Letter: Disastrous preparedness

Dale Dunham is a resident of Half Moon Bay. This is a version of public comments he read at Tuesday’s Half Moon Bay City Council meeting.

Leadership in a disaster situation is critical; this is an unalterable truth that cannot be overemphasized.  The person appointed to the leadership role should be in a senior position of authority in local government, be extremely knowledgeable of disaster response requirements, and also be in a position that would normally permit their immediate response to fulfill emergency duties. In Half Moon Bay, as in other cities, the City Manager fills that most important leadership role of Director of Emergency Services. (HMB Municipal Code:  Chapter 2.40, Emergency Organization)

In addition, the City of HMB Emergency Plan states that “The City of Half Moon Bay City Manager, serving as the EOC (Emergency Operations Center) Director, will manage and coordinate the city’s disaster response in conformance with state law and county emergency response ordinances.” (City of HMB Emergency Operations Plan, Volume One, Page 1, Executive Summary)

The City Manager should then, be required to fulfill the requirements for authority, knowledge and availability.  As the “CEO” for the City, the City Manager has the authority and, presumably, because of emergency training and senior management involvement in all facets of city management, the knowledge.  And, as the person hired to be responsible for virtually every operation of the city, the City Manager should live in the city and be available.

The Half Moon Bay City Manager lives in Oakland.

In a normal commute it’s 1 to 1 1/2 hours to or from Oakland.  In a major disaster the commute will be—that’s right—there probably won’t be one. This is critically important because one of the certainties of disaster preparedness is that there is only one chance in four that you’ll be at work when an earthquake occurs. I do not wish to gamble the welfare of my family and my community in a disaster, against that mathematical probability, considering the additional “probability that at least one earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or greater will occur on a…San Francisco Bay region fault before 2032.”  (USGS Handbook, Putting Down Roots in Earthquake Country, USGPO, 2005)

So, why do we have a situation in which the City Manager is, essentially, unable to fulfill one of the primary responsibilities of the job?  Is it because there is a line-of-succession to fill the vacancy in her absence?  No, every jurisdiction plans in that manner for the occasional and necessary absence of every employee. Most importantly, for HMB, her backup, the Director of Public Works, is the only department head (including the chief of police) that lives in the City.  As all department heads are heavily tasked in a disaster, how many balls could the Director of Public Works possibly juggle?   No one starts out without the normal anticipated availability of the person at the top of the responsibility pyramid.

The City of Half Moon Bay recognizes the residency requirement: “…within one hundred and eighty days after reporting for work the city manager must become a resident of the city, unless the city council approves his residence outside the city.” (HMB Municipal Code, Chapter 2.16, City Manager)

Yet, in 2004, the former City Council approved “residence outside of the City” for the City Manager.  Despite significant financial incentives and the extension of the “City” limits by the Council, to include the area all the way from Pescadero to Montara, she elected to live outside of the City. (Agreement For Employment of City Manager, May 18, 2004)

All other things being equal, it’s fair and appropriate to accommodate new employees if you can. But in this case the City Manager’s obligation to fulfill the requirements of the position or common sense should have dictated to the Council that it require the City Manager to reside in the city.  It did not.

When the council signed the agreement for the employment of the city manager, now city mayor, Marina Fraser, was a minority of one on the council and could do little else.  Mayor Fraser now has the opportunity to investigate measures that can mitigate this potentially dangerous situation and ensure against similar missteps in the future. Some of the possible ways to mitigate the problem are:

• Recognize that we have to pay a higher price for living on an earthquake fault in this community, a community where, over the past dozen years, we’ve let ourselves be led to believe that less is good and more is bad.  As a consequence, we are now in a position of limited infrastructure redundancy, which places all of us at greater risk and limits our disaster preparedness options.  We only have to look at the Devil’s Slide and Highway 92 Fiber-optic mini-emergencies of the last three months to realize just how fragile our infrastructure really is.
• Place a much greater emphasis on creating the conditions which will allow city employees to live in the community.
• Hire a replacement for the position of Emergency Services Coordinator in a timely manner (oops, too late, he’s gone) or designate another appropriate person for those responsibilities.
• Establish priorities for increased emphasis on employee disaster training and emergency exercise involvement.

I look forward to Mayor Fraser and the Council’s good judgment in addressing this serious matter in a timely fashion.

Dale Dunham
Half Moon Bay