We have about 40 folks registered to be here in person, so we may have some partners of ours joining us today. But I'd like to welcome you all, and everybody who's watching online. How are we at? This is the first and what we hope will become a continuing series of what I like to call conversations on key emergency management issues that we're working through here in California. My name is Eric Amaral. I am the acting deputy director to respond to operations here at the California US. And over the last couple years, have the opportunity to also serve as the acting deputy director of recovery operations. Back in June, Governor Newsom held the first ever emergency management summit on here in California. It was a phenomenal opportunity to bring together emergency managers, fire and law enforcement professionals, and city and county leadership, as well as local elected and senior leadership to talk about those issues that we're challenged with here in California when it comes to emergency management. Obviously over the last decade, what we deal with on a regular basis in California has become more and more complex. I can't help but say to bring a smile to share in the crack in space who's with us today is by all means unprecedented what we've been dealing with over the last several years. But it truly is with the impacts, climologically of what we're dealing with, with the population increases, and with a number of other struggles that we've got, the ability to respond effectively and recover from both natural and human caused disasters is becoming more and more complex. And so the purpose of the conference in June, and the purpose of today is to continue that dialogue, continue that conversation. Our hope at Cal OES and with the support of the Institute for Local Government, the California Association of Counties and the League of California Cities is to continue this dialogue on a regular basis, talking about key subjects that are important to all of us or perhaps are the greatest challenges that you're dealing with at the city and county level. And so today we're gonna start by talking about recovery. It was a component of our conference back in June. It was probably one of the most well-received seminars at that conference. And it was obvious we needed to spend more time sort of digging into what does it mean when local governments proclaim emergencies? What does it mean when you're asking for assistance to the state or federal government? What do the programs mean? What are the authorities that are in this? What are the things we can and can't do? And then, so that's gonna be the first tablet today, our Chief Counsel for Cal OES, Collin, our Deputy Chief Counsel, Jennifer Bollinger. We're gonna be speaking with you today. And they are the ones behind the scenes that help to ensure that we're maximizing the assistance that we can secure for local governments following a major disaster. They're working in close partnership with Ryan Beerus, our Deputy Director of Recovery and Recovery Team to collectively work to ensure that we're maximizing the authorities that are out there and the programs that are available to support local governments. As I said, over the last couple of years, our experience in working to secure what the state and federal assistance has grown exponentially. Just over the last two years, we've had nine major disasters, the Presidential Disaster Declaration in California. And so with that, we have learned a lot about how to sort of work the machine with the federal government, have Ryan join us as our Deputy Director of Recovery, given his long experience at FEMA, has been phenomenal to help us ensure that we're doing everything we can to support local governments. And so today's gonna be two parts. Alex and Jennifer are gonna start the day off with us talking about the process. And then I'm pleased to have with us today Sherry McCracken, the Chief Administrative Officer for Butte County and Riva Feldman, the city manager for the city of Malibu, who are both gonna provide a presentation on their experiences last year, with both the campfire and the Woolsey fire, and what that meant to their community, what are the lessons that they're taking out of this, and where are they directing their communities moving forward to be ready for that next event. Ryan Pierce, our Deputy Director of Recovery, will also be joining us to talk about where our recovery operation is going. Obviously, we are evolving our recovery operations as we deal with these ever more complex incidents, and the way we deal with housing of folks after the major disaster, the way we handle debris operations, the utilization of a multitude of other state and federal agencies through our long-term recovery framework to help cities and counties again maximize the programs and dollars that are out there. So Ryan's gonna talk a little bit about that, Riva and Sherry will speak, and then we'll end the day with the Q&A session with all three of them, where we can dig into those issues a little bit more. What I wanna make clear to everybody here in the room and online is that I want this to be a dialogue. So during Alex and Jennifer's presentation, please raise your hand and ask questions. If you've got ideas or things that you utilized in your community that have been effective, and you think others should know about that, please feel free. I want this to be an active dialogue. Online, if you've got the comments or questions, we'll ask you to email Chris Berry to my staff, chris.verry at CalOES.ca.gov, and we'll ensure that your comments and questions get incorporated into the session here today. So with that, I'm gonna hand the mic off to Alex Powell and Jennifer Bollinger. Good morning. I'm Jennifer Bollinger, I'm the Assistant Chief Counsel for CalOES. I've been here about close to four years now. I am a background of full public entity different work, litigation and work for a company. And this is Alex, how do you want to answer? So Alex, I'm the Chief Counsel here. I've been with CalOES for a little over six years. We came from the private practice and civil litigation. Just a quick story about how I kind of got into emergency management. Originally from New Jersey, and back in 2012, I was a back home visiting family, working in San Diego, and didn't expect it to be as bad as it was, of course. My family was lucky, a lot of friends and family were not, and they had some significant damage. And I remember thinking, how do communities rebound from that, right? I've never experienced that. What do you do? How do you pick up the pieces? How do you restore some sense of normalcy in your lives? And then a couple months later, there was an open year, and I thought that was a perfect opportunity to jump in. I'm very passionate about this mission. I love the work that we do, and so it's my pleasure to be here talking with you all. It's Brad about Alex. He started as a staff chomp from here, and Dr. Monroe didn't work his way up, and improved himself, and ultimately, I got appointed both by Brown and Ethan to position. So, and even, we're gonna talk about proclamations and disaster assistance. And where we're gonna head in this conversation, is we're gonna briefly address the authorities that govern the disasters and proclamation process. We'll talk about local proclamations, eventorial proclamations, what we call CDAA, California Disaster Assistance Act. Debris mentioned when an event is so large that we have something called a PPDR program and private property debris removal program. And then of course, the Stafford Act and Stafford Act decorations when the federal government steps in and becomes a federal disaster and the president's issuing emergency decks or major disaster declaration. So the authorities, the emergency services act is what governs the state of California for disaster that gets the governor brought powers to issue order, wage statutes to spend regulations. And that's where we derive the authority to issue disaster proclamations also. And then CDAA, California Disaster Assistance Act, it's the governing statutory body that provides authority for the state to come in under certain circumstances and provide financial assistance to local for certain events. And then of course, the Robert T. Stafford disaster in the emergency act. That is the federal statutory scheme that kicks in when the state ends up seeking assistance to financial assistance or direct federal assistance from the federal government or any event that becomes so large that it's beyond the state's capacity to handle on its own. So local emergency proclamations. Why does the local wanna proclaim? Well, with proclamations, it is indicating to the state that there's a situation where it's beyond the capability of the local. It can't activate pre-established emergency provisions. So if you have certain ordinances in place that are triggered by a local proclamation, you may wanna do that. And it provides immunity for certain actions and vision making when you're responding to a disaster and then of course, extraordinary state powers. And then there are four steps. Or so who can proclaim? It's the county, city and county and city. And a proclamation demonstrates that it's beyond the local's capability. And there's four steps when you wanna proclaim. You proclaim, you ratify, continue determining. The sort of things you wanna take up. So here's the timeline summary of the local proclamation. So a local proclamation can be issued by a governing body or an official identified by ordinance within 10 days of an instance. So that's critical to keep that 10 day period in mind. And then the governing body would wanna ratify the local proclamation if it was an official that issued the proclamation. And you have to do that within seven days. And then there's a renewal for every 60 days. Sometimes if the event is so catastrophic, the governor and it ends up being a state declared emergency. The governor may waive the renewal of every 60 days. I think we saw that in camp, yeah, camp. And then there's an asterisk here in January 4th, 2019. The legislature increased the renewal from 30 to 60 days. So what constitutes a local emergency? So up there, there's a paragraph that is taken right out of the statute, but essentially it's a duly proclaiming existence of conditions of disaster or extreme peril to the safety of persons of property within the limits of a city and county or county caused by such conditions. And then it lists out within the statute the types of things that you could proclaim for. But the key is here is which are likely to be beyond the capability or control of political subdivision. So that's your, as a local jurisdiction, this is how you would explain to us or demonstrate that an event is beyond the capability of your jurisdiction. I don't wanna go back real quick to something Jennifer mentioned. Under the Emergency Services Act, only a city, a county, or in San Francisco's case, a city and county can proclaim a state of emergency. That's not to say special districts couldn't proclaim, school districts couldn't proclaim, but to be a valid proclamation under the Emergency Services Act, and then there's a tie to CDAA, which we'll explain. It has to be one of those three. And then we'll explain in more detail about how the CDA process works and how you can come in as a district underneath the county that you're resting. So as Jennifer mentioned, the proclamation under the Emergency Services Act must be proclaimed only by the governing body of the jurisdiction or by an official designated in an ordinance that was enacted by that governing body. It must be ratified by the board within seven days. This again, just increased from 30 days to 60 days, but the governing body must renew that proclamation every 60 days. And then ultimately, the governing body will terminate the proclamation once conditions no longer warrant there to be a local emergency proclamation. So this is what I was talking about about the interplay between CDAA and the Emergency Services Act. So under CDAA, a local emergency is defined as a local emergency as proclaimed under section 8630 of the Emergency Services Act, which is specific to a county, a city, or a city on a county. And you must have a local proclamation that's valid under the Emergency Services Act to trigger potential CDAA eligibility. There's still a process that will undertake to review any requests for CDAA, but to even open the door, there must be a valid proclamation. So once there's a valid proclamation, the local agency may qualify for CDAA and generates a totality of the circumstances. So there are a lot of factors that we at CaliS will look at and that ranges from the fiscal capability of the jurisdiction and the budget to how many events the jurisdiction has endured over the past, let's say 12 months, assistance that it received for those events, unique circumstances of the event itself. So there are a lot of things that will play into whether a jurisdiction is eligible for, should it proceed state assistance for the disaster. Any questions on local proclamations? Yeah, go ahead. So for a special district, I'm just going to give you a minute. So for a special district, the question I have is, I understand they can't proclaim a local emergency under the ESA and they can't specifically request CDAA that way, but if there was a concentration of damages within a special district, what would be the process you'd be looking for them to kind of raise that up to the next level? So strongly worded letter to the OA, a phone call, what would be the process and the best practice you would give for that? Yeah, so certainly coordination with the OA, I don't want to pine on a strongly worded letter or a non strongly worded letter, but I would certainly everything, the way that the sub structure exists, and I can look to Eric and Ryan as well on this, is that it starts local and builds its way up and then through the OA, which is the county and then to the state. So certainly would require coordination with that OA and hopefully we're not waiting till time's a disaster to make sure that coordination is happening, that there's an ongoing dialogue, so that way in the event of a situation that impacts a special district, there's already a lot of communication through that OA, is that about right? Ryan shaking his head in the affirmative, so we're good. Eric, who's our former regional administrator as well knows. Alex, we're still gonna be looking at that, and maybe you're gonna get into this, we're gonna be looking at that operational area and their budget, even though it's maybe a district specific, we're gonna be looking at budgetary factors of the operational area as a whole. Right, correct. We wanna see all the resources that exist through mutual aid or otherwise that can assist that jurisdiction and any jurisdiction before it arrives to the level or as part of the analysis for state assistance. The transition between local proclamations and gubernatorial proclamations. So I'd have to say if it's not, the disaster is something that's readily apparent to the state, you know, massifiers breaking out and consuming thousands of acres to where we know immediately that that's gonna trigger a thought to go down the gubernatorial proclamation process. It's imperative upon the county to communicate what's going on in your jurisdiction to your regional contacts so they can filter that information up through the regional contacts to the people here so we could start making that assessment to determine whether gubernatorial proclamation is appropriate for those circumstances. So it's about the information sharing and the communication between us and your emergency coordinators. So once it reaches a gubernatorial proclamation, what does that mean? So it's found in a government code section 8558 and again that's under the Emergency