the month. Again, we're not advocating for a once a week test, but just once a month. But it would at least be in alignment with that. With that, I'm happy to take questions at the moment. If you have any concerns as well.

It's going to be the expectation, too, that if it's not people that are in the room, their decision, they go back to their respective councils or whoever needs to approve them. That would be the only other ask out of this group.

Absolutely. On the first Wednesday? First Wednesday at 11 a.m.

They choose 11 instead of noon.

Because it aligns with the National Weather Service.

Those old people grew up with the new whistle. Yeah. Woodworks goes off every Saturday. Is that something we've got programmed into it? That would have to be a local program.

I'm not familiar. As we've talked in prior meetings, one of the things that as we roll out potentially this outdoor warning center project, some of the justification for us to do that was to bring everybody into alignment. And I think, again, if there's concern or holdouts about converting, I think it will be more messy from a public reception point to warnings. if we have like a spotty implementation of it. So to me, it's kind of all or nothing. And I'm happy to have conversations with whoever I need to have conversations with at each city level to make sure that folks are on board.

How soon are they wanting to make the move?

Yeah, so if we get approval at our next commission meeting, which I believe is September, the actual implementation effective date would be January 2027. So one of the things that I've talked with Polk about already is specific to messaging. They're pretty certain they're going down this path. So at some point, they're going to be doing public messaging to say, this is what our adjustment is. I'd prefer if we're going to do it, that we do it in the same time frame. If we look at prior to the derecho, when we didn't include 70 mile an hour winds, We constantly faced issues at the agency with people not understanding what warnings meant, why the sirens are going off. I don't want to say the problems have gone away entirely, but it's certainly a lot better when we have a consistent activity policy.

Any other discussion on that?

We'll sustain us on the siren we're in.

Don't know. It has been submitted, which we're basically at this point just kind of waiting for FEMA's final review and approval. We've been waiting for six months. I'd love to tell you tomorrow. No change. Okay. Federal government, that's all I need to say. Yeah, you may have heard they did shut down for a while. Yeah.

All right. Comprehensive emergency plan update.

All right, so this is something we do every year as part of our statutory requirements is to adopt the comprehensive plan. This is the last of the five-year cycle that we're on that actually makes all of our plans into the kind of revised usable format that we've really merged to. So you can see the ESFs there on the screen that are for adoption. I would suggest that we adopt in blanket. Prepared all these and worked through the LAPC to get approval on their end. So it's really just waiting for commission adoption.

Do you have a motion? No. Motion to adopt ESF 4, ESF 9, 10, 13, and RSF natural and cultural affair.

I have a second. I'll second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Open meetings law.

All right. This is the easier of the two legislative things we'll discuss. One of the newer things that came out, this is a standard practice we've always been doing, but the legislature said that on an annual basis, we have to designate where we're going to post our meeting agendas. So the bottom of the Commission can be approved. It indicates that we'll post it at this building on the front door, and we'll do this essentially once a year because that's what the code requires. Looking for a motion to approve the front door of the human service campus as the designated posting. Second.

Discussion? All in favor?

Aye. Aye. Aye.

Now the fun one.

