ORDER-2018-147 : Appointment of Health Director Ruth Clay as Emergency Management Director, effective April 27, 2018

Transcript (~32 min @ 2:38)

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▶ 2:15 John N. Tramontozzi: Auburn Mortimer I'll reiterate the fact that this is a pursuant to the Massachusetts open meeting law is being recorded by mm TV anybody in the public who wishes to visit the site bar will see it on pre-recorded viewing on cable Network so order number 2018 dash 147 is the appointment of Health Director Ruth clay as emergency management director effective April 27th 2018 and I see before in the audience this evening second the motion to suspend the rules

▶ 2:51 John N. Tramontozzi: thank you we have a motion to suspend the rules by Alderman Medeiros seconded by Alderman Mortimer on the motion all in favor aye any opposed seeing none so So we are on suspension of rules, and we invite Ms. Clay and members of the administration. I see our legal counsel, Mr. Van Campen, with you this evening.

▶ 3:10 Speaker 1: Good evening. Good evening. Mr. Chairman.

▶ 3:13 Speaker 2: Good evening.

▶ 3:15 Speaker 3: Thank you committee, non-members.

▶ 3:17 Speaker 2: Tabletop. Is everyone?

▶ 3:19 John N. Tramontozzi: Thank you both for coming forward this evening to be heard on this order. And I open up the floor for, I see more.

▶ 3:29 Speaker 3: Mr. Chairman, if I may, just before we field questions, I do have a prepared statement from Mayor Inferna. She is unable to attend this evening. She did ask me to read it by way of introduction of Ms. Clay.

▶ 3:42 Speaker 1: Please, please do so. That's very appropriate.

▶ 3:43 Speaker 3: Thank you. Good evening, dear members. I'm writing to respectfully ask you to approve the appointment of Ruth Clay as Emergency Management Director for the City of Melrose. Ms. Clay has been the Melrose Health Director for 21 years. She was the Reading Health Director for 10 years prior to that. For the past nine years she has been the director of the combined Melrose-Wakefield Health Department. She has a bachelor's and master's degree in community health from Tufts University, a master's degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. Ms. Clay has been involved with emergency management for the past 10 years, working closely with previous emergency management directors such as Ed Kelly and now chief leary because of her work in the health department she already has relationships with police fire and DPW and our school department she has developed plans for emergency medication dispensing sites for Melrose and she ran a real-life drill for establishing an emergency dispensing site for Melrose and for surrounding communities this entailed setting up the site at the Wakefield vocational school in distributing water and M&Ms in place of medicine to volunteers who came through this sort of preparation and planning is essential to emergency management in an emergency or any other situation miss clay knows what to do and how to do it she is a good manager and has many resources at her fingertips she understands the importance of being prepared and staying up to date furthermore none of this is new to her because she has been present for many emergencies including snowstorms and floods I feel she is the ideal candidate for this position and I hope you will approve her appointment sincerely Gail M Inferno mayor of Melrose mr. chairman I also just wanted to add for the committee before we field questions that our emergency management function as a city has been evolving over the last 10 or 15 years many of you know Ed Kelly who has was left us but he did a tremendous job in this role for a number of years and during his tenure and beyond as many of you probably know the the function of emergency management in any municipality has become heavily professionalized and heavily focused on preparedness in the event of an unknown situation we know what our world is today miss clay's role in in this respect would really be as the coordinator in chief of a number of agencies in the city law enforcement fire schools information technology city hall dpw and mayor inferno believes that it is more critically important that we be prepared in advance of any emergency rather than worry on the fly while the emergency is unfolding so she's very confident to put miss clay in front of you this evening and we're here tonight to answer any questions that the members may have thank you motion to recommend for passage

▶ 6:43 John N. Tramontozzi: second before i take that i also notice i just want to put for the record that um on everybody's desk there is um what i believe to be the drop description is it uh the emergency

▶ 6:57 Monica C. Medeiros: management director point of uh yes i do not have one of these uh thank you that might need

▶ 7:07 Monica C. Medeiros: your voting number so I'll let you so do you have one now I do now and I think

▶ 7:10 John N. Tramontozzi: Alderman Forbes does not anymore we'll make sure that this gets are posted to the public docket on the m2 q2 mr. mr. chairman if I also made for the

▶ 7:17 Speaker 3: committee's edification the job description that's in front of you this evening that's our existing emergency management director job description the goal assuming miss clay is appointed is to take that job description and integrate it into the existing health director job description so it would be one combined job description that we can you know provide to the board assuming

▶ 7:40 John N. Tramontozzi: favorable action so what I understand it's not two separate employment it's