Services Act. And a state of emergency means the duly proclaimed existence of conditions of disaster or of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property within the state which by reason of their magnitude are or are likely to be on the control of the services personnel equipment and facilities of any single county, city, and county or city and require the combined forces for mutual aid or reasons to combat. So it's not too different from the definition of a local proclamation, but this is, you know, as pertaining to the state of emergency. And the ESA, as we've indicated, empowers the governor to proclaim a state of emergency and it's for circumstances, conditions of disaster, extreme peril as we outlined. And the governor is, the county can request the governor to proclaim or the governor finds a local authority is beyond its capability to respond to the disaster and feels it's appropriate for the state to proclaim and provide assistance. This could be the difference between an event that is a slower moving event, maybe like a storm or it takes some time to assess damages and the local jurisdiction sort of needs to get a feel for what's out there before they would maybe proclaim and come to the state. Compare that to something like the campfire where, you know, within a matter of minutes, you know, the state was aware of how bad that event was and the governor does not need to wait for a local proclamation in order to proclaim and start moving resources. And we've seen that in some other events as well, even as recently as a couple of weeks ago where the governor was able to proclaim at the very start of an event, anticipating that something was likely to be beyond the capability of local jurisdiction, which is exactly the justification for proclaiming. Proclamation happens, it triggers certain authorities and powers under the ESA, broad powers to mitigate the effects of the disaster and the governor then has the ability to issue executive orders following a proclamation. So what does that really mean? He can suspend statutes and regulations. So often the suspensions that we see in a state of emergency, a proclamation for state of emergency is suspending the public contracting code for the state in terms of competitive bidding. Then there's critical documents, suspensions and waivers, vital records for the waiver of fees for that. He can make amend or rescind orders, commandeer private order, private property and then mission task other state agencies to assist in the response and recovery in the disaster. And that authority exists actually without a state of emergency as well. The director of Cal ESS is authorized to mission task state agencies to maybe prevent or mitigate and anticipate the impacts from a disaster. But certainly during a proclaimed emergency the director here will mission task agencies to do something within their jurisdiction, whether that's CHP or Cal Recycle to assist with debris or DTSC, the Department of Toxic Substance Control to assist with the removal of hazardous household waste. These are all things done via mission task. Following, as I mentioned, following proclamations the governor has the authority to issue executive orders and often you'll see an executive orders orders that address specific situations in a particular jurisdiction that needs addressing. So for example, one that Alex cites often is during the Napa earthquake, there was a suspension or excuse me, there was a suspension or a waiver of a ABC law for operation of wine tasting rooms to operate outside the mileage that the required to relative to their main vineyard. So they could maintain a business and build the economy back up following the earthquake. Exactly, you know, there are no two events are like, right? There's always some unique circumstance for one or another and that's like to me a great example of something that's gonna try to help bolster that local economy or mitigate the impact to the economy that region relies heavily on tourism and it's world renowned. And so to the extent there's some accommodation we can make to allow tourists to continue to put money into that area, it's really important. And that's one of the keys to recovery is to do something quickly and to buy down that prolonged from a disaster. So here's a kind of a list of just from recent executive orders or proclamations, things that you may have seen in either proclamations or executive orders. And the number one thing down that unemployment insurance that specifically called out in the emergency services act and essentially what it is is when you apply for uninsurance benefits, typically you have to wait that first week. So you were ineligible for benefits during the first week and starting week two you can receive benefits. So the governor can waive that one week waiting period so anybody who is rendered unemployed temporarily or permanently as a result of the disaster can immediately begin receiving that benefit. And again, it might seem like a little thing but having a resident of an area have money coming in could help them bolster that local economy and keep that community stable. And then as Jennifer mentioned, vital records. So the fees to replace vital records that were destroyed the governor can waive that the law imposing those fees. State agency contracting price gouging is automatically triggered on a proclamation, local land state, local governing bodies can extend that prohibition on price gouging. The governor has in certain serious events it waved it for a longer than a 30 day period at a time. And then waste of debris removal is one of the more common waivers when there's a significant number of homes down. The governor would waive rules relating to the disposal of debris so we can quickly move that debris and again restore community.  And in late November, the governor issued a school specific executive order that cut a ton of red tape and was kind of show the state's flexibility and ability to get students back into classrooms quickly. And I think that truly most schools were back and running within a few weeks whether they were in temporary facilities or whatnot but at least minimizing the impacts of students which impacts kids in classrooms contributes to the funding for the school district it keeps the sense of normalcy for the children who were impacted. So that was a really important and novel executive order that the governor issued. Alex? Yeah. We're actually fortunate today to have the superintendent of the county office of education with us. Oh, there you go. We're going to see if Mary wanted to say a couple words about that. Thank you, Harry. Good morning, I'm Mary Sakuma, the county superintendent of schools and the mention here of the extraordinary efforts that Calloway us and so many others did on our behalf that the actions that you did on our behalf were really incredible. And a couple of examples were, so we had two school districts pretty much wiped out and there was no way that in the case of Paradise Unified that they were going to be able to get back up onto the ridge and as it turned out they weren't able to return until this past August. And so what they ended up doing was standing up schools in places like the mall office building that was near an airport so not only did the office building not meet the field act requirements of a school building but in addition we had to get an additional waiver because of its proximity to the airport. But those were a couple of examples of just extraordinary things that we were able to do. It was amazing to be a part of standing up an entire school district again in three weeks. Just essentially what happened with the holiday in between. So thanks again. The California Disaster Assistance Act. So as we previously mentioned, you have to have a local proclamation in order to valid under the ESA in order to be eligible for disaster assistance under CDAA. And what that is, it provides state financial assistance on to a governmental entities or certain private non-profits for eligible emergency activities and public infrastructure work. And CDAA is structured in a way that patterns the Robert T. Stafford Act assistance. So you look at it in terms of categories, you have emergency working of permanent work. And then approval is based on the totality of circumstances. It's just not one factor, it's a multitude of factors including cost of eligible disaster related damages per capita indicator, local physical capacity, repetitive disasters and such. And then right at the bottom, I don't know if you can see the link here, but there's a fact sheet on Cal OES website that can be accessed that describes all the factors in more detail. So as I mentioned, our public assistance, disaster assistance is that categories are broken into emergency work and permanent work. So you have to be free removal from emergency protective measures and then you have permanent work, category C through G, and we'll talk in more detail about that. But as mentioned, it's very much patterned after Stafford Act. So in the event that the disaster transitions into a federal disaster where we receive aid, we will be able to easily justify those categories for a federal assistance. Yeah, so there, just only to note on this, they're split out into emergency work and permanent work and that's intentional. So on the left side, emergency work, only the governor can authorize CDAA for emergency work, whereas the director theoretically can issue a director's concurrence and award CDAA only for that permanent work on that right side, on that right column. And then when we get into the Stafford Act, we'll talk about two types of decorations, emergency and disaster. And on emergency decorations, we're only talking about that left side, categories A and B. So yeah, we'll go through them quickly. I don't, we don't need to go into a ton of detail. I think debris removal for us is probably the most critical. It's the one we spend the most amount of time on and there are a ton of slides dedicated specifically to debris, so we'll get into that. But the gist of it is that debris removal generally is referring to debris on public property and on lands that are managed to maintain and owned by the local jurisdiction. We're not talking about private lands here. There are programs for debris removal from private property and we'll talk about that in just a minute. Emergency protective measures, these are all your response costs. Mutual aid, you know, typically it'll be law enforcement where you're dealing with evacuation and maybe overtime, things like that. These are the costs that are associated with these emergency protective measures. And their measures implemented to mitigate that immediate threat to public health and safety. So that's that immediate response to a disaster. Hey, I'd like to jump in real quick on that. So on, if you go back to the last slide. So what's important on this category B emergency protective measures for jurisdictions that have received fire management assistance grant. Obviously as we transition into the recovery phase, if you've received an FMAC during a firefight and we're gonna, as Ryan's team's doing the calculations, we're gonna pull out all of these costs and associate into that FMAC. So when you're looking at your overall cost of the disaster, these emergency protective measures are gonna get tied back to that FMAC in large part. So it's important to understand as you're working with our regional teams doing your individual damage assessments, looking at the overall cost of the disaster if you've received an FMAC. I think we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment to understand that those get factored out. They can't be counted twice. And well, yeah, once we get into the federal side there's not a slide on it but I will explain what an FMAC is as well. So just reason through the categories here, C, our roads and bridges, similar to offsetting costs for FMAC, if a road is eligible for federal highway administration costs, then those are gonna be backed out of the calculation towards your total, whether or not. And that'll play into whether or not the state is eligible for federal assistance and I'll get into those thresholds in just a bit. Category D, water control facilities. Likewise, if it's subject to their jurisdiction of another federal agency, then FEMA will not fund it. So for instance, if it's in an Army Corps program then that's what's gonna provide funding for any damage. Water control facilities, utilities, and then parks rec and other facilities. So those are all the categories of assistance. So what happens right after a disaster? The local jurisdiction has to verify its damages and this is really where Ryan's team comes into play. He's got a team of emergency service coordinators and disaster assistance specialists that get deployed into the field and essentially embed with local jurisdictions to assess these damages. And so what a local jurisdiction would first do is assess damages and enter it into web EOC or Cal EOC, I believe it's called. And then the state will help validate these damages and it's that validation that's critical because that's what ultimately determines the level of agreed upon damages. If we're dealing with a potential federal event, a federal government will be part of that team. So it's state, local, and fed. It'll all assess the damages, come up with an agreed upon amount for uninsured losses to public facilities, put them into each category of assistance that we just talked about and that becomes the PDA, the Preliminary Damage Assessment and that is what drives the request for public assistance in a major disaster declaration which will get empty. But that's key, an accurate and thorough assessment of damages. At your level, we won't as a state and the fed won't as a federal government know whether assistance is warranted. So this is absolutely critical and when we're talking about a federal event, we're on a tight timeline to make a request unless we request an extension. So the sooner you can access these areas to validate damages, the better. Now, we understand there's some areas that might be inaccessible due to flood or snow or something like that and that could justify a request for an extension of time for the federal government but we need to operate under the assumption that there will be no extension and that will have validated damages very soon after an event. Okay, we talked about this as well that the director can issue CDA for permanent work, the governor can issue for either emergency or permanent work and who's eligible to proclaim under the ESA. From time to time it comes out whether an incorporated town is included in the definition of city so that's why we threw that definition in there. I think it's come up twice or three times since I've been here, so this is something to know. So our CDA regs essentially mirror the federal government's regs for public assistance and this is a really critical slide right here. If it's a state-only event, the requirement is that you follow your own rules. However, the federal procurement rules which we'll talk about in a bit are very, very stringent, especially for local governments, more so than state governments and they're tricky and it's the number one point for the obligation refining from the OIG if they come into audit. So procurement is absolutely critical. Our regs actually say that to the extent that there may be federal funding available, a local jurisdiction must follow the federal procurement rules. And so what happens for a local government is that you have to follow your rules and the federal regs and to the extent there's a conflict you must follow the more restrictive or more difficult rule to follow. It's really tricky. And so if FEMA does their presentations, they'll actually give examples of which is more restrictive