Alright, so this is a, there's a presentation in here. There's quite a bit of financial and context information. So I think what's probably best is we go through this. Then afterwards, if there are questions, I can roll back. So I included this bill as part of the packet. It's really long. Important things are, at the last page, the property tax bill includes some implications for local emergency management that are going to require us to do. I do want to reiterate that this information is still relatively new. This was passed basically the last day of session, and it's only been a couple weeks since then. So we're still waiting on some legal clarification. But the way that it's written is Pretty strict. So this is really intended to just be a high level summary with some impact. Kind of walk through this specific section that. Kind of implicates emergency management. That says for each fiscal year, beginning on or after July 1, 2027. That'd be next year, July 1. And in addition to any applicable property tax levy. Great limitations provided by law. the sum of the property tax levied by all governmental entities for the purpose of funding the services and operation of the Commission shall not exceed an amount equal to 103% of the sum of property tax dollars levied by all governmental entities for the purpose of funding the services and operation of the Emergency Management Agency and Commission for the immediately preceding fiscal year. So to kind of break this down, for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2027. That would mean that it's fiscal year 2028. We have not done that budget yet. We will do that budget in December this year, and it will be done by February 20 of next year. Basically, this bill, when it says shall not exceed an amount equal to 103% of the sum of the property tax dollars levied. So that amount for us this year is $453,000. Next year, fiscal year 27, we kept it level because we had some excess funds and we're doing the fiscally responsible thing by keeping the levy down using the funds that we have on hand. regardless of the governmental entity. So it's important to note that there's some commissions in Iowa that use different funding mechanisms. So like they ask cities for money and the cities each contribute. We use just the general fund at Dallas County and the tax is equal across all residents, it includes city and county. So functionally the taxes are being levied on the same amount of people, but the important part of this bill is regardless of how we adjust our funding mechanism, We are locked in at the amount of taxation that we will receive next year, which is 450,000. Plus 3%. So, uh, this is going into low. It's actually, it's signed into law at this point and, um, it will impact us until they change. So this is not a 1 year problem. This is a problem that we will face. continuously There's I think 80 some more pages of this bill it includes more stringent limitations on other at the city level you may have seen Things like a hundred and two percent growth on the prior year in some of those cases it includes things like allowances for growth on new valuation maybe there's benefit exemptions for employees and

Ours does not include any of that.

So it is a very strict. 103%. I'll give you an idea of what that looks like over that slide. So, our fiscal year 27, which I'm just going to call it is. The coming year starts in about 6 weeks. Is we have 453,000 in revenue from taxation. Pulling in about 51,500 grants. And 46,000 from our commission fund. So our commission fund is money that we don't spend.

It does not go back to the county general fund. It stays with the commission.

We spent 46,000 dollars in the coming year. To keep the levy rate as low as possible. Our actual expenditures for next year are 550,500 dollars. So if we don't have this $46,000 going forward, you can see where there's a pretty sizable shortfall. So projecting out into the next year, fiscal year 28, this is where the 103% limitation is applied. We started with 453. Next year, we can levy a maximum, fiscal year 28, we can levy a maximum amount of $466,590. We still expect to receive some money from grants, about $41,000. That leaves us with a deficit of about $55,000 of our programs, about a 10% cut. I did include just very basic, basically the same salary raises we got this year and next year, just to show if we change nothing else, we're still above by that amount. I should stop here. Any questions thus far?

Automatically do what the county does correct? They give a 2% or 3% raise.

Yeah, so the commission still has to adopt it and the commission still has to have the funds from taxation.

Always done that the years on this, we followed whatever the county.

Yeah, and so this is just kind of projection.

So is it a bad deal that we've taken money out to supplement next fiscal year? We probably shouldn't do that, shouldn't we? Correct, yeah. It's going to make it worse on this 103%.

That's exactly right. Yeah, we're basically being punished for using money. There's no way to correct it.

No way to correct it.

The tax rates have been set for next year, which is the baseline here.

Mm-hmm.

There is, obviously, I have tons of ideas with how we can help navigate this, but 1 of the things that we still don't know is the outdoor warnings project. If the project goes through, there's a potential that our baseline for next year. Is actually increased because cities are going to be providing us with a supplemental. Contribution to provide actually their portion of the cost match. or for sirens. So that would increase us by about 93,000. So that would solve the issue if we got this grant. Now, granted, we don't know that we will get it, and I don't know that we have a lot of influence. Isn't that pass-through money? It is pass-through, but it still counts, though? Because the way the law is written is if it's raised by taxation, it would count. So if we get the grant, basically it's a non-issue. We'll actually probably levy less than the additional 3%, because we won't actually need that full amount.

