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HomeMy WebLinkAboutCity Council Meeting - Council Workshop - Minutes - 07/16/2002 COUNCIL WORKSHOP MINUTES July 16, 2002 COUNCIL MEMBERS PRESENT: Chair Tim Clark, Connie Epperly, Leona Orr, Julie Peterson, Bruce White, Judy Woods, Rico Yingling STAFF PRESENT: Mike Martin, Jim Schneider,Brian Felczak, Dena Laurent, Tom Brubaker, Alexander Ransom, Jackie Bicknell PUBLIC PRESENT: Tom Sharp, Dave Hayes, Don Shaffer The workshop was called to order at 5:00 PM by Council President Tim Clark. Council President Vacancy was added as a fourth item to the agenda. Emergency Management Update Fire Chief Jim Schneider gave an update on Emergency Management in the City. —I'd like to provide an overview tonight of the Emergency Management Program for the City of Kent and assisting me tonight will be Firefighter Brian Felczak. As you know, the Fire Chief is the Emergency Management Director under the city code. The Office of Emergency Management was located here at City Hall. We recently moved Emergency Management up to Fire Administration at Station 74 on 116`h Street. It is now located where the ECC, the Emergency Coordination Center, is located,which is where all activities for emergency management occurs. It will enhance the communication • between myself and the emergency management personnel, which will help a lot. Also, it will give them easy access to the ECC, either updating it, or if we do staff it, will be a lot easier. Emergency Management in itself is divided into four different phases which are Mitigation, Preparedness, Response, and Recovery. I'm going to talk about each one of those briefly about what's happened in the past, what's happening now, and what we see happening in the future. ■ Mitigation. In 1999, Emergency Management personnel went out and did a Hazardous Reduction Survey throughout the City at all work sites. That led to the identification of a generator for City Hall so we keep all services up here at City Hall. Presently the City of Kent has applied for grants totaling$1.8 million and that's been done through the Public Works Department. We'll use those for retrofits of water tanks, a well, and seismic retrofit of City Hall if we get the grants. In the future, the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 requires the City of Kent to have a mitigation plan in place by November of 2003, and we will have that done and brought back to the Public Safety Committee and the City Council. • Preparedness. In the past we provided and we've been recognized for the Emergency Management Training for the Kent School District. We've implemented a citywide Radio Systems Program, coordinated the annual Sound Shake Program held in April of every year, and some personnel attended the Emergency Management Training in Virginia. Presently we're conducting CERT Programs, citizens' Emergency Response Team programs for the community, and we've established department operation centers called DOC's. Guidebooks and standards have been developed for each of the DOC's so they know what to do if they have to implement • the emergency system of their department. In the future, we want to enhance the regional coordination with King County through the Regional Disaster Emergency Plan and we also want to enhance our own training relationships with the City of Kent workers and enhance their training. Council Workshop,'7/16/02 2 ■ Response. We've had seven declared disasters or emergencies in the City of Kent and obviously one of those was the Nisqually earthquake. Presently, we do HAZMAT drills jointly with other cities and county personnel which allows us to work with other jurisdictions and work on our site plans and hazardous materials plans. One of the big areas that would help us as far as response in the future—there's going to be an exercise in either April or May 2003 called Top Off 2 and that is an exercise that will start in the City of Chicago and is 10 days long. The first three days will be in Chicago and they'll have some type of weapons of mass destruction emergency that occurs in Chicago. Then three days later, an actual exercise is going to occur in the City of Seattle. We are going to staff our EOC for one to two days straight and go through some simulation and work on our ECC, which would probably benefit all of us. It's quite a bit of work to put that together. We're still trying to make sure we get some funding to make that occur,but we are one of the few role players that might be allowed to participate in that Top Off 2 exercise. • Recovery. Through fire mobilizations we've recovered $131,000 of refund. Money that's come back to the City of Kent and through Public Assistance we've recovered$625,000. We've recovered almost $750,000 over the last 5-6 years. In addition, one of the things that emergency management personnel worked on is the Olympic Pipeline Franchise Agreement. I'm very, very impressed about the effort and the data and everything that has been put together. 