▶ 7:47 Speaker 3: correct this is merged into there's one contract of employment with the city of

▶ 7:50 John N. Tramontozzi: Melrose correct before we take the motion to recommend I'd like to open the floor thank you very much thank you both for coming down

▶ 7:57 Monica C. Medeiros: tonight one of the reasons that we had held us in committee previously is that we were hoping for a little bit more information and a little bit more information about the direction in which the department might be going on this this as as mr. van Kampen had mentioned this department if you will and I'm kind

▶ 8:20 Monica C. Medeiros: of loath to call it that from the situation where we are today has really evolved over the years and I know when mr. Kelly was here it was much more focused on I think a lot of stars planning we did a lot of evacuations and drills with the schools and that kind of planning we used to have a committee with our auxiliary police that would meet regularly and train regularly I had the pleasure of being able to sit in with them on some of their trainings but since that time that group has been disbanded I believe the stipends that were involved in this function have been eliminated from the budget or the the line item has been completely zeroed out so I think what you're referring to is

▶ 9:11 Speaker 2: the cert team and there are we'll discuss whether we want to recreate the CERT team we we already have what's called the MRC medical response team which is pretty much the same thing as a CERT they just call two different things and come from two different departments we can have both and just have them work together our MRC is active and actually deployed during the last storm to the town of Easton's shelter so that's definitely one of the things to look at you're right there's there are zero expense dollars to this that will probably be an issue but financial reasons I believe is is one of the reasons why it's being folded into another position rather being its own

▶ 10:08 Monica C. Medeiros: separate position well I am glad to see some action happening I do hope we see something arrived back in the budget it was never a huge dollar amount it was a lot of you know volunteer resources and things like that that we really you know it was the stipend that mr. Kelly received I think was maybe $8,000 it was for the whole year it was not a tremendous amount and it was a lot of volunteer you know hours put in from other people but I do think it is crucially important especially in the environment we're in both for you know to be prepared in an emergency management setting whether that be god forbid terrorism a national natural disaster or you know just even some of those really bad floods that we get I know you know in particular they were so so crucial and so helpful to the people in in Ward two and some of the really bad floods that we had had throughout the city and so I know you were very involved at that time although maybe not in the role of director I was in the rowboats so you know we we appreciate that

▶ 11:18 Speaker 2: and I'm sure you're qualified to do it thanks I as as Mr. Van Kampen said earlier over time emergency management has really changed it's its own field now people who are in college are getting undergraduate degrees in emergency management you can get graduate degrees in emergency management so you know I I think in the future the the city will I'm sure we'll be looking to when it's financially able to have a separate person do this and we'll do what we can you know until then and I

▶ 11:52 Monica C. Medeiros: believe you are also very involved when the h1n1 virus was going around so we

▶ 12:02 John N. Tramontozzi: know you can thank you very much thank you you're welcome the chair does recognize alderman Francis Wright joining us this evening thank you I think this is an important enough order that I'm certainly gonna open it up to any alderman who wishes to ask some questions would you accept the motion I

▶ 12:14 Peter D. Mortimer: made the motion we can have discussion after the motion there is a motion on

▶ 12:19 John N. Tramontozzi: the floor motion to recommend for passage yes there is a motion to It is recommended by Alderman Mortimer and is seconded by Alderman Boisselle. For on discussion, we are in the middle of discussion, Alderman Wright? Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

▶ 12:37 Francis X. Wright Jr.: Ruth, I think you're a great selection. I just, for the purposes of people at home, I have a memory of about 12 years ago, the Levi Gould losing their heat on a weekend, I think it was a holiday weekend, and everyone had to be moved up. I'm not I'm not saying that we're gonna have instances like that again but when we do have these emergencies across the city they don't necessarily happen nine to five so when we do have an emergency I just want to make sure that you know you you're relatively nearby close enough to get to get to us and you know you're not spending every weekend you know 200 miles away well I carry my

▶ 13:26 Speaker 2: phone 24 7 we have had emergencies for in some of the schools happen to be in Wakefield but while I was on family medical leave taking care of my mother but we still took care of it even though that's the nice thing about technology is a lot of times you don't have to physically be here to still manage the situation so we have had emergencies when I wasn't physically in the city but

▶ 13:55 Francis X. Wright Jr.: it was managed and okay yeah you know full faith that you know you'll be able to manage these events and do a great job for the city solicitor just for the people at home I had raised an issue relative to other occasions where if missable employee holds two positions one needs to be designated special under state ethics statute I've asked you to look into that if you could just kind of