and it's really difficult sometimes to even figure that out. But that's a critical component of post-disaster recovery because any defect in contract or procurement is gonna put you at a disadvantage should there be an audit. So that's why we recommend that you follow the federal rules. And then generally the cost share for CDA if you're granted that is 75% which means that the local jurisdiction will bear the 25% non-state share of CDA. So it's a pretty simple calculation. It's a little trickier if we're dealing with federal funds. And again, we'll talk about that in just a bit. So I've got a couple of pictures before we get into debris removal, but you can see the picture on the slide right now is Coffee Park before and after the 2017 North Bay Fires. It's a pretty powerful picture if you take a look. The next slide that you're gonna see here, this is a staging area following the 2017 North Bay Fires of burnt vehicles. Thousands and thousands of vehicles that were burned, they're essentially shells on the vehicle that were staged so that the crews can remove actual structural debris from properties. But to me that picture is pretty telling. You can't really tell what vehicles when one starts and another begins. And we're talking about this on a scale of thousands and thousands of vehicles. And then here's just a close-up picture of one vehicle on a property. This is from 2015 in Lake County, the Valley Fire. I have debris removal from publicly and privately owned lands and water undertaken by the state in response to an emergency as eligible for state financial assistance. Private property debris removal may be authorized when there's an immediate threat to public health and safety. And the critical thing to take away from that statement is that it needs to be a threat to public health because the state does not typically go into private properties and remove the debris that's typically incumbent upon the landowner and it has to be an extraordinary circumstance for the government to come in and do a private property, dirty removal, excuse me, stumbling over my words today. And then that often will necessitate a proclamation from your local health officer about the threat to public health. And then there's the assessment of whether the state needs to come in and assist in that manner. And so the CDA regulations talk about debris removal and then talk about private property debris removal. And the default rule is that removal of debris from private property is ineligible for CDA. So that is the default rule, right? We're only talking about public property. The exception is if there are circumstances that are so severe, perhaps a high concentration of homes that were burnt in a certain area may be impacting the watershed or just the shared volume of debris poses a threat to the public at large, then the state could consider authorizing reimbursement for debris removal from private property. Same with the federal government, we'll go into their criteria in a minute. But the key there is that it's still a reimbursement program just like any project under CDAA. So the default is if we authorize it then the local jurisdiction could engage in a private property debris removal and submit for reimbursement. Only when there are truly extraordinary, the worst of the worst sort of events would the state come in and actually in the form of like a direct state assistance remove that debris. So it's really critical that jurisdictions understand the scope of PPDR, what the rules are and build a local capability to actually engage in this sort of a program because most events would not warrant the state to actually come in and do that. And while we can provide technical assistance it's really important that the local jurisdictions understand what it takes to run a debris of the removal program. Yeah, and should the locals undertake such a program the regulations require that the local jurisdiction secure a right of entry form meaning that they are authorized to go into the private property and remove that debris. And within that right of entry form there needs to be a whole harmless agreement. But from the owner of the property to the local jurisdiction and the state saying that the local and state are absolved of any liability or negligence or damage to the property. And then the local jurisdiction or the excuse me and then the private property or the private owner, the home owner and the local jurisdiction needs to avoid duplication of benefits. So overview of private property debris removal there are both state and federal programs that could allow this. It is actually considered public assistance it's not individual assistance. Reason being is that the justification for engaging in that kind of a program is that there's a threat to the public at large and you need to remove that debris to mitigate that threat to the public at large. So this is not considered individual assistance under either the state or the fed programs. As Jennifer mentioned, you need a right of entry and demarcation at home or harmless. And there's a spot on the existing or we right of entry template that we've all used that has a spot for insurance but it will be the local jurisdictions obligation to pursue insurance proceeds because those would constitute a duplication of benefits. And that's a requirement both in the state and the federal programs. We typically get a lot of questions when these programs are rolled out or town hall meetings and people say, well, I owe money, am I gonna be out of pocket for this? The short answer is no, but your insurance proceeds the government would take your insurance proceeds to the extent there are insurance proceeds you're marked for debris and remaining after the debris removal has happened. Now, homeowners would be able to use that debris insurance proceeds for things that are not covered under the debris program, but if they have no other expenses and there are funds on the policy you're marked for debris and ensure the government would collect that back and typically it's gonna be cents on the dollar compared to the cost of the debris removal. So it's not in that pocket but it is a recruitment money from the insurance policy. And then in order to get private property debris rule request to us, you'll have to demonstrate that there is an immediate threat to public health and safety under the federal guidelines. There's gotta be some sort of cognizant official that can make that determination. It almost always is the local health officer and it's always done via a local health emergency under health and safety code 101-080. And this is critical. It's a way that, because we are not health experts, right? We're gonna rely on those health experts. So if there's a local health officer that is proclaiming the existence of a health emergency due to the volume of the hazardous debris, then that's gonna carry weight in our evaluation. And one of the bases as well could be economic recovery. So it could be that you need to remove that debris for instance to restore the economy of the local economy in that jurisdiction. And that's gonna be one of the factors that will weigh into whether or not that program's approved. So the local considerations when you're undertaking a private property through debris removal program is having taken the steps prior to the disaster occurring of having contractors in place or potential contractors in place for the debris removal program. And then when you're responding to the actual emergency and undertaking the debris removal, sometimes debris ordinances are necessary. So the ordinances need to be consistent with the public health emergency and the threat to the environment. And make sure that the local jurisdictions are not allowing individual property owners to reenter into the areas that are deemed a threat to the public before the debris is actually removed from the property. And then of course, as Alex mentioned, the insurance collection that we have to avoid the duplication of benefits. Yeah, that should be, yeah, that should do. Essentially what you wanna do is in that ordinance you're gonna identify, typically a timeline by which a homeowner who does not wanna participate in the consolidated government run program to opt out, do their own cleanup. But they're gonna be strict timelines that the homeowner would need to clean by and the local jurisdiction must be ready to abate all properties that have not complied. So if you have a homeowner that has left property there and it's potentially posing that threat to public health and safety or watershed, they're gonna be subject to abatement. Question? What was the question? The question was, has Cal OES provided templates of those ordinances or providing recommendations on who wants to emulate? So I don't know if we've officially provided them. We have just over the years worked with jurisdictions. So I do have many of them. We have our own kind of guidebook that we sort of rely on and certainly able to share that. In fact, following the 2017 North Bay Fires started as daily calls and then every other day and then a couple of days a week and then weekly calls with every, either county council or city attorney of an impacted jurisdiction. So there was like 15 folks on the call every day talking through all of these issues ordinances. And then in a car fire, which was July of 2018, county council and city attorney for Reading worked with Sonoma because they had just gone through with us many a year earlier. And then this year we're working with Butte County. I know that their county council had worked with Sonoma. So certainly there is this sort of neighbor helping neighbor approach on the legal side as well. And I'm happy to share any template. Those are all right, in ordinances public. So happy to share any of that that will be useful to jurisdiction. But I think that's a key, that coordination and collaboration with folks who have gone through it is key on any disaster there. Alex, I just wanted to remind everybody Sherry McCracken is in the room with us today. And she's got plenty of templates that I'm sure she'd be happy to share with all of you, as I'm sure Reva would as well. So certainly looking to the folks that have been through it. And one of the other things I wanted to touch on and I'm sure Ryan will touch on this a little bit further when he speaks is to help everybody to understand that our ability at the state level or the federal government level to do debris operations is not unlimited. So we are going to look at there are not clear cut defined thresholds on when we will be able to come in and do debris removal. So that's something that we will look at is what is your capability, understanding that we will throw all the technical expertise and experience to your team to help you. But we certainly want to see California as a whole get to a point where there's a greater capability at the local government level to do these debris management operations, understanding that those very large operations in 17 and 18 where the ability to get a community back on its feet quickly requires sometimes the state or federal government to come in. But there's a lot of events that we deal with that are a much smaller universe. And so that's a conversation we need to collaboratively have before there's the expectation that the state or federal government's gonna come in and take care of that. Thanks, Eric. And to put in perspective of just the sheer scale of some of these disasters. So in 2015 we had a federally declared event 4240 which encompassed the Butte Fire and Calvary's Amidore counties, the Valley Fire and Lake County. Collectively between those two massive fires we had just under 2,000 homes destroyed. North Bay fires in 2017, we were over 6,000. And in the Camp Fire alone in Paradise we were talking over 18,000 structures. So when we talk about the threat to public health and safety, it's not a few hundred homes. We're talking thousands of homes that literally blanketed the entire community with hazardous debris. And it's that sort of a justification that would allow private property debris removal with public funding, if that makes sense, right? It's not just a few homes scattered. It is a high concentration widespread public threat. So this presentation we're probably gonna explore emergency declarations and major disaster declarations. But it's noteworthy that there's also another assistance available under the Stafford Act and that's FMAG for fire management assistant grant declaration. And that is triggered when there is a fire happening and it reaches such a significant threat threshold that the federal government is willing to lean in and provide assistance to help combat the fire situation before it expands its magnitude. Real quick, noteworthy on the FMAG, sorry. You have one shot to request that thing. And so you have to, there's gotta be an event that looks that that could warrant a major disaster deck if the fire burned away, it does, but you can't wait until after the fire is burnt to request that. And the whole idea is that they'll provide this assistance to mitigate that, what would otherwise potentially be that major disaster declaration. And to colligate those requests are verbal over the phone and then the paperwork followed after the request is made and the verbal approval is provided. So like I said, emergency declarations and major disaster declarations, those declarations authorize the president to provide supplemental federal assistance. And the amount of assistance to go is dependent upon the two declarations. So an emergency declaration, any occasion or instance for which in the determination of the president, federal assistance is needed to supplement state and local efforts and capabilities to save lives and to protect property, public health and safety or to the lesser or a burden of threat of a catastrophe to any part of the United States. So as we covered earlier in the charts, we have, if you remember the two charts, you had the degree of removal and emergency protective measures and then you have the emergency work. So here we're looking at the emergency protective measures and the degree of removal on that left side of the chart. Yeah, so typically these come at the front end of a disaster or shortly before a disaster. You see these a lot on the east coast as a hurricane is coming in and they know it's gonna come and they can kind of time it and they'll maybe request an emergency declaration ahead of time so they can receive some sort of emergency protective measures to mitigate that threat. California unfortunately is a no notice state for the most part. Once in a while we'll have a really bad weather event like we saw a couple weeks ago where there was pretty certain that there were gonna be fires during that really severe fire weather condition. We also saw the near failure of the oracle dam spillway. That was the first emergency declaration at least in my tenure here that we secured. Just given the mass amount of folks who were evacuating at one time, obviously the potential catastrophe that would have occurred had that fell. And then we've had a few since when there were massive evacuations or really bad fire, campfire for instance, we were able to secure one of these just to get additional firefighting assets or commodities for shelters when you knew that there were gonna be a lot of folks displaced. But for the most part these are more rare than what Jennifer's about to talk about. Of course it's fine for you up there but it's a natural catastrophe regardless of the cause and it's of such magnitude to warrant a system under the staffer doc from the president and the federal government. So this is the type of assistance that's available under the major disaster declaration. So if you give, think back to the chart that we set for us for you under CDAA to start clearing those