By Sarah Green
KHI News Service
HUTCHINSON, May 1
County commissioners and mayors aren”t required by federal mandate to complete emergency management training
and most of them don”t.
Sedgwick County Commissioner Tim Norton is trying to change that.
Norton was the mayor of Haysville in 1999 when a tornado struck the town, destroying business and hundreds of homes. The city had an emergency preparedness plan, but he learned quickly that his role as an elected official carried significant responsibility.
“You don”t have to know everything, but you have to be able to think through anything,” he said.
Kansas” “home rule” law leaves most of the decisions in emergency preparedness and response up to counties. Consequently, said Susan Norton, dean of Corporate Education at Cowley College and Commissioner Norton”s wife, the decision-making role in responding to disasters often falls to county commissioners.
Susan Norton surveyed the state”s 346 county commissioners and mayors in Kansas cities with more than 2,000 residents for a doctoral dissertation. She presented the findings to a small group at the Governor”s Public Health Conference here on Tuesday.
The January 2007 survey found that 46 percent of those surveyed had completed at least some training. The remaining 54 percent said they weren”t aware of the training or weren”t interested.
“As an elected official, if you are in charge, how do you know what to do if you don”t have a good grasp of incident command?” Susan Norton said.
Courses for the National Incident Management System and Incident Command System training are each two hours and are available online, Susan Norton said. The two systems were created by presidential directive by the Department of Homeland Security and are the national training courses for government officials and anyone who responds to a disaster.
County commissioners surveyed often said they were not concerned by the threat of disaster in their counties, either natural disasters such as tornadoes or floods or the possibility of a terrorist or manmade disaster such as a contaminated feedlot or a train derailment, Susan Norton said. Many commissioners also said that they believed their emergency management and law enforcement departments would be able to walk them through the necessary response if a crisis occurred.
There might not be time for those discussions, Tim Norton said.
“At the time of a crisis, it”s not the time to be handing out business cards,” he said.
Elected officials should be particularly concerned about the possibility of future litigation, Tim Norton said. Officials are now held harmless for their actions during a crisis. But 16 civil lawsuits filed against local officials in Louisiana courts after Hurricane Katrina could change that.
“If you”re a decision maker, you may be held accountable for not doing your due diligence,” he said.
Both the Kansas Association of Counties and the League of Kansas Municipalities have expressed interest in providing training and information to local officials. Tim Norton is the president of the Kansas County Commissioners Association, and has added the emergency management training in orientation sessions for new commissioners.
“I think we”re making great strides in getting the message out to that population,” he said. “Emergency preparedness, I think, is a great responsibility of elected officials.”
-Sarah Green is a staff writer for KHI News Service, which specializes in coverage of health issues facing Kansans. She can be reached at
sgreen@khi.org
or at 785-233-5443, ext. 118.