▶ 14:24 Speaker 3: touch on that sure so Alderman Wright called me about a week or week or so ago losing track of time right now but Alderman Wright and I were speaking about a week or so ago about the appointment of miss clay as the emergency management director and you know the view from the outside was that this is a separate position in the city's structure so if she's being paid to do two separate jobs under 268 a which is the conflict of interest statute the question was whether that's allowable so in an abundance of caution I did contact the State Ethics Commission spoke with a staff attorney there who did advise that because we're taking the emergency management responsibilities and collapsing them into the health directors job description and because miss clay is only getting one paycheck from the city of Melrose that there was no need to designate the emergency management director as a special municipal employee so she could perform both roles so the cleanest way for us to handle this which is the way we were originally intending to do it was to have one job one job description one person one paycheck and to Alderman Medeiros point earlier Miss Clay is going to see a salary adjustment as a result of taking on these responsibilities and I believe that that equates with a twelve thousand five hundred dollar increase on her total compensations so which is the stipend that Chief Leary was receiving when he was performing it or as he's continuing to perform it if I may just one more

▶ 15:51 Francis X. Wright Jr.: question and and mr. city solicitor if if the Ethics Commission had come down said yes it's two different positions we this would have been readily addressed by us or have been addressed by us by declaring the emergency management position a special municipal employee position which is done all the time

▶ 16:16 Speaker 3: municipalities across the Commonwealth correct and we would have done we would have you know requested that designation and if the board determined otherwise that it didn't want to support that designation then we would have figured out an alternative plan for emergency I'm sure we would I just you know we've

▶ 16:27 John N. Tramontozzi: got our eyes across our teeth great thank you thank great all them in Forbes and then all of them in McMaster.

▶ 16:34 Scott M. Forbes: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You know, just looking through all the list of responsibilities, so the obvious question to me would be with the additional responsibilities as being the emergency management director and your current role as a director and a department head already, the additional hours that it would take just making sure that you would have the capacity to evenly balance and do both jobs. I just wanted to, if you could just, you know, speak on that behalf, that would be great.

▶ 17:00 Speaker 2: it's a really good question yeah and um i discussed it with um mayor dolan and mayor inferna

▶ 17:14 Speaker 2: i i don't i think what we will do is look at all the different components of emergency management and prioritize and we'll figure out what the priorities are and start at the beginning and do as much as we can do i have fantastic staff in both melrose and wakefield

▶ 17:38 Speaker 2: so I've been working to delegate more I happen to enjoy a lot of the hands-on stuff and like to go out still and do inspections but I'm going to you know have to scale that back and stay as more of a manager and administrator and we'll

▶ 17:57 Speaker 3: see how it goes okay and Alderman if I could just to that point just so the committee's aware it's sort of the full picture here we're going to convene a local emergency planning committee here in the city which is going to consist of all of the stakeholders that you could envision would be needed in the event of an emergency law enforcement fire public health i.t as i said earlier public works the school department probably a representative from melrose wakefield hospital the mayor's office so the the sort of the vision is that her role would be to as the director versus the incident commander which you might want to talk about in a little bit but her role would be to coordinate on an ongoing basis so the protocols and procedures are in place on an ongoing basis with all these stakeholders and hold them all accountable to have these policies and procedures in place and print and plan excuse me so that in the event of an emergency everyone's prepared and ruth's role at that point is almost ancillary to the event that's unfolding right so um there's

▶ 18:57 Speaker 2: The MEMA, the Mass Emergency Management Agency, and the State Health Department, as Rob said, we've been doing emergency management for over 10 years now. There are a lot of requirements by MEMA and DPH that we've been working on. We do have plans already in place. They need updating and fine-tuning, but it's not like we haven't done a lot of that work. We have a current emergency dispensing site plan in case we had to, from a health department's perspective. So it's not like we're starting from scratch. I mean, Ed and Chief Leary have been doing this all along. The difference, I think what sometimes people get confused about is the difference between an emergency management director and the incident commander is that when there's an emergency,

▶ 20:02 Speaker 2: We, as well as agencies literally across the country, whether it's the FBI down to our local fire department, all use a system called the Incident Command System. And it allows us to all speak the same language, have the same organizational structure, so that if different agencies are coming together to deal with an issue, we're all starting from the same place. And during an emergency, there's an incident commander, one person who's in charge. And depending on the incident would depend on who the incident commander was. So if it was an active shooter, God forbid, that would be the police chief. And if it was a hazardous waste spill, it would be the fire chief. And if H1N1 comes back, it would be me. So it depends on what it is as to who that person is. And sometimes there's a unified command. so if there's a terrorism attack on the the railroad and some and chemicals are spilt then we'd probably have fire and police there's a unified command I mean all sorts of scenarios you can come up with usually the EMD the emergency management director is not the incident commander in those cases the incident commander is there in our operations center to help make sure that the incident commander has all the resources that he or she needs to operate and we have resources all over the state we have resources in Beverly that we can access we have resources locally we share resources with other communities and there's a lot of moving parts so there's a planning part there's a fiscal part that's keeping track of the money that's being spent there's a logistics part and there's a you know a whole organization chart that we'd be sitting in the operations center managing the incident and then there's everybody out