'They've done an excellent job on that. It's a long process to work through. A lot of safety issues are involved as far as an agreement. Things that we're concerned about with the pipeline running through the City of Kent. We've been working on that and working through that with the City Attorney's Office. Some additional things that the emergency management personnel worked on is response plans for major installation sites in the City of Kent, high hazard or hazardous material sites. We developed emergency plans to respond to that site. I know that the Nisqually earthquake was • about 18 months ago but we thought we'd describe some of the objectives when we staff the ECC and some of the results that we obtained from staff in the ECC. Brian Felczak—During the Nisqually earthquake we were more shaken than stirred. We were very fortunate during that occurrence. Our main need was meeting the needs of the citizens and the employees and trying to blend that together. Normally, Public Works receives about 10 requests for services a day. During the first week they had over 500. At the time of the earthquake, the police and fire normal emergency response call volumes tripled and most of those calls were for spin-offs from traffic accidents due to the congestion. There were several road blockages, lots of alarm responses, both burglar and water flow alarms, requests for odor investigations, and damage assessment requests. As far as the City status and employee's response, it was really wonderful. Everybody evacuated. There were no fatalities or serious injuries at all. Some departments set up their Department Operating Centers and the response capability assessments began to come in to the ECC, basically saying where are your people,how are your places, and what about your equipment and your things. Those started coming in. The ECC, itself, normally takes over an hour with a crew of 8 people to set up that facility in that building. Luckily during the earthquake there was some training going on up at the Training Center and those folks got together and set it up within 20 minutes. So we began receiving damage assessments as soon as they came in and we were prepared to deal with them. We took the damage assessments, compiled them, sent those to the county and the state. Within the afternoon, the Mayor signed the Proclamation of Emergency. The biggest problem we had was road snarls and traffic. • OEM established a citizens' hotline. We coordinated with FEMA. We began tracking problems both in the City and we coordinated through the Federal Emergency Management Agency the establishment of a disaster recovery site, which was the only one in the South King County area. It Council Workshop,7/16/02 3 was right up here in the north end of the valley and we went down there for 3%to 4 months before they finally closed their operations. In all the citywide claims, $128,980 was recovered from public assistance requests to help put the City back together. 75% of all the damages were covered by FEMA, and 12.5% was covered by the state. The City has to pay 12.5% on top of that. Council Facilities Tour Mike Martin discussed possible tour sites with the Councilmembers as well as time involved and possible dates. It was decided that September 24`h at 3:00 PM would work best. Councilmember Interviews Mike Martin handed out the list of Councilmember interviews with Paul Lanspery. Sounders—Desian—EIS Mike Martin said the Sounders have taken an unusual step of actually spending money on the project early on. They are hiring a project manager and a firm to scope the actual design of the facility and are moving towards actually funding the Environmental Impact Statement. Staff is meeting with the Department of Ecology some time within the next 10 days, and had a meeting with the Sounders, King County and a couple of other folks yesterday. It was very, very good. We keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. It hasn't. We're very pleased with the progress there and just wanted to keep you informed. Council President Vacancy Tim Clark nominated Judy Woods as Council President. The motion was seconded by Connie • Epperly and passed 7-0. Senior Center Trip Plane Crash Victims Judy Woods said that John Hodgson would be making a few comments tonight at the beginning of the Council meeting. Leona Orr asked if cards or something could be sent to the family from the entire City Council that express our condolences. Judy Woods said a memorial would be held at the Senior Center on the 3ls`of July. The council workshop adjourned at 5:32 PM. Council Office 2"d Floor, City Hall -- 220 4"'Ave. South, Kent, 98032 PLEASE SIGN IN DATE: 12 Z& Name Address Phone Number ern SC �JL 1,0 0, 1 old ��� XC4.3 ( 1 ep& 7 0 LAW 5 -7 9 4-