categories as well. So you have the left side of the emergency work and then you also have permanent work. But what's also significant for major disaster declarations is that you have individuals available under major disaster declarations. So it includes housing, mass care and sheltering, emergency assistance, crisis counseling, a disaster unemployment, there's the hazard mitigation grant program disaster declarations end up. Yeah, so the way that the HMGP program works is the state receives back, depending on the calculation either 15 or 20 cents on the dollar of every dollar that constituted that major disaster declaration. So on a billion dollar revenue talk about $150 million or $200 million that comes back to the state in the form of a hazard mitigation grant that any local jurisdiction could apply for. It's not limited to just the jurisdiction where the event was declared. So it's statewide, it's a really tremendous program that we administer here. It's federal dollars that go back to the locals to ideally build the capability to mitigate harm from a future event. So hopefully you folks are familiar, if not I would definitely become familiar. Ryan will be your point on this but it's a really important program. So there are two different analyses that occur for public assistance and individual assistance. Public assistance generally is gonna be driven by the cost of the event. So California's indicator is somewhere around $57 million of uninsured public infrastructure damages from an event. It's a really, really high number of highest in the nation given our population. And so this is where I'm talking about where the local jurisdictions must identify these damages and get concurrence from the state and the federal government on the cost of the repair or replace. So what happens is the state has to reach approximately $57 million in order to be eligible for a major disaster declaration. In addition, each county that we're seeking to have included in that major declaration must meet their own indicator. So you could have a situation where the state gets in with a $57 million threshold but included in that $57 million are a couple of counties whose numbers contribute towards that total but did not meet their individual indicators. And that happens once in a while especially with larger counties that have really, really high thresholds per capita thresholds. Individual assistance is a totally different analysis. There is no preset number that you have to hit in order to get there. I think in the past we've looked at 800 to 1200 homes as sort of a rough minimum and then you kind of have to sell why it's justified. So there could be concentration of damages, trauma to the community, socioeconomic status of the community, all those types of things contribute. Just recently though FEMA updated its criteria and they have a new formula that's based on total taxable resources of the state in California that increased the indicator or the threshold theoretically for individual assistance. We have not requested individual assistance since this rule came into effect. I think it was just this past spring. So June, yeah. So we have yet to see really what that difference is but we certainly are aware of recent events that may not have had the same outcome if we're calculating with this new criteria. So this is something we're watching very closely. Hopefully we don't need to request anything because we have a nice, I don't want to use the Q word but I'll say it's quiet sort of time for it's California. But we'll see what happens when we make our next request for that. Yeah. Just give everybody an example of the Napa earthquake would not have been declared under this new criteria. A lot of the flood and events earlier this spring would not have been declared under this new criteria. So these are things that were declared. Can't fire 2017. That was iffy, if that would have met the metric at least in the early stages. So what Alex is saying is this has potentially huge complications for the state. And I know that folks are talking generally not just in California that it's sort of brand new. We'll see how it all works but certainly something to keep an eye on. So the federal debris removal program similar to what Jennifer was talking about on the state side there's gotta be a demonstration that there's an immediate threat to public health and safety. And then also they'll take into account economic recovery as a basis for approving that kind of a program. Again it's public assistance not individual assistance and they require the rights of entry and that you avoid duplication of benefits. So duplication of benefits can be in many forms most commonly it's gonna be insurance. So when you're running a debris program every homeowner theoretically would have insurance for most will and most of those will also have debris coverage. And so that's where a lot of your efforts are gonna be focused. But there could be other programs as well that constitute duplication. So if you have a flood control facility that's under Army Corps like I mentioned that will be ineligible. And then recently we're kind of seeing this play out but there's also provision in the Stafford Act regulations that says a negligent third party that caused the condition for which disaster funding was expended would constitute a duplication of benefits and that there is an obligation of the local government to pursue those costs from a negligent third party. So. And with the state to try to retain any as a result of negligence of a third party and it very much patterns the federal regulations. Yeah. And this is a that's a heavy lift.  It's a lot of work. Some jurisdictions contract out that task to a subrogation firm. And that could be eligible. Could be an eligible expense towards the disaster as well. But before you undertake that obviously could coordinate with us if it's a federal event with FEMA as well we'll make sure that everybody's on the same page. And then the cost share. So generally when federal assistance comes in it's at 75, 25% cost share rate. And then we, the state will kick in 75% of the 25% with CDAA funding. So the way that the breakdown typically will look is 75% from the federal government, 18.75% from the state and then the local jurisdiction would have six and a quarter percent as their cost share. So as I mentioned, probably the number one finding with audits and maybe Ryan could confirm this is relating to procurement and contracting. Again, it's very complicated and it's very important. On the left, the state has it relatively easy. The state follows its own contracting rules and has to include a series of contractual provisions that are set forth in the regulations. On the right side of that column it's a lot more tricky. So for local government you have to follow your local rules to the extent there are state rules that apply to you. You follow those and you follow two CFR 200.318 through 326. And when your councils are reviewing these to the extent that there's anything between 318 and 326 that conflicts with the local rule you have to compare them, de-dub them and follow the more strict path. So it's a really tricky, difficult thing but it's important and you don't wanna be in the business giving money back that you receive from for disasters. So that's key and I would also say I should have said this during debris. Debris is probably the most complicated and costly part of our recovery operation and there are obviously contracts that are affiliated with those things. So your debris contracts, it's a double whammy. It's a highly, highly, well it's a high price tag on the debris. Procurement's always gonna be audited and debris contracts will always have some scrutiny. So make sure that those things are solid, that you vetted them through your council and that you've complied with the procurement rules under the Stafford Act regulations. And then when there's not a federal event, or sorry, like a major disaster or an emergency deck, there are still other types of programs that you can seek relief from through the federal government and that's run through our office. So one could be the small business administration. You can get low interest loans for businesses and homeowners. And then the U.S. Department of Ag has disaster programs that'll provide funding for lost crops or something that resulted from an event that did not warrant necessarily a major disaster declaration. This could still be on the table as assistance. And then we talked about the hazard mitigation. Again, a really critical program that we administered that gives money right back to you all to build up better capabilities and to be able to withstand future disasters. So in the last several years, how the U.S. has really put its mission forward, we've seen an extraordinary amount of emergency proclamation, presidential emergency decorations and major disaster deck decorations. So here's some statistics that we've met, if you will, unfortunately, and we've all been extremely busy responding to the disasters over the last couple of years. So we've had 11 major disaster decks, five presidential emergency, 75 plus cumulative state of emergency based upon the timeline up there. And then we see fires, storms, earthquakes, disease outbreaks, gas outbreaks, air attacks throughout many more.  There's always something new. There's no shortage of disasters that strike California. I want to just point out a few things. One, that 75 plus gubernatorial, it's sort of a misleading number. The numbers of events is way higher than that because that'll be like one proclamation. Within one proclamation, you can have a dozen fires that are listed out. Even a couple weeks or two weeks ago, we had the TIC and the Kincaid fires, two separate events, obviously different counties, but within one proclamation. So that's an example of one proclamation equals two events or at least two separate fires. And that goes on through most of these. And if you look at the recent trend, nine out of the 11 presidential disaster decks were in the past two and a half years and all five emergency decks that we've seen at least since 2014 have been in that same time period. So certainly a pretty busy time for all of us folks here. So speaking of things that we're always seeing new in events, does anybody know what that is? Firenado, right?  I think it was referred to as a firenado or a fire tornado. But so evidently within fires, you can have essentially weather systems or winds that are created within the fire itself. And this is one that occurred in the campfire or in the Car Fire rather in 2018. And National Weather Service officially designated this as a fire world with wind speeds equivalent to an EF-3 tornado, 140 plus mile an hour winds within a fire. And you actually had damage within that fire gravity who had wind damage to homes that were not necessarily burned the way that neighboring homes would have been. But damage nonetheless as if it was a catastrophic tornado. When we requested that major disaster decoration, it was actually approved for two types of events. It was a fire event and a wind event. And they looked at them separately because there were damages attributed just to that wind. So it's not just, we're not just saying that when we say never know what we'll see and there's no two events are alike. This was certainly something that I hadn't worked on before and it was novel to me. So kind of a telling tale of what we're seeing in these past few years. And then this is our contact information, Jennifer and me. So if you have any questions down the road, always feel free to email or call and happy to take questions now or hang out for after the other presentation. So we are ahead of schedule. We're gonna take a 15 minute restroom break and allow folks to get coffee and refreshments on the side of the room. But we've got more than enough time for questions right now for Alex and Jennifer. So if you've got questions for them. Thank you, Alex. I think we've put you through the ringer with the campfire and I have to tell you, it is so important to have your council working with Alex and his crew and stay in lockstep because we weren't in the beginning. I think we are now though, so thank you, absolutely. Any other questions in the room? Okay, then we're gonna take a 15 minute break. Let's come back here at around 9.35. The restrooms for anybody that needs them are directly behind us in the hall. There's also a filter water dispenser out there if you've got a water bottle that you wanna refill, you can do that out there. And we'll be back here around 9.35. Thanks. We're gonna start our afternoon group. It's gonna start with Ryan Beerus, our deputy director of recovery and then transition over to some perspective from both city and county level from 2018. But we're gonna start first with Ryan Beerus, our deputy director of recovery. But I think it's only about six months on the job with us who brings to Cal OES and the state of California a phenomenal experience from the federal side in terms of disaster recovery. So I'm gonna turn it over to Ryan. First off, I have not been here for even four months. July 22nd, it was my first date. Good morning, everyone. I do have a lot of experience on the federal side. I was with FEMA for over a decade, working recovery in front office. And I was deployed in the field probably 80% of the time. So including working the 2017 and 18 wildfires here in California as the housing lead for FEMA working alongside Eric and others from the state. I liked it so much. I chose the better profession coming here to work for California. So it's my honor to be here. And I can say that people here and working with many of people in the room like Sherry and others has been a joy. You don't really get that when you have that FEMA shirt on. You definitely get a different response when you go into counties and cities. But before I go into just what I know for 2017 and 18 and some lessons learned, I am gonna turn it over to my assistant director for recovery operations, Grady Joseph. He has to leave at 10 o'clock and I just wanted him to speak some of the technology, things that we're looking at for the state. So Grady, good afternoon, good morning everybody. Sorry, I'm still getting used to the time change. I was on the East Coast all weekend. So anyway, what I wanted to kind of chat with you guys a little bit about today. Ryan's been here for about four months. I've been here for a little over two months and what we both worked on primarily while on the federal side was an effort to make sure that we have data interoperability across jurisdictions, right? So when we're looking at it from a national perspective, we've got 50 states, obviously about 3,500 counties, 16 territories and over 400 tribes in the United States of America. So we wanna get to a place where we can begin capturing data once and reusing that throughout the rest of the recovery process. So that starts up at the initial damage assessment, our estimate, so what we have been attempting to kind of put into place since we've been here, we've done two IDs since I've been here of the most recent one being for the concaved fire in Sonoma. We wanna get to a place where we can gather information at the first touch with the locals, with you guys and give you guys the ability to capture that data as well so that we can then move that into say public assistance, individual assistance, right? So if we've gone out with the SBA and done an assessment of a home and noted that that's been destroyed, we have imagery that supports that. We have all the requisite information. Why should we not just be able to roll back directly into housing assistance through the SBA or FEMA's individual assistance program when that comes into a play. So we're really trying to get better and focus on areas where we can improve