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