By: Adam Stone

Every time it floods, Shaun Mulholland is pulled out of bed.

That might not be surprising. As police chief for the 5,000-person town of Allenstown, N.H., Mulholland is supposed to be on hand when the Suncook River overflows its banks, as it does all too frequently.

Mulholland’s involvement in the action is hardly unique. What is unusual though, is the specific role he plays in these crises. Rather than direct police activity, the chief typically is busy coordinating activity among emergency responder agencies. He keeps an eye on his officers, but he spends most of his time organizing efforts up and down the river, synchronizing local activity and tracking operations in nearby towns.

In short, Mulholland acts more like an emergency manager in times of crisis than he does as chief of police. This is because that is what he is: deputy emergency manager for the town, sharing emergency management duties with the local fire chief. Mulholland sees benefits in the arrangement: It means the local emergency managers are people with hands-on emergency experience, and it means that police and fire are by necessity tightly integrated. But there are downsides too. In a disaster, “It’s one less police officer and one less firefighter who are available to do those jobs,” he said.

Mulholland isn’t alone. Nationwide police chiefs and other top officers are being pressed into service as municipal emergency managers. They bear the full responsibility of their police jobs, while simultaneously carrying out all the training, reporting and planning work of the emergency manager’s position. Whatever the upside may be, some observers have grave doubts about the wisdom of putting emergency management responsibilities on the backs of police leadership.

Driven by Budgets

How do first responders end up with the job of emergency manager? The first and most obvious answer is money. A municipality may recognize the need to have someone who can plan for and coordinate response during crises, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that civic leaders are prepared to pay for the work.

That’s not surprising, since emergency management is a little like auto insurance — you don’t give it much thought until you need it. “Emergency management doesn’t get the visibility that other programs or departments do, because it is something that you don’t necessarily use until a disaster happens,” said David A. McEntire, an associate professor of emergency administration and planning in the Department of Public Administration at the University of North Texas.

Low visibility equals low priority when it’s time to build a budget.

Mulholland has seen it firsthand. State law requires his town to have an emergency manager, and the job exists in the Allenstown organizational chart as a separate position. But at the end of the day, Mulholland’s a salaried employee and adding the task to his workload comes at no added expense to municipal coffers.

“There have been attempts to put money into the budget for this, but of course these days that has been cut out of the budget each year,” he said. In 2010, advocates tried to put a salary of $1 per year on the books for an emergency manager. Civic leaders saw it as an effort to establish precedent for a funded position; they cut the token salary from the budget.

Money isn’t the only factor driving police leaders into the emergency management seat. There also may be a sense of mission overlap, explained Frances Edwards, who follows emergency management issues as deputy director of the National Transportation Security Center at the Mineta Transportation Institute.

The federal government has defined terror as coming under the emergency management umbrella. That would seem to make for a nice synergy. “You can make the case that because the police deal with the crime all the time — because they have informants and are used to working with the community to mine information — they are a natural fit for the terror aspects of emergency management,” Edwards said.

The question remains whether that’s a good thing. Police may be an ideal fit for the law enforcement aspects of emergency management, she said, “but when the focus shifts to flooding and earthquakes, it becomes quite a different argument.”

Certainly law enforcement leaders know how to manage a disaster scene. But are they trained to manage disasters in the aggregate, to do all the big picture work that goes on behind the front lines? “Emergency management is not about field response,” Edwards said. “It’s about managing all the aspects of the community, whether it’s people, financial or material.”

Finally, Edwards worries that by putting the police chief in charge, municipalities may send the implicit message to other agencies that they can leave emergency management to someone else. “To have any single department head in charge of emergency management,” she said, “it allows the other department heads to say, ‘Well, that’s his problem. I don’t have to play.’”

This issue of territoriality is significant, with the power to undermine response structure across the board. “It really needs to go under the mayor’s office,” McEntire said. “Emergency managers are supposed to be working with all departments and agencies, and if they are under the fire department or police department, it is hard for them to be put on an equal playing field with other participants.”

Dual Responsibilities

For those on the front lines, wearing dual hats can mean juggling two very different sets of responsibilities.

When a tornado touched down in Blaine, Minn., in 2007, trees tottered and roads were blocked. Police Capt. Kerry Fenner got the call at home, suited up and headed right for — the scene of the disaster? You’d think so, but that wasn’t the case. “I came straight to City Hall and started setting up the [Emergency Operations Center],” Fenner said. “I didn’t go to the scene until hours later.”

As emergency management director for the city of 60,000, Fenner sets aside his first responder responsibilities during an emergency and takes on the tasks of coordination and communication. Before 9/11, the job took 5 to 10 percent of his time. Today about one-third of his efforts go toward emergency management.

“We do risk assessments more often, not just risks to our population but also to our critical infrastructure,” he said. “We do business continuity in terms of government planning, which is a term I hadn’t even heard of when I started doing this.”

In practical terms, Fenner balances the load by devoting a regular block of time on Tuesday to emergency management. He establishes plans that look months or years ahead as a way to keep the emergency management task on target while still making time for police work. “If you have to do the multiple hat thing, you almost have to do it this way,” he said. “Otherwise it is too easy to let other things dictate what you are doing.”

The jobs are no easier to juggle in a place like Alpine, Wyo., a rural town of just 700 residents. The town recently cut back the Police Department, firing one of two officers thus leaving Chief James Phillips to manage on his own as both the sole law enforcement officer and local emergency management director.

Besides keeping the streets safe, Phillips organizes training and preparedness, and coordinates with the county, which manages the scene in case of emergency. “I write our plans, I think of the different problems we might face and try to come up with solutions beforehand,” he said. “I try to have some kind of order put together ahead of time. The biggest thing that it adds to my work is the meetings that I go to, the coordination that I have to do, and the plans I have to be involved in writing and practicing.”

Mulholland wrangles with the same challenges. As deputy emergency manager, he’s charged with coordinating National Incident Management System and Incident Command System training, as well as all the tracking and reporting needed to win FEMA grant funding. He’s found a simple fix. “I average between 60 and 70 hours a week working,” Mulholland said, “and when we are in the middle of an emergency, I sleep either at the police station or the fire station.”

On the Upside

While the potential drawbacks may be significant, there also may be some substantial advantages to be had in putting the top cops in charge of emergency management.

Take the perceived issue of territoriality. Rather than being a liability, some say, the presence of a first responder in the emergency management chair is a benefit to all. After all, a prime function of the emergency manager’s role is to ensure seamless coordination among first responders, to bring everyone to the table both before and during times of crisis. Put a first responder in charge of that effort, the logic goes, and that’s one fewer agency to bring onboard.

There also may be some virtue in having hands-on experience at the helm. It makes sense for an emergency planner to be someone who has daily, practical familiarity with the actual conduct of emergency affairs within the municipality. “Police probably have a much greater knowledge of what to do in emergency situations than most other government employees, perhaps excluding firefighters,” McEntire said.

Then there’s the law enforcement aspect. Terror is high on the emergency agenda, and the men and women in blue have a unique perspective on the situation. “In light of the terrorist threat and homeland security issues, we definitely need a law enforcement perspective in dealing with disasters,” McEntire said.

However, in the end, simple necessity may dictate the situation. With budgets razor thin, municipalities will likely continue handing off emergency management responsibilities to those already on the payroll.

Adam Stone writes on business and technology from Annapolis, Md. He also contributes to Government Technology magazine.

You may use or reference this story with attribution and a link to
http://www.emergencymgmt.com/disaster/Emergency-Managers-Multiple-Hats-021411.html