how we do our operations. That goes into everything from the IDE side all the way out to when you folks are asking for disbursements for your PA grants, right? We wanna be able to cut down the amount of touches and the amount of paperwork that you all have to contend with because we believe in first and foremost making sure that the customer experience you guys are the customers for us, right? We wanna make sure that that's as efficient as effective as possible. So more to come on that as we kind of get our feet wet with the different recovery operations and begin to build on that but that is somewhere something that we're definitely moving towards. So we wanna be a lot more predictive. We wanna be a lot more conscious of your time and energy and whatnot and basically free up resources so that we all collectively can focus on the recovery and making sure that we're making the best decisions for local communities as they begin to recover. So any questions on kind of where we wanna go and where we've been? Ryan and I both worked on the modernizing of the public assistance program. So that's been kind of a big focus for us and then damage assessment assessments nationally as well. So really just trying to bring those lessons learned and those experiences into California and ideally improve business processes for the entire state to make everything a little bit more effective for us. Thank you. Don't really have nothing prepared because I read Alex's brief yesterday and I was like, well, I don't even need to speak on recovery because he just covered it for you all. So if there's any questions on recovery, you ask Alex, he's got us covered. I'm gonna talk just some lessons learned real quick at least lessons that we at the state learned or I learned personally. The path forward of how I plan on leading the recovery team here in the states working closely with everyone in this room and Reeve, I actually owe you a visit from my meeting a couple of months ago. I did not forget that. I've been telling Pune we need to get to Malibu and why would we not want to go there? So I am working on that. And then I wanna turn it over to Pune who leads my interagency recovery coordination division. I think this is gonna be the future of how we approach disasters, particularly with, Alex just mentioned, IA may be a little more difficult to get. PA, $57 million is a large threshold but that doesn't mean that there's not assistance out there. So we have this team with six RSFs and she's gonna kind of go over that. And for the first time ever, I'm sure Sherry, I've seen your slides too but if you could just mention some things about the recovery support functions and your experience, good and or bad, I would like for everyone to hear it including myself. So I went to the NEMA conference two or three weeks ago in Idaho and we were at the OR&R session and it was an hour and a half long and I don't know how many people were in the room. It was quite a few and FEMA was talking individual assistance and then they were like, these are our metrics. Just to give you some metrics, which were one metric that they mentioned which was alarming to me. Their metric for sheltering is 14 days. If anybody's still in shelters after 14 days they get alarming, whether they get alarmed or they say the county or city can't handle it, the state needs help. Apparently they've never ever responded to a fire because a fire is months, we just, well, a year in this case, having shelters open. So that was one thing they mentioned. They also mentioned housing, of how their housing program, they're gonna bring in all these travel trailers and mobile homes and they wanna be innovative but they really can't. So, but once again, they have never worked fires. They've never worked mudslides. They've never apparently visited the state of California because lots are small, space is precious and there's different codes here. For instance, when they were bringing in the manufactured homes and luckily I already left this disaster as a Fed December 21st because of the shutdown because if not it would be my fault. But they brought in mobile homes that never even met the state or local code. So when you go into a sales program at the end of this hopefully maybe given somebody a potential use of a unit, they can't even purchase it because it doesn't even need code. That's a big lesson to learn. We should never accept anything, Alex, in the future that doesn't meet our code. And you were probably not even aware of that probably those are discussions. Another thing with shelters we've learned is all the pop-up shelters, nationally this is a problem but particularly with 17 and 18, we had the Walmart pop-up shelter here and that creates its own coordination effort. Several churches were popped up. This recent incident and for the Kincaid fire, we had some of our subcontractors open up their base camp to sheltering which we quickly had to intervene and make sure that they went to the proper sheltering. So that's one thing a big lesson learned is every, in the end everybody wants to help, right? But coordinating that and not going to those assigned shelters does become problematic in large events. Debris, I haven't really seen it in 17 and 18, but particularly in floods and we are prone to flood and events here in the state. We just have to watch out. There's a lot of scam orders that come out for debris, particularly the muck up. So that's one thing. And we've seen some of it in 17, not too much in 18 people trying to clean up at the dime of somebody that just lost everything, which is said, another lesson's learned from 17 to 18. I don't know if I could say it, but I'm going to anyway. We do it, when it comes to a federal cleanup, I think we do it better than the feds. In 18, we not only were quicker, we also did it cheaper by $700,000 per parcel. And I think that's just to the testament to not only Cal OES, but also working with the county. The county has been great in the town. The ROEs is a big lesson's learned. I mean, Sherry can definitely speak to it when she mentions it, but you know, Sherry had, she's the county, then you have the town of Paradise and who's going to control that ROE process? Who's going to set up those ROE centers? How many town halls do you have to have to get all of these ROEs in? And she received over 11,000, I think it was 809 to be exact, ROEs in a pretty quick timeframe. So, but that's the nature of a cleanup. ROEs are critical. And we're doing it round two with trees. That was another lesson's learned. I think, but particularly up north, not so much down south in it, but you know, when you have a debris cleanup, you have all these trees that were burned down that's still part of the potential right away. Early on though, we didn't really capture all of that with the ROEs and didn't have that language. We didn't have it approved. So now we have to go into phase two of the cleanup, which I don't know if it would have changed the timeframe of the cleanup, but it would have definitely prevented round two of collecting right of entries, which is just never, never fun. Alex mentioned the debris cleanup, but you know, we picked up in 17, 3.6 million, exceeded 3.6 million tons of debris already. I mean, that's, it's more than the World Trade Center by double. It's almost 600,000 elephants for those that can visualize that. And the reason I mentioned that is I've reviewed 12 debris management plans from counties and a lot of people have this notion of where they're gonna put the debris. And I think you just have to visualize that many elephants. And then when you write your plan, see if those elephants fit where that's going. On housing, nobody wants to talk about housing, even pre-event, we have a housing crisis in the state. We have affordable housing problem in the state. And when you lose 14,000 homes like Sherry did or Coffee Park, that was I think 1,500 homes, you have to talk housing. When we do have an IA incident, like we will if it's 2,000 plus, I think the metric's 2,500 now, just to let y'all know. It used to be 800, I think it's 2,500 now. Is, you know, you're gonna quickly have people talking or coming to you about being innovative and setting all these new things up and these, I don't know what you call the many houses, what's it? Tiny homes, yes.  So it sounds good. But all of that is, you can't really do that post incident. You have the ones that want to do the 4D type homes. They want to, they have this module that they can go rent this or buy this empty building and have all these 3D plantings and quickly do things, which I've never done before. What I'm trying to get at is this has to be all done pre-incident. Post incident, there's three things you can do and this is, it's, within the confrins of being innovative, this is housing. You can buy it, you can build it, or you can repair it. That's the three things you can do in housing. So when you lose something, when you lose everything, you're not buying anything. All these other programs you hear about, family, multifamily repair. Well, it's burned to the ground. There's really nothing to repair. They want to, at the time, we had a step program which you can shelter in place, which they removed, which I'm convinced we will have it in the incident of earthquake, but there's nothing to live in. That's another big program for FEMA. The federal programs for housing are built for floods. It's built for a hurricane. It's built for the Gulf Coast. It's built so where something can come in, the water exceeds, the wind dies down, you put up a trailer, you mark and build your house, and the trailer leaves in six months. That's what the federal housing programs are for. If you haven't been to a housing mission before, it's the most political thing you will ever get involved in. It's the most personal thing you will ever get involved in and it's the most, I mean, I personally love it. I did it for 15 years at the national level and I still love it here today. It's a challenge, but the biggest lessons learned that I can say is start thinking of it now because one day it is going to impact wherever you sit. Another thing we learned is NIMBY, not in my backyard. When these disasters occur, sometimes you have to build communities. They're called group sites or commercial pads. But when you build the group sites, you bring in all of this infrastructure, you bring all the units in, and then you have to go to the cities and say, hey, I wanna use it in this vacant lot. Well, it goes to the city council and they're like, mm, that's not happening here. I don't want those people staying there. I don't know what that means. I love when people say it around me. I am one of those people. I did lose my home in Katrina, so did my family. I think I'm a pretty good person, so I don't know what that means, but I can tell you what it means to me is during Katrina, you had all those news clips happening way over here whether they were doing drugs or meth labs or whatever they were doing in their units, and that's the perception that's out there right now. We have to clean that perception up. So one of the biggest lessons learned, not only for this disaster, but just nationally, is as you speak to your county and your city and whoever that is, let's just make sure that those people are the people that lost their houses. We have very few crime in the group sites that are being managed right now. I think the number's definitely less than 1%. Probably no different than it would have been if that was a community standing before the incident. Disaster case management. I'm actually gonna let Sherry get into this. It didn't, it just, it's slow. It's a needed action, but I can say it doesn't really work as well as it should. We're dealing, I'm not stuttering. I'm just trying to be, anyway, Sherry, you can get tomorrow into disaster case management. The quirky thing with disaster case management is they use this formula from the Fed side and they think these are the numbers, like it's 10, I think it's 35 to one. But the problem, so it's one case management for 35 people. The problem though is that there's a bunch of numbers out there. We're dealing with something right now. The number of people that have not been served or case managed is from 826 to 8000 and no one can agree to the number, but the only one that FEMA's gonna allow us to go with is of course the one that's less than 900. So that's one thing Sherry and I are working right now. And it is pivotal that it's such a great thing. It addresses the unmet needs, but it seems like every incident we could always improve disaster case management. Elected officials is another lesson learned, particularly for everyone in this room and myself is we have to quickly make sure that we're communicating with them. We have to quickly ensure that when they're calling, whether it's the governor's office or the East Coast or having press conferences that we give them all the information that they need. When I got here, I said it's imperative that everything I know and my team knows the county and city needs to know and the elected officials need to know. We should be saying the same number. We should be saying the same thing. It should be no surprises. I think it's working well since I got here with the campfire, there's still every week I just scratched my head and go, why is Sherry or the town columning? And typically it's a comms issue. We will get there, but it's, I could tell you from where I stand, it's one of the most important things that we could do as emergency managers is over-communicate. Included for individual systems, you know, communications key with the individual and how we communicate to them. I'm still trying to make FEMA realize that we can communicate collectively better to the individual. What I mean by that is, I don't know if you don't know this, but when somebody loses their phone and there's an IA's turned on and then the call center from FEMA turns on and it's called a pre-placement interview. That name alone works me, but the very first question is not how are you, do you need any counseling? Did you lose your home? And the next question is, what is your permanent housing plan and will you relocate? To me, that is, I just think it's a wrong way to approach those calls. It's one thing I'm doing here. We had 5,000 or so cases that we're trying to get information back from FEMA because they recalled out and we're gonna call them personally. We're gonna case management through the long-term recovery team and just see is there truly any unmet needs. Group sites, if anybody is in here is involved in group sites, my only advice as long as I'm here, I'm gonna be pushing you to do it and I'll be definitely pushing FEMA to do it is to make sure that we look through the lens of it's not short-term. 18 months is not short-term. Eric says I was here for six months. That's, I feel like I've been here for six years, but I can say what I mean by that is, when you lose everything and you're with everyone that has lost everything, I think it's imperative, I think it's nice and I think it's the human thing to do to have a community center, whether that's a picnic table, a tent, somewhere where people can just walk around and just say, hey, I need a hug. Oh, let's talk about something other than the disaster because right now in these group sites, all they can do is just go home in their trailer, which has no grass, no playground for kids, no dog walks, nothing, but dirt in their trailer. And if you could tell I'm displeased, I am. It's a FEMA program, not a state program, but I can tell you moving forward, it's just something that we have to demand from the federal government. And they're gonna say, we don't wanna make it too comfortable. Well, I don't know what that means, but I know every hotel you go to has a picnic table almost these days. They even have a place