And we better be careful not taking the 3% of it. Yes. It'll catch us in the end, probably.

Some of the challenges with the way they wrote this, so if we ever want to do anything as an agency, so $453,000, our next year's budget, 3% of that is about $14,000, if my math is correct offhand. Our personnel benefits alone have raised by about $12,000 or $13,000. So it leaves us about $1,000 of wiggle room. So if you look at ever buying a vehicle or ever upgrading something, ever fixing a problem that we identify, we're going to have to raise money for an unknown amount of time at $1,000 a year. Family suppers? Yeah, it's a lot of brownies at bake sales to raise money to make sure we have the funds to do what we want. So to the next point, I do expect that we'll have a little bit of money because of a staff vacancy for an extended period of time this year. So we'll have about $30,000 excess in our carryover, which means that we have some additional time Into fiscal year twenty eight when this actually goes into play that we can start. We can draw down on some of the excess funds in our carry over.

To give you an idea of what amount of money we have in here.

All just the white box. Not actually white. It's great. So, our beginning fund balance requirement, the amount that we have allocated to projects is two hundred and six thousand five hundred. We keep 25% as a kind of operating fund because the county pays us after the first of the quarter or after the last day of the quarter. So we have to basically float our expenses until we get that money. We have a little bit of retention for emergency management performance grant and then likewise for hazard mitigation projects. And then we also have things that are on outlay like vehicles, for example. So this is what our current fund balance looks like. And like I said, I think we'll have about 30,000 extra that you would not be penalized for using, but it would buy us a little bit of extra as we figure this out. All right, this is where it gets a little bit more clear on what the impact is. So in just my initial budget estimate, we could cut nearly all, and I'll put in quotes, consumable spending. So things like office supplies, minor equipment, fuels, vehicle repairs, cell phone, publication, data management, education, training. We could cut all of that. Pretty substantial impact to the program. It's still not enough. to actually make a measurable impact. And we would still be basically exceeding the amount of 103% growth we're supposed to stay on. So other things that are problematic with this bill, a change in healthcare election. So if a member goes from single insurance to family insurance, that exceeds the growth cap under this bill. It's $13,000 difference between one family insurance. That alone would trigger us to go above the two of the three.

Some of you are not on family.

That's not the point point is that any change like that puts us over is the point of bringing that up.

And we can't discriminate against those family now. Well, it's it's too late.

We're locked in right? So.

Yeah, um, and then the other piece here is that the commission may be required to actually decline some of the federal grants due to cost match requirements. So. For example, our hazard hazard is materials. Emergency. Uh, requires a 10% cost. We may not have the money to make 10%, which means we're going to turn down $9,000 because we don't have 1,000. So, to give you an idea that hopefully there's a legislative fix in this, but. get to be seen, right?

So I did meet with the executive committee a couple weeks ago.

Obviously, there's a lot of options on the table. We could do nothing. That's always an option, not a good option, but we can do that. It's effective for less than a year. Legislative solutions, which would allow for adjustment with growth from the county and or because of our use of the fund balance. Those are things that we could potentially propose. I don't know that they would be implemented prior to our budget deadline, which is February 28th. Our budget really has to be published by about February 1st to make sure we meet the deadlines. One thing that we're seriously looking at is offloading and cutting expenses to reallocate projects to other owners. So a couple years ago, we took over hazardous materials billing for Dallas County. Maybe that's something that we give back to them. hopefully we can continue to use some of the money that they provided for that to us for our program training delivery so it'd be like training that we bring in contract and deliver trailer storage and maintenance yeah pretty much all all the options other than that I think be very clear we run a very lean program i don't have a ton of they don't have any money for like discretionary spending right so really at this point it's we're cutting programs um it's just which ones are we cutting that have the least amount of external input and then lastly to evaluate shared services and consolidation with neighboring so the guidance from the executive committee But still, let's make sure we get legal clarification on the bill, what we can and can't do in terms of offloading costs, evaluate opportunities to cut costs, evaluate interest in shared services consolidation with other emergency management. I will note the state structure, and I'm already having some conversations on the state administrative rule side, is one of the main grants that we get is 39,000 a year. we consolidate with another county around us, the way it's currently structured is that we would not get both counties grants. So a consolidation may actually mean that we're cutting $39,000 of grant money. So we do need to be really careful. I've suggested maybe some alternative solutions where the commission could potentially retain the ability to access grants, but have some sort of shared environment. There's really a lot that's unknown.