▶ 22:06 Scott M. Forbes: there actually working on the incident so it's two different things I say my my final question would be is does the administration foresee this being a folding the position in more of a long-term approach to this solution or is it kind of we're playing it by ear see how it is and then re-evaluating a

▶ 22:25 Speaker 3: year or two years down the road I'd say the the latter which is that we're gonna look at it I think the mayor is committed to giving Ruth the opportunity because she has this unique skill set to do this role but obviously to have a conversation in a year or two to determine if it's a if it's an efficient workable arrangement and then at that point if it's jointly decided that it's not you know the city will go in a different direction this is this is all

▶ 22:49 Speaker 2: in response to current events and the resources that the city has right now and and responding to today's situation and you know things change over time

▶ 23:03 Speaker 4: thank you Thank You mr. chairman master Thank You mr. chairman thank you both

▶ 23:07 Shawn M. MacMaster: being here this evening um i appreciate miss clay began to answer one of the questions that i have a few questions i have relative to structure and chain of command and you touched upon incident commander my question would be if there isn't clear-cut jurisdictional authority so if it isn't let's say a school shooting if it isn't a hazmat incident if it's not a pandemic if the the lines, let's say, are blurred based on an emergency such as a hurricane or a flood, an earthquake, some type of natural disaster, who would be the incident commander at that time? Would the emergency management director assume that role when there isn't clear-cut jurisdictional authority?

▶ 23:53 Speaker 2: Well, when there isn't clear-cut jurisdiction, it could be for a couple of different reasons. one could be the the circumstance I talked about earlier where it could be more than one in which case there is what's called the unified command so there is more than one incident commander so that's possible and then if the lines are super blurry you know the the emergency management director can be the incident commander it's possible and mr. van camden you mentioned

▶ 24:21 Shawn M. MacMaster: um coordinator in in chief um i'm wondering does this um add an additional your official title

▶ 24:32 Shawn M. MacMaster: would that would it add an additional layer of supervision an additional layer of civilian supervision over police and fire um again if the lines are are blurred in terms of accountability

▶ 24:41 Speaker 3: or well i think i think in the final analysis the police chief the fire chief the director of public the you know the IT director all report directly to the mayor so they they they would work collaboratively with the emergency management director but if it got to a situation where an employee wasn't performing I think is your

▶ 25:04 Shawn M. MacMaster: question or not so it sounds like this may be more unified command as Miss Clay said that if it's not a clear-cut jurisdictional authority let's say it was a flood in that scenario as I understand it Miss Clay wouldn't have operational authority over the police and fire chief but would rather work in a unified command capacity is that fair to say correct yeah so in a flood

▶ 25:23 Speaker 3: situation I'm assuming some things here but I assume a unified command would involve DPW police probably it would probably involve the entire local emergency planning committee as a unified command structure sorry if I was

▶ 25:42 Shawn M. MacMaster: going into left field on you there one additional question can you help me understand the the current structure of the emergency management director position so for instance if chief Larry was unavailable to respond to an emergency right now is there a designee who is called upon to perform those duties and how would that if at all carry over with this potential change to

▶ 26:06 Speaker 3: the position so currently under chief Leary there is no official deputy if that's your question in his absence but under our current protocol what would happen and we've never had to exercise this but what would happen is the incident that the it would be sort of an event driven result so the incident if it were a law enforcement centric incident or a hazmat or whatever it would the incident commander who would be responsible for dealing with that event would effectively become in the absence of the emergency management director the the deputy for lack of a better way of saying it i don't know if that answers your question it does thank you

▶ 26:51 Shawn M. MacMaster: and if i could just note mr chair that um i'm very familiar with uh miss clay outside of this chamber in a professional capacity i know that she is well respected she's able to build coalitions and bring together partners to collaborate on a regional level i think especially on the the pre-incident front she has a lot to bring and i do think the questions that you provided were helpful to me in understanding more of the operational aspect of what would happen during the time of a critical incident so thank you thank you mr chair very good thank you chairman

