County Commission | The Magazine April 2020 | Page 15

FROM THE COVER
AAEM: Connecting the Emergency
Management Community
A
mong ACCA’s affiliate groups,
the Alabama Association
of Emergency Managers has a
particularly diverse membership. It is
common for affiliates to work closely
with one or more state agencies, but
AAEM goes a step further, boasting
a healthy membership of state EMA
staff members.
“The role of county government
is getting increasingly complex —
this is in part due to technology,
social media and new challenges
that are faced daily,” said AAEM
President Jim Coker from Jefferson
County. “Building the relationships
needed for success is a top priority
for emergency managers as we chart
a path into the future.”
State partners appreciate
excellence at the local level.
“Maintaining strong relationships
with the officers of AAEM has helped
us with a number of key initiatives,
as well as provided an open pathway
for communications on routine
issues that help us keep Alabama’s
emergency management program on
track,” said Jonathan Gaddy, AEMA
Assistant Director and former EMA
director for Calhoun County.
Of course, counties are well
represented on AAEM’s membership
roster, along with representatives
of nonprofits and municipal, tribal
and federal government. Just in
the past few years, AAEM has also
added caucuses specific to the higher
education community and healthcare,
expansions that seem fortuitous amid
the current COVID-19 pandemic.
That’s just what emergency
managers do — gaze into the future
to see what could go wrong. The
ancestors of our modern, “all-hazards”
EMA leaders recruited plane spotters
during World War II and promoted
backyard fallout shelters during
the Cold War, but by the
1980s, civil defense was
rebranding as emergency
management.
Eventually, the
independent Alabama
Emergency Management
Council evolved into
AAEM, opting to move
under the ACCA umbrella. The
big selling point was gaining ACCA
staff support for membership and
conferences, said Chance Corbett, an
emergency manager and member of
the Russell County Commission.
AAEM’s major events of the
year are a summer conference and
a winter workshop, and members
take an active role in ACCA’s
big statewide events. Both the
ACCA Annual Convention and
Legislative Conference always include
educational breakout sessions specific
to the emergency management
community.
As is the case with all of ACCA’s
affiliate groups, AAEM puts a priority
on its education program, a four-tier
professional certification
culminating in the
master’s level, which
requires a minimum
of 1,350 hours of
training.
Sumter County
is like many rural
counties in that the
EMA director wears
more than one hat. “If I
didn’t have an organization like
ACCA available to offer me training,
understanding, and ways to get and
become certified as both an EMA
and a 9-1-1 Director, I would have
been a lost soul,” said Margaret
Bishop-Gulley. “Knowing the lay of
the land is alright if you work in the
county where you live; but knowing
how to get things done according
to the guidelines of both AEMA
and FEMA is a whole different ball
game.”
In the tradition of the County
Family, AAEM has a track record of
AAEM’s annual summer conference has grown into the Statewide Disaster
Preparedness Conference, a three-day event cosponsored with the Alabama
Emergency Management Agency.
COUNTY COMMISSION | 15