Explain what you want to share. You got that far here.

So yeah, very initial discussion. Things like shared plans. We could combine with other counties to share plans, which would mean that a commission would adopt one set of plans. I'm not totally sure what it all looks like at this point, but, uh, bearing duty officer staff, for example. Yeah, there's, there's only your plan poke. I hope. Well, this is where it gets this is where it gets really tricky. Um. I call you to come to boom county because I'm we need help. We need somebody to. Yeah, I think against from county, but we need to, uh. We're still too early in the conversation to really, I think any sort of recommendation. But there is, yeah, obviously we could lean towards Polk. There's a natural tendency there because the Metro, and we're going to have the Metro regardless if we go to Polk or not. Or we could go out to Madison. Adair Guthrie is already combined as one county, one commission.

What does Green do?

Green does not really. Their program has a revenue of about $40,000 from taxation, so I don't think it would be valuable for us to lock in with them.

We don't want to go help or join with a county that doesn't have any.

So, yeah, a lot of things to consider. Again, this is still super early, so I… We're still on there on one.

We're paying for trailer storage. Is that correct? No, but… I thought that was an expense you could cut us.

if we can house our trailers i brought this up a couple years ago we our trailers are all outside and they weather a little bit faster than what you would expect them to so like this year we had some water damage from being parked outside so if we can find homes in fire departments it saves us a thousand dollars over a three-year period because we don't have to do placement or extra cleaning you know that type of thing um It's small stuff like that. But again, we can do all of those things. It still may not be enough measurable based on the way.

You're talking about cutting services on the one column. What would you cut? We built this up. It's the time I started coming to these meetings, what, 20, 25 years ago? We have gotten so much better, and I work with another county. You probably work with Polk and Dallas, so you see Polk's really good. I hate to see us cut anything.

It's not panic time yet, but it's getting close to panic.

We better be figuring this out as soon as we can. I'm very proud of what AJ and this county do, and I brag about it all over the nation. I was talking to Nebraska guys, and they were just... Amazement of our shares department loans and your guys's command vehicles. Got a really good program somehow we need to keep it.

Yeah, that's that's the goal. Well, within the confines of the new law.

So, on that grant, you're talking about 9,000, we lose if we didn't have a thousand Israel way. If that's something that a bunch of us fire departments want that training, that we can kick in some money to cover the $1,000, or does that screw up the budget too?

That is a potential option. Okay. As long as it's not funds from taxation. The law is very clear about funds from taxation.

Most of our departments got our fundraising aside. I think outside the box here, because you guys are going to be in the same boat with this deal, too. And you were talking about vehicles. Don't we have that fund set up to kind of build up, and then it'll build up to when we need the new vehicle? It's not how our budget's set, so we...

However, our one-time use of carryover funds to offset the taxation... It kills that entire budget line. Again, I'm not trying to be dramatic, but this is the new bill that came out. We haven't the latest to figure this out. If we want things to go into effect for the next budget, which is July 1, 2027 through June 30, 2020. do have time but i think things are going to move fast certainly if you have feedback about program and what it should or shouldn't look like i think share with the executive committee or with me and i think there's gonna be a lot of discussion next two or three months before our next meeting or maybe we have a special meeting to have a discussion about what things look like

Anything else on that? Wonderful. Good news. Anything else for the good of the cause? Open to adjourn. Second. We'll just go ahead and say all in favor. Go ahead. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.