to smoke at most hotel places. They have a place where you can meet. They have a place where a dog can use the bathroom called grass. These are simple things, I think, that we can demand because at the end of the day, it is our people, right? This is our program, it's our state. I think the county city, I think the biggest thing is just to be united with us. I've probably speak to Sherry four or five times a week late at night, and I think it's the only thing that keeps me sane to make sure that I'm given, providing her everything that she needs. I do it the same for the town. I've been in the town with Sonoma, thanks Sonoma's here, with the Kincaid fire quite a bit, but it's one lesson's learned as you go to some of these disasters and there's, it seems like a battle, it just can't be, right? We just have to be united on that. I have some indication, I know it was mentioned earlier. I think the biggest lessons learned from 17 and 18 and even when I just reviewed $35 million worth of projects and we sent them off and it's clear that when you get this pot of money, everybody's starting to become innovative, and they're like, yes, we're gonna do this. I encourage all of you out of, what would y'all wanna do now if you had that money? Already have that plan in place, be innovative, be, tie everything together. More importantly, identify the cost share, the biggest issue with hazard mitigation is the cost share. So many people say I'm gonna use DR money for the cost share. Well, A, that's assuming you're getting CDBG DR, and B, that's really not a good cost share because you would never get that within the 12 month timeframe. Anyway, it takes at least two years for those federal dollars to come in. Now that finally my last lessons learned, I know I'm speaking long, Eric, but I had a little extra time, but I think the biggest lesson learned for me as a federal, a former federal employee, now state employee, and a former current survivor, whatever the word is today, is don't depend on the federal government. And I know it's, you already all know that, but don't think that when I is turned on, your individual assistance and housing programs are no longer needed at the county and city level because they won't be, the programs are very small. The programs are, while the Stafford Act is written in a way to be innovative and help the policies that go in place underneath those are everything but that. Example at NEMA, they want the states to now take over their housing mission. Of course they do, and I told them in common, I was like, the state of California would love to take this on. As long as I don't have to go through your procurement rules, as long as I don't have to go by your policies, let me just go by what's in the regulations and the Stafford Act. And they said, well, we'll talk with you. Well, I saw the draft just this weekend and it's basically everything they currently do. And on top of that, we have to do all these other things as a state, like you have a housing plan, which I don't mind, but they want us to identify a group site every county and they want to do it in a month. Yeah, let me bend it, let me go to LA and see how that works for me, right? So it's not. So it's ridiculous. I'll be taking this head on, it's supposed to come out in the spring and I'm gonna be very vocal because if we have to do this, the only thing that it's gonna do for us is it's gonna ensure that we can't house people quick. And at the end of the day, the program is supposed to be about housing. So that's my rant on that. On the rebuild, I think one thing lessons learned is codes and insurance codes at the local codes, as you rebuild, one thing Coffee Park rebuilt extremely well. One thing they did was they quickly realized they have to change the way they built. So they allowed smaller homes on parcels and whatnot and they did that fairly quick. And I think they're up to 70% rebuilt already, which is huge in two years. And they did lose quite a bit. And make sure you constantly speak with insurance. One thing I'm pushing for in the hazard mitigation side is, and I'm speaking to the commissioner of insurances, how do we build back with metrics in mind that, hey, we have this defensible space, whether it's around the county, around the city or X amount of homes are built above and beyond what that code is, how can that drive? Well, A, can that ensure insurance is even allowed? And B, can that actually drop down insurance? And that's one thing I'm pushing for. Cause if you can just imagine, you have a county that has defensible space all around the county, which is beautiful green and whatever, but it's a break, right? Especially if it's a hundred yards and you have homes, 75% are built above and beyond the movie code. I think as assurance commissioner, not that I am, but we should be like, hey, well, they should get a discount, right? Whoever builds back there should be awarded something that should be the incentive to build back. Now that, what I just said has a lot of issues with it, but this is just one thing I'm trying to push because you can't rebuild back as quick as you want if the insurance is not going to be insuring the homes that are getting built back. And by the way, if you disagree with anything I'm saying, just raise your hand and we'll be glad to talk. Have forward for me on public assistance front, which is by far the, it's where the dollars are. One thing I've seen is we don't use mitigation at all. When I got here, the project worksheets for PA were at 2% mitigation. That's just free money on the table. You have category C to G projects and you can get 15% of that. It could be a simple thing, a bankment, you have to hit a flood and hit a runoff and you have to reseed it. Well, maybe you could put hydro-seed and do other things and you can get that $1500 to a $10,000 project. I told my team that I want 25% of all projects to have mitigation identified by January 1. I don't know if we'll get there by January 1, 2020. But I know we're already up to 15%. So speaking, let you all know that is it would be your applicants that we're pushing this to. And now I'm requiring every starting today, every PA project worksheet or every applicant briefing that we do or recovery scope and meeting is on a category to C and G project I want a note to say a notification of what they're doing with 406. And if they say they're doing nothing with 406, I'm requiring them to give me a memo to file to me. And I'll be looking at those personally because my goal and my role is two things. One, I'm the breeze to make sure that we're doing everything on the procurement side so that the state's not losing money. And two, my other goal is to make sure that I'm spending every federal dollar to the penny and putting it back to this state. So that's why I was hired. Also, I wanted to look at PA and really just recovery in general is how do we rebuild using 404 and 406? How do we bring 404 together? How do we ensure that as a state, we're looking this at a holistically approach and working with county, neighboring counties and tying those 404 mitigation projects, dollars together. And I could say if there's a united project that comes across my desk and it's helping a lot of people in the state, whether it's county led or it's tie into something else like a tie into the water, whatever it is, maybe, those are very interesting projects. And they become very competitive because hazard mitigation is very competitive. And so I'm just giving you some tips of how to be very competitive. I'm gonna definitely be asking the team to own the process more and public assistance. What that means is, who has been through a PA incident? I'm assuming most people here. So there's these things called program delivery managers. That's not a thing, it's a person. But they come in and they talk to them what the metric is anymore, seven to 10 applicants and that's their vision and that's all they do. But I can tell you the problem is, FEMA doesn't have enough, they're trying to hire a thousand of them. So when I meet some of the PDMGs, even since I've been here, they've never done this before. And that is the customer service form of how things are being rebuilt. So moving forward, any event that we have, hopefully not this year, it doesn't start to next year, we have a wind event, fortunately, Wednesday again, but is any Lodge project, which is like 127,000 now, I'm gonna have a state PDMG over that. I'm gonna own recovery, we're gonna own recovery. This, these are our applicants, it's not FEMA's applicants, and I'm gonna start with the Lodge projects. It's critical for us to move forward doing that. One thing y'all could do to help me is there's this thing called the Grants Portal. That's one thing Grady mentioned that we redesigned the PA program we did, so if you don't like it, it was more great than me. But not with seriousness, what we did do was create the Grants Portal, which does, it does do one thing very well, it tracks everything.  We should not like appeals. We should get to yes, day one. Appeals take time, it takes money, and more importantly, it's not getting money into the street where it needs to be. So the more that we can track things electronically, you can see exactly what everything is, or what is missing, everybody talks EEIs, EEIs, well it's there, so you know exactly where that is. But what we're not doing right now, what the system can do, and nobody wants to do it, but I'm encouraging all of you to do it, and if you can own this in LA, it would be huge for us, is let's get in there now, before the incident, and put our hospitals and everything in there now. Identify, load in the insurance records, load in the maintenance records, take a picture of the hospital the first month of the year, so where when the incident happens, you have pictures of that. Because if you do all that now, when the incident happens, we can flip money around in days, not months. So I encourage all of you all to take advantage of that. And it's a free system, as of today anyway. Individual assistance, I'm much, so we don't have an IA program, right, at Cal OES. We have CDAN, but we don't have IA. I take offense to that, because I think we have a lot of things in IA. I consider this an IA, this is my vision for Cal OES. There's a circle, and there's a person in it. And anything that touches that person is IA. So our team is gonna be refocused in the next few months to be the expert on SBA, to be the expert on working with CDSS, to understand all those programs. There's gonna be an expert on non-profits. How do we get into that person? So yes, we don't have an IA program, but we have a lot of people in California, 40 million people. So we have a lot of individuals, and I have an individual assistance team, and they're gonna be the experts on how to help you help that person. On the planning side, I personally would never be a planner. I would not do well. I particularly don't like to read plans, even though I do. As I said, I have been reading the debris management plans.  But what I can say is that I do wanna make sure that we're planning for a real world events. So what I mean by that is I want the debris management plan that the state's drafting, that we do have people, I think I have somebody in LA, on this county city, been helping me in San Francisco and some others, but I want the plan to be first off all hazards. I think we've covered fire. I think we know where we are with fire. But the most common disaster here is floods. We do have mudslides. I'm from Louisiana. We probably will have a hurricane down south now that I'm here. I think the last one was in the 60s, Eric, in San Diego. Yeah, there'll be a small one, but. But I also want the plan, I want to be all hazards. I want it to be real world. We talk about being resilient. I have the ABCs of what that means, but the C of that is capacity. But even capacity, if you read these plans, is it really meeting what the reality is of tomorrow? A lot of the plans that I've been seeing, it's still based off of the threats that were around in the 60s and 70s and 80s. Well, times have changed. So we have to be looking at those plans as we draft these plans, including housing plans. I'm gonna have a housing plan for the state. I want all of you all to take a look at it for us. And more so, I want you all to leverage what we're doing, start with us. My debris management plan, I have 12 guides to lead me there using the counties to help us, because it should be united, right? It should be the same in-state of all this, but it has to be realistic. The housing plan, you say, you can, I was reading once it was a chore when I first got here and they said, everybody's gonna be after disaster, everybody's gonna be housed into temporary shelters in 30 days. That's false. It's not gonna happen. So be realistic as you're setting these plans up. And that's my C for being resilient. I want for you with the A or B. One other thing we're doing moving forward is, Alex talks about the IDE teams and the PDA teams, is one thing what we don't have here is we don't have teams identified. When a disaster happens, it's basically an email goes out and three people are sent somewhere. And I think there's a better way of supporting you all. So we're gonna have monthly teams identified. And I want you all to know who those monthly teams are. I want my teams to come out to you all. And when they arrive in your county or city, A, that's probably not a good thing, but B, I want you to be comfortable with that. And that's important for me to get out in front of that. Also recovery task force is something we just started, we did it in Ridgecrest. We did it in this recent fires. My team's in Kincaid right now. Recovery task force is I actually leverage the recovery support functions because they have expertise, not just in infrastructure or housing, but also economics. And they know where to find those programs that can help identify your gaps. Their job when they get there and Leia has been, I think every one of them, is can you raise your hand, Leia? So she's been, everyone is to embed in the county or city, help identify where your gaps are, and then come up with a plan when she comes back home, working with the teams and giving you a concrete document that you all can use moving forward. And she doesn't go away. Ridgecrest, she just finished, I believe, saying that all their needs were met. So that's something that we're getting up in front of that. And unfortunately with this new IA program with declaration criteria, I think moving forward, we're gonna have more of these types of events than the federal types of events. So it's important that we get out in front of that. I think that's all I had. I'm gonna have, nope, so debris, two other things. So Eric mentioned, everybody, we're just not gonna come in and clean up. So Sonoma Kincaid had 200 homes, I think. But what didn't rise to the level of their capacity for us to come in. But one thing we're doing is, it doesn't mean we don't assist at the state level. So we brought, I brought my debris manager. He got embedded with the county. He gave him the technical assistance. We brought in a CalRecycle to give them technical assistance, particularly in the contracting side of things. Legal actually reviewed, not only the statement of work, but also the contract to ensure compliance, because at the end of the day, this may be eligible for CDAA. So we wanna make sure that we're assisting you all, if this was you all in that incident, to make sure that there was a reimbursement capacity. We also brought in DTSC. They actually gave them the contracts that were pre-negotiated with CalRecycle DTSC. So we knew going in, if the county selected one of these contracts, it would be eligible for that. They, the Russian river is close to there. And we're making sure using CalFire and some others to make sure that there is no major debris flow that would impact the Russian river that was ongoing last week. And that report should be done this week. But that's a lot of help. So it's a monumental effort on our part, but just because it doesn't rise to the level of a state lead or a fed lead, it doesn't mean that we're gonna be up in front of this. Our director here at the state is very forward-leaning, very forward-thinking. And I treat recovery-like response. Recovery does not start 30 days. And when somebody asks me, so what's that transition? I just cringe at that. It should be, well, it should be minus 180. We should be able to think about all of this stuff as I mentioned already, but more importantly, when two weeks ago, Grady, the assistant director, I was at NEMA, we had this, you know, the power straddle off in the fires, he was sitting with Eric Lamero. He was sitting in the UCG room day one, hour one, and that's how I treat recovery. Recovery and response are united. Recovery cannot work well if we're not united with response. