State Representative Sean Roberts, District 36, Hominy, recently filed HB2839, which calls for the elimination of emergency management directors and Staff in all but four Oklahoma municipalities. An excerpt from the bill’s text reads as follows:
“Incorporated municipalities with a population less than One Hundred Thousand (100,000) according to the Federal Decennial Census or most recent population estimate are required to create an agreement with the county for emergency management services but shall not employ an emergency management director or emergency management staff.”
Kelly Cain, the Public Information Officer for Oklahoma State emergency management, said: “We have gotten a lot of phone calls from both municipal and county managers across the state, as well as other organizations. Everyone who has contacted us has been against the proposal. In Oklahoma, we definitely do not have a ‘one-size-fits-all’ emergency management program across the State…From a State Office perspective, we feel like the best way for local jurisdictions to handle their emergency management needs is to determine what works best for them.”
It should be pointed out that many local emergency management directors and staff are volunteers, and rural counties are struggling to fund existing services.
The Sapulpa Times reached out to Representative Roberts’s office for comments and spoke to Roberts’s legislative assistant, Taylor Woodrum. When asked what the justification was for authoring this bill, he replied: “The reason he wrote the bill was at the request of a constituent in Hominy…he wrote it because the constituent called him and showed him some problems they had up in Hominy, and asked for the bill to be written.”
Woodrum stated that Representative Roberts will not be running the bill this year. “It is not one of his 8 bills he is allowed to pass or is going to pass. He is not going to push it any further this year.”