▶ 27:25 Peter D. Mortimer: tramatosi um i would uh reiterate although i'm not a big fan of reiterating and echoing in the chamber ms clay is eminently qualified for this job in terms of education and experience and performance um and i think we'll be well situated if uh a bad day of it does cloud over melrose hopefully uh that will never happen but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure so uh i'm very happy that we have you in place uh and the question i had is uh hearing some of these blurred lines um coming up and conversation about that would there ever be a scenario where if it were a situation that may involve different agencies and there's some question about the command who would be uh the incident commander would it ever be or could it ever be the mayor of the city of melrose would the mayor ever being that the mayor is the boss of the chief of police and the boss of the fire chief would the mayor ever be in charge of an entire emergency situation not usually especially in a city situation with a mayor

▶ 28:39 Speaker 2: just my experience with with mayors they like to be out in the community helping people

▶ 28:51 Speaker 2: really hands-on you know out in the community and you can't be the incident commander and be out in the community you have to be sitting you know in a room with a bunch of phones and and computers managing I just want to bring up one thing about this merged lines thing there's really there aren't merged there aren't blurred lines the kind of the whole point of incident commander is there are very defined roles there's in advance a public information officer there's an operations person there's a logistics person we know who those people are in advance and they who know who they are in advance so when the emergency comes and there will be you know some kind of emergency there there aren't blurred lines everybody has a very specific designated role and everybody reports up to one person that ports up to another person it's very organized and very delineated so thank you very much I have no further questions Thank You mr.

▶ 30:03 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: chairman thank you thank you for being here tonight I was looking at this list which is really helpful of the current job description and I understand that you're going to refine it and then embed it in your in the health director but I'm hoping that this could be put online somewhere so when I was trying to do a little research for this meeting prepare myself I couldn't find much information for the public to understand what this role entails I certainly found our municipal ordinances which include a mention of the director and then also the council so a question for either of you is you've mentioned there will be a local sort of stakeholder group that's convened it sounds like you have the perfect sort of mix of folks and perspectives is that sort of what this emergency management advisory council is that's referenced in our ordinances

▶ 30:48 Speaker 2: it's that's old wording okay and if you go online and you look up MIMA or within the office of preparedness of emergency management within the state health department we're required to either have a regional emergency planning committee an REPC or a local emergency planning committee it's required we are part of the repc that's actually meeting tomorrow morning but traditionally we did have an lepc and we met on a regular basis and that will be the first order of business is bringing that back up and and operating because the most important thing during an emergency is not handing your business card to somebody and introducing yourself everybody should you know be well aware and have relationships with each other before then and the way to do that is to be working together on an ongoing basis that's great that that sounds like a

▶ 31:46 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: really great priority and I think it would be helpful to for the public then once you've got that sort of established to maybe have a little bit of a web presence so people know sort of that this this group exists and who's sort of on call and just by way of example one of the responsibilities listed in the current job description is to designate an emergency operations center do we have one and if so what is ours for the public it is I don't know what we call

▶ 32:15 Speaker 2: this room if you call it the training room it's on the mezzanine it's not uses office space because it's not handicapped accessible because it's in between two floors and the elevator doesn't stop there but it is our emergency operation site it has loads of computer capacity and that room is on the emergency generator for the building not exactly sure but I don't think the whole building gets powered for the emergency generator but that room and the IT department are the two parts of the building that definitely do get

▶ 32:57 Kate Lipper-Garabedian: power right away okay so yeah we do have that okay and then maybe the last question you mentioned the meeting that's happening tomorrow for the regional group have are you do you attend those currently or will you be there tomorrow or i haven't been okay because i have

▶ 33:08 Speaker 2: lots of meetings to go to but i will start going and i know chief leary has been going and we both plan on going tomorrow they're held in wakefield which is super convenient so it's not a problem and we actually i think mr van campen referenced the scale the real life scenario that we did at the vocational school we're doing a follow-up to that which will be involving all of our departments and not only our departments but malden medford wakefield and stonems departments together and we're going to be doing a tabletop which is scheduled for june and then a full-scale real-life demonstration again at the voke in august so we have some really good opportunities to do some really concrete things because nobody likes sitting around and looking at plans it's a lot more fun if you're actually going out and doing it

▶ 34:13 Speaker 5: thank you so much for being here and for answering my questions great thank you any further

▶ 34:16 John N. Tramontozzi: discussion just like to move the motion well i guess i can't i'm not a member of the committee i'm just concerned about the discussion seeing none uh we do have a motion on the floor that's been seconded all in favor aye aye aye no seeing none so uh this order will be uh recommended to