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Kune, to go over the recovery support function. She has eight slides. If there's anything you'd like to ask you that she's got to be more than glad to answer them. So good morning. I'm Kune Sinsen as he said, overseeing the long-term recovery interagency coordination group at OES. We're a relatively new unit, so I have some slides to share with you. I think you've seen this timeline before. It's a FEMA timeline. We use it in a lot of our presentations. What's different about it now is with Ryan's leadership, we've really moved the timeline for recovery to pre-disaster, right? We're gonna start before disaster starts meeting with you, planning with you, the different contingencies and plans. When the event happens, we're gonna be in the state operations center along with our response partners, gathering information and creating that preliminary plan of recovery with you. And then we will stay with you through the three different stages after the event happens all the way until you're self-sustained in recovery. So with that, we have the four different divisions in recovery that Ryan touched on, individual assistance, public assistance and mitigation are programs that you're familiar with, they're Staffordac programs. So we're the new unit with the new division and there's six components to us, six sectors or recovery support functions, as we call them, housing, economic, community planning, natural resources, infrastructure and health and social services. And they're in each a team in the joint field office right now, working with our federal partners and working with the local jurisdiction on the different projects that have been identified. So the six RSFs are very much like the ESFs and they partner with the ESFs. You can see the inter-relationship between the RSFs and the ESFs. We again started the onset of the disaster working with our ESF partners to not duplicate, not hit our local jurisdictions multiple times asking for the same thing but really collaborate with them to support the locals. So what is long-term recovery? Long-term recovery begins and ends with the locals. We believe that here at OES, our job is to support the locals and work with our federal partners, our nonprofit agencies to identify resources for the locals as they prioritize their projects. So goal of long-term recovery is moving towards self-sufficiency. We want the locals, the counties, the cities, the town to be self-sufficient, to be able to help themselves in that recovery process and help them become more resilient. So the key person for us in terms of our partners is the local disaster recovery manager and hopefully each jurisdiction will identify who that person is and help that person engage with us before an event so that we have that partnership, that relationship, that dialogue started before an event starts. Their job really is to represent and speak on behalf of the local jurisdiction in terms of priorities. At the state level, we have state agencies assigned to each of the recovery support functions. Health and Social Services is Health and Human Services Agency. We've got our partners from the Department of Public Health sitting in the back. They lead that RSTEP in terms of setting the priorities of how we help the local jurisdictions with housing, its business, consumer services and housing agency, infrastructure is OES, taking the lead on that one. Natural and Cultural Resources is the Natural Resources Agency Community Planning Capacity Building, the governor's office of planning and research. And we've got some advisors. The FEMA partners or advisors in individual assistance, disability integration, mitigation, EPA and our role development are in the joint field office with us or accessible to us in the joint field office, advising us on different projects and funding sources that we might want to tap into. In terms of activation, when we are activated our goals support the needs of the locals in terms of human, technical and financial resources. So, there's four divisions in recovery. The other three come with money, ours doesn't. So, our goal is to find resources aside from the standard Thaferdack programs such as donations, in-kind services, federal programs that we may not typically know, exist or tap into, even some local, I'm sorry, some state programs that are just steady state programs that state have that you may not be aware of that could be helpful to you in your recovery process. Identifying the challenges and collaborating, in the recovery process there's lots of layers, layers of funding, layers of coordination, layers of planning and our job is to help you through that in terms of project planning and creating timelines, creating path forward in terms of your recovery. In terms of our approach, we have a whole community approach. We believe that every member of your community needs to be part of the recovery process in order for it to be successful. We've reached this conclusion from having recovery programs and processes that didn't include everybody and have learned that that doesn't sit well with the community. So, the people, the people that live there, having a say, the faith-based organizations, the private sector, nonprofits, government agencies, elected officials, really looking at the entire community and asking them what do you wanna look like? What do you see your community looking like after we recover? Not what does the state or the federal government want you to look like? So, whole community approach is very important to us. So, here's a sample, the crosswalk for paradises projects because we are working every day on the campfire and we've talked a lot about campfire today. So, in terms of the six RCS, the kinds of projects that were identified, the gaps, the needs for paradise and then how we're prioritizing them and helping them find solutions, just a snapshot of point in time of what we're doing for paradise. So, what does the end look like, right? What is the outcome we're looking for? Well, for housing, we're looking for a situation where the displaced survivors have accessible, safe, permanent housing. In infrastructure, we're looking at a system that's restored and resilient to future disasters and health and social services. We want to sustain health, disability and social service programs including behavioral health, schools, programs for children. Along those lines with health and social services, we're doing something for the first time in partnership with Mary to stand up a children and youth task force focused on all the aspects of what a child may need in a disaster because they are one of the most vulnerable populations and the impact of a disaster lasts with them their entire life, right? So what can we do collectively to remove barriers to not work in silos? What do those children need? Well, one of the things we've identified are their parents need help. Their parents don't know how to support them. So those kinds of wraparound services to educate not just the teachers and the counselors in the schools but also the parents, the entire community that needs to wrap around those children and make sure that they're recovering. With economic, we're looking at bringing back work. We're looking to bring back the businesses and that's a really complex one. Housing is complex, but economic is too. California has a shortage of workforce in certain sectors. So getting the right workforce to move back when there's a housing shortage is very hard. So each of these assets are so interrelated and it's so complex trying to talk a business into coming back when they can't hire anybody and there's really no one living in the community that would sustain them is very hard. So bringing the business back really is the future of the community. And then the natural and cultural resources, the historical essence of that community. And I always ask, what is the difference in your mind when you think of San Diego versus San Francisco versus Sacramento versus maybe Duke County, right? Very different images come to mind because that's the natural and cultural resources of that community in that county that make it so unique. We have very unique county. And so the natural and cultural resources, RSF's goal is to identify what is unique in that community that needs to be restored, that needs to recover for them to have their identity back again. And then community planning capacity building is really at the core of all of these RSFs, wrapping them all into a recovery plan a path forward for that community. So I think that's it for me. Hey, before I get to any questions, just three things. One, on the individual side, I think when you go through a disaster and you're talking to people, I can tell you this is what they hear. So when you go there, we call them, hey, so these are all the great programs. Have you spoke to FEMA? Have you went to the county? How is church going? They're right now that down and they're gonna put it in their pocket. And they go, you know what? I just lost my house. I might have just lost my dog, my friend, my relative. When I get a chance to deal with that, I'm gonna pull that sheet out in my back pocket. So keep that in mind as you're dealing with survivors. I can tell you that may not happen for a year. When I left St. Benoit Parish, which was totally destroyed and drove, I never cried ever. Big tough guy, right? So, but when I left that parish and I left, I was with my dad and I was getting this great job at FEMA and we went to the Louisiana Mississippi border and I cried when I left the estate. And I don't know why I cried. Other than I knew this, I was never going back, right? So that's tough, right? I was so busy because as soon as the disaster happened, I was helping everyone doing all these things. I never even had time to cope with anything, but that was a year later and I was crying. And my dad luckily didn't say anything for like 15 minutes. So I thought he was gonna make a joke, but he didn't. So those feelings are raw, they're real. And it also goes to the community level as well. We will come in after an event and we bring in all of these state agencies, even before the federal agencies. We're sitting with the counties and we're talking and then there's meeting after meeting. Literally, it looks like that slide deck, right? With the big star in the middle of lines. I think sometimes it's good to go slow to go instead of fast and ensuring that everything that we bring in to you all is coordinated. We have to make sure at the state level that we're controlling those incidences where if there's a HCD meeting for housing, maybe we can tie that into a FEMA meeting with housing at the same time or the RSF, our state partner meeting at the same time. And maybe it needs to be a week later than when everybody wants to meet, right? Because at the end of the day, it's your disaster, right? So, and we're here to support you and to take passion with that. And with closing before comments, I am from St. Bernard Parish, was a beautiful parish. Loved it, 26,000 homes, I believe, on the Parish side. And obviously, you know, it got destroyed. Some people had, I think the lowest amount of water was five feet, most people had 20 plus feet of water.  Now, granted, most of the sealants fell in, right? Because it was, the water line was above that and everything fell in. So you would get now your plates and your wedding gifts and you would dry them out. And two days later, they were full of mold because it's porous. It's been sitting there for like two or three weeks.  So we were like, we wish we didn't have a house to go to, right? The people that didn't have a house to go to was like, I really wished we had a house to go to. At the end of the day, everybody lost everything. And what was worse about that particular incident, I know I'm recorded live, but is, you know, the rebuild process was extraordinary slow. It took over a decade to get a hospital in place. We had 16, 17 schools. They have one right now, one of its elementary middle. And a lot of that has to do with, and I can say this as a resident of the parish, was the parish head of vision. And the vision was the day before the incident. It wasn't the future. It wasn't what just happened. So when something happens like this, I always say, take the blinders off. You know, be the community that has 5G, be the community that has a great art museum or something to where when people wants to come back to it's built to not modern day, but it's built to yesterday, to Tomorrowland, a future land I think is Disney World, right? So, and not be tied to the incident. Because every community that's only thinking about building to what it was, it's a long recovery. So, any questions for me? Any questions? All right, thank you, Ryan. We're gonna take about five minutes and then have Riva Feldman, the city manager for the city of Malibu, come up and address us for a moment. Great, thanks. I was just reminded by the league that there actually is a resource. We talked very briefly about whether a resource exists that we've compiled for locals to use in the event of a disaster, specifically in the context of ordinances, the pre-ordinances. And, shortly after the summit that Eric referenced, in early June, there was an attorney-only summit that the league and the association of county councils put together. And from that, there was a playbook that contains pretty much anything you would need in response to a disaster, whether it's ordinances or relevant laws or templates of contracts. So, that resource does exist. It's on the league's website right now. And, any questions afterwards? Feel free to come to Derek or me, but I wanted to make sure you all knew that that is out there for you all to use. Thanks. Before I have Riva come up, I just wanna express how appreciative I am of both her time, as well as Sherry with Butte County, with the responsibilities for running a city and running a county and taking the time out of their schedules to be with us today. It means a lot to listen and learn from you. So, thank you. Good morning, I'm Riva Feldman. I'm the city manager from the city of Malibu, and I'm glad to be here with all of you today. It's always very humbling to come to OES and to hear stories of other communities and what they've gone through. And, my disaster, as horrible as it has been for our community, does pale in comparison to some of the things our other friends throughout the state have gone through. So, I'm gonna give a short presentation on what we went through in Los Angeles last year. Thank you. It was made by my media team, so I'm really appreciative of what they do for us. This map is the fire area of the Woolsey Fire. For those of you who aren't familiar with Los Angeles, the Woolsey Fire started north of the 101, it actually started in Ventura County. And from where the green triangle is at the top of this map to the coastline is roughly 25 miles, give or take, depending on which part of the coastline you're getting to. And the Woolsey Fire burnt that distance in less than 24 hours. It got through to the 101 freeway about eight hours or so, eight to 10 hours after it started. The 101 freeway at that point is roughly 200 feet wide. And so, our firefighters really thought that they would be able to contain that fire and stop it and we had 50 to 70 mile hour winds at that point and it was picking up embers and throwing them two miles ahead of the fire front. And that was where they lost the fire. But I wanna dial back a little as I tell the story, I like to give kind of the week that we were in when the Woolsey Fire started. On Monday, we share a captain with our station, with our neighboring cities, we're a contract city with Los Angeles County Sheriff Department. My sheriff captain had a stroke on Monday and it was the first day of our new operations lieutenant. So I had never met her. So she took the helm when he went to the hospital. On Tuesday, we had an election. I had two city council members that were termed out. I had two new council members elected. We had a new governor and we also had a sheriff race in Los Angeles County and it took about 10 days for that sheriff race to be determined. So as of Tuesday, we didn't know who the sheriff was. We were also under a PSPS watch. It was one of the earlier ones, obviously a year ago. And we in Malibu were very prepared for it. We've been messaging with our community. We were under a red flag watch. We had our EOC open and ready to staff it. My staff was on high alert and we were expecting it. And then on Wednesday evening, we had the borderline rail shooting in Thousand Oaks, which is a neighboring community for us. There were a lot of Pepperdine University students there. Pepperdine is located just outside of the city of Malibu, but it's our school is what we consider it. And we had a student who lost her life there. We had 16 other students who were at the borderline rail during the shooting. I had staff members who had friends and family who were there and who were impacted. So we started Thursday morning dealing with that disaster. I personally was at Pepperdine with them, with their students. And then the campfire broke out and then the hill fire. And you can see that on this map, where that broke out. And we were really concerned about the hill fire. It started in an area that hit the year prior that burned all the way to the coast. And so resources were sent to the hill fire and to the campfire. And then the Woolsey fire broke out. And so we were the last in the state to get resources. And that's a common story that we're now hearing with after action reports that there just weren't enough resources and our folks were calling and calling through mutual aid for hundreds and hundreds of engines and just not getting them. So that was one of the things you'll hear as I go through that was really a challenge. In Malibu, we're ready. We burn, we have mudslides, we flood. These are normal things for us, unfortunately. And we're very well-versed in emergency preparedness, particularly for a small city. The city of Malibu actually has 13,000 residents. We're a long city, we're 21 miles long and we have a very high visitor population of about 15 million people a year. But we talk about emergency preparedness. In the year prior to the Woolsey fire, we had done multiple trainings of our emergency operations center. We had trained with our partner agencies. I had done a test throughout the city of our reverse 911 system. And we really would have said, if you had asked me the day before the fire, if there was a major fire, are you ready? Have you thought of everything? And we really had. We had thought of alternate locations in the city for our EOC. If our city hall building where our EOC is located impacted, I had staff trained which way and that way. Who could do different roles. I had lists of where staff were located. And again, as a small city, I have a small staff. I have a hundred people. And so I thought we were ready and then the Woolsey fire hit. So when the fire started and started to impact Malibu, it was the middle of the night. My personal story was I was also impacted and I evacuated. So as I was evacuating my home, I'm on the phone, waking my staff up, getting them to the EOC at city hall to activate and start our messaging. We have a protocol that when a fire hits or is in the 101 corridor area, we activate our EOC. And then if it starts jumping the 101 and it's traveling, we start preparing to evacuate our residents. So they evacuated 250,000 people in the Woolsey fire area in a very short amount of time. The entire 101 freeway shut down, which left just Canyon roads that feed onto Pacific Coast Highway, which is a state owned highway, two lanes each way in and out of Malibu. And when the evacuation notices came for Malibu, there was a fire front of 14 miles long heading towards our entire city. So they get, we got direction from the fire department to evacuate the entire city. And because of the Hill fire, which was both burning to the north and west of us and the concern from the fire department that that fire would hit the highway, they had us direct all of our residents south or east of Pacific Coast Highway towards Santa Monica. So the image that you see is traffic on the highway. What would normally take people about 20 minutes took people six hours to get out. We are in the EOC and we're sending out our messaging. And again, we have a very robust notification system. We use something called e-notification through our website which allows residents to sign up for emergency alerts. And so we can send that out and get a text or an email. We use our reverse 911 system. We use Nixle. So we were pushing out information in all these different ways. But what we didn't know while we were sitting in the EOC that power had gone out through the entire Wolsey area through the entire city. So that meant that residents who are at their home and it's now light out, we're getting evacuation notices. And so now we roll to what was our next plan in the EOC if this happened was that we would use law enforcement and fire resources to go through our neighborhoods and evacuate people. And that didn't happen because of the number of people that were being evacuated. And the way the fire was traveling is it blocked the access through the canyons into Malibu, which meant that first responders, law enforcement and fire actually had to go all the way around to actually physically get into Malibu and they just weren't able to get there. So a lot of our residents did not get the evacuation notice. And this is a big lesson learned for us that if you don't have Wi-Fi and you don't have cellular phones and you can't call people because nobody has old fashioned landlines anymore what you do, how you communicate with them. And then the challenges of evacuating thousands and thousands of people through one very small area and it took hours for us to coordinate with our partner agencies with CHP, Outrans with Santa Monica with the city of Los Angeles to actually stop traffic coming into Malibu and take over all the lanes of the highway. So these are things that we're working on now in the aftermath to correct and have better solutions for that. And then of course, the fact that we were the third disaster in our state and just couldn't get the resources, they are fast enough. And so as a small city, what we look at now is what can we do, what can we take on as a city to make up some of those gaps? Obviously we're not gonna fight the fire but some of these roles that we've looked to law enforcement or fire to do, what can we actually take off? I put this picture in because it's just one of my favorite photos from the fire. Malibu is actually a rural residential community. We have a lot of horse properties and so evacuating large animals during a disaster is a big, big problem. And again, we weren't the first city in this fire to evacuate so there was the entire Woolsey area is a rural residential area and so there was a lot of issues with evacuating large animals. Some people obviously have llamas but horses and fortunately we do have the beach and so what ended up happening is a lot of those large animals in the incident were actually just brought to the beach and their owners left them there and then the following days we had to figure out how to feed them and transport them. So immediately after the disaster, things that you don't ever think you're going to have to do is first of all, what we found out was that we had residents who divide the mandatory evacuation orders and state and so the day after the fire hit through Malibu and the forthcoming days, we realized there were hundreds of residents who had remained behind. Many of them fought the fire and saved their homes and saved their neighbor's homes. The video that I showed was all taken actually those videos were taken by residents who were there and so it created a problem that we had never really thought through is that we thought everybody would leave and what really happened in our fire was that people stayed and so now how do you help people who have stayed while you're at the same time trying to get your community back open and getting the people who had left back in safely and so it's really a balance particularly again for a small staff. So our EOC was also evacuated with that first day and we were fortunate enough to get the open arms of the city of Santa Monica who opened their EOC to us and we worked out of there for three straight weeks but it really saved us because there was no way for our staff to get in and out of Malibu and even for people to get to Santa Monica was about a four hour trip with the road closures one way. So I really leaned on the relationships that I have with other cities and other city managers and got a lot of support staff so it's something at the city that it's very important to have as relationships of people you can just call on don't wait for mutual aid just say do you have some bodies I need someone who can do the X and I was very fortunate in the cities of West Hollywood and Santa Monica and Culver City and Beverly Hills and Indian Wells Santa Rosa all sent in people and so then getting in to assess what has happened in our city and obviously the first thing people want to know is did my house burn down and we couldn't even get to some of these areas and because of the way our city is laid out it's not a grid, they're not just streets that you can see what was a house there's a lot of flag lots and deep lots and lots with accessory structures like guest houses or barns or garages and so from the street you couldn't tell what had burned if that was the house or not so we were very hesitant in providing that information out there can be something I've really taken away as we need to do that better to get people that information because that human interaction of being able to tell people what had happened to their home or not is very, very critical in those immediate days and then try to repopulate your community where you have complete infrastructure that has been destroyed in the Woolsey fire area the Southern California Edison replaced up close to 2,000 power poles so some people didn't have power for up to a month some people took months to get their communications from Wi-Fi, et cetera back up and running and so these were just really huge challenges that we had to A, help the utilities find a way to get in and do that and then communicate to our residents why you couldn't get back into, you couldn't go to your house and people were saying I don't care if there's power I just wanna go home and then as you saw in the video it started raining and we experienced the flood after fire experience and we understand that's a three to five year thing that we'll have to go through and again you have a community that has just gotten back into their homes of course it was over the holidays the Woolsey fire happened at the beginning of November so some people didn't get back into after Thanksgiving now it's raining, now it's Christmas and now you're talking about having to evacuate again and it's challenging and we really heard the lessons that were learned in Montecito and LA County decided that they would have a mandatory, no evacuations or mandatory evacuations there was no voluntary evacuation discussion when it came to the floods and so we activated our EOC three more times after the Woolsey fire as part of the flood and debris flows and had to do rounds of evacuation and I know I hear it's gonna be windy and hot some parts of California this week but in Southern California we're expecting rain again so everybody now is gearing back up for what we experienced last year and it's telling to be here at OES and talk about funding and relief and whatnot but one of the problems with disaster relief funds is that you only get that there's a declaration that it's not a federal disaster or a state disaster because it's just a lot of rain you're not gonna get money for your municipality to clean up what came off the hills and so last year we spent several million dollars just cleaning up mud that won't be reimbursed for and now something we're expecting for the next few years so I'll let you know how that all turns out but we learned a lot and it's a very humbling experience to go through and to think as government what can we do different how do we do this better how do we think ahead of what could happen and so some of the things that we've taken upon ourselves is we're doing evacuation planning and with different evacuation routes and planning that include figuring out the data of how many residents live and give them food what the ingress and egress is for those neighborhoods and coming up with multiple egress routes if one of them is impacted we've come up with safe refuge areas where we can just send people to get them off the highway and open up roads to get more people out and hold them in a safe refuge area until we can get some time in coordination with other agencies and we're really looking at what we can do as a city to get information out to people and so since the Woolsey fire we have actually purchased through our reverse 911 system cell phone data which we didn't have we only have home phone data and so that gives us the capability of contacting anybody through our reverse 911 system who has a cell phone that's registered in our zip code we also are now fully capable and trained on doing NIA which is the wireless emergency alert system ironically we signed up to participate in that before the Woolsey fire and had a training scheduled for the week after the fire so we weren't able to use that but it's certainly something that we plan on using because not only is it important for us to communicate with our residents but because of the high number of visitors that we have in our community we recognize that in a disaster we may need to do while I talk about what happened to us which was a fire what I think is very important for everybody in California to take away is that it might be the earthquake and that's gonna be much, much worse than any of us have experienced in the fire because in the fire you may actually have an opportunity to evacuate people but in the earthquake we're not and so as government we need to look at how do we help thousands and thousands of people who are stuck and need help and don't have the resources and aren't resilient so we're really having those communication that communication with our residents of how do you become more resilient how is a neighborhood do you help yourself? We're increasing the number of cert volunteers that we have in our city we had alw