The Comfortable Substitute for Ownership

I have read a lot of LinkedIn and Reddit posts about emergency management being misunderstood. They are practically a genre at this point, and I will admit I have written a version myself. Nobody gets us. Elected officials do not know what we do. The public thinks we show up after the disaster, not before it.

After seven years of running a regional program that I built from the ground up, I do not think that is my problem anymore. Whether it is an EM program buried in a public safety agency, a county department largely left alone but expected to fund itself with grants, or an innovative multi-jurisdictional experiment, the pattern I keep seeing is the same: they understand us well enough. They have just figured out that minimally funding us is an easier way to feel done than meaningfully engaging with what we do.

How I came to that conclusion seems important, because I think it points to something bigger than my program, and bigger than this moment in federal funding. I think it points to the actual shape of the choice in front of this field right now.

Civil Defense and the Forcing Function We Used to Have

Emergency management did not start as the discipline it is today. It grew out of civil defense, and civil defense had something we largely do not have anymore: an external, visible, shared threat. At the peak of Cold War anxiety in the early 1960s, community-level participation in preparedness felt urgent and obvious because the danger was named, constant in the public imagination, and indifferent to jurisdictional lines. There was no internet, and by and large people trusted what they were told. People built basements and stocked shelves because the threat was real to them in a way that made the effort feel rational without anyone having to argue for it.

By the time Richard Nixon entered office in 1969, public and government interest in civil defense had already fallen sharply from that peak. The fear faded, and with it, so did the participation. What stayed behind was the structure: a designated person with a room in the basement, a binder somewhere, the shape of preparedness without the will that had originally animated it. When Carter created FEMA in 1979 and gave it the dual mission of emergency management and civil defense, the field was already trying to solve a problem it would never fully solve: how do you sustain community investment in a low-frequency threat once the visceral fear of that threat is gone?

Civil defense did not transform into a mature, sustained model of voluntary civic engagement. In some places it atrophied quietly. In others it diversified into all-hazards planning, homeland security frameworks, and countless program variations. What it did not become, anywhere, was a model where communities genuinely owned their own preparedness rather than delegating it to a designated person with a room in the basement.

I think that is worth sitting with, because I hear echoes of it every time someone tells me, with real sincerity, that in a real disaster, we would all just pitch in and get along. That is not a plan. That is the emotional residue of civil defense thinking, the comforting idea that goodwill alone will produce coordination when the moment requires it. It will not. Cooperation, sure. Not meaningful coordinated incident response and support. I have spent two decades watching what happens when good intentions meet an actual incident with no structure underneath it, and it is not pretty.

The answer, it turned out, was federal money. EMPG and the grant infrastructure that followed did not fix the engagement problem, they papered over it. Programs got funded. Plans got written. Coordinators got hired. And elected officials at every level got to feel the obligation was handled without ever having to personally own their community's preparedness and resilience. The federal check was, quietly, a comfortable substitute for ownership, the same psychological move I watch happen at the local level every budget cycle, just performed at a different altitude with a bigger checkbook and better cover.

The internet did come along, of course, and we look back at that nostalgic era of duck and cover under your desk when the sirens sound with a wry smile. It seems a little silly to us now, as we all become experts at weather behavior and foreign policy with all the information at our fingertips. But what replaced civil defense was not a more sophisticated model of community engagement with risk. It was a more sophisticated model of avoidance, better informed, more skeptical, and just as unlikely to show up for a coordinating meeting.

One could argue that cybersecurity has emerged as a candidate for a new shared, visible threat. But in an age when we carry computers in our pockets at all times, the more common response is still to look away rather than face that reality together. The avoidance, for now, looks familiar. Whether cyber becomes the rallying point that changes engagement and agreement remains to be seen.

The Structural Disadvantage for Emergency Management

Here is the part I think gets missed in most of the misunderstood-emergency manager conversations. Fire, EMS, law enforcement, public works, and public health all have built-in renewal mechanisms that emergency management simply does not have. A structure fire happens. A car wreck happens. A water main breaks. A disease outbreak demands a response. These events occur often enough, visibly enough, that nobody has to be convinced the investment is worth it. The proof keeps showing up on a schedule.

Emergency management's entire domain is the low-frequency, high-consequence event, the thing that, by definition, happens rarely in any given budget cycle, especially in a region like mine that has not had its worst bad day in over a decade. The difference between those agencies and emergency management is not a framing problem I can solve with a better presentation to a board. It highlights the nature of emergency management work: I am asking people to sustain investment and attention toward something that, by design, rarely proves itself necessary in the timeframe anyone is paying attention to.

I do not think this battle is ever fully won. I think the honest goal is building something that can function despite never fully winning it.

What I Have Learned About Competence and Permission

A friend once told me, never demonstrate competence in the early days of a job. If you do, they will expect it all the time. Still, for most of the last seven years, I have operated as the person who absorbs that gap quietly. When a board does not engage with a plan, I make sure it is defensible and the best it can be without everyone at the planning table. When a jurisdiction will not designate a point of contact, I become the point of contact by default, for everyone, all the time. When elected leadership tells me, sincerely, how glad they are that I am here so they do not have to think about this, I have genuinely taken that as a compliment.

Now I no longer think it was one. I think what I was hearing, dressed up as gratitude, was relief. They were not expressing confidence in the program. They were expressing relief that my competence meant they did not have to do the harder, more uncomfortable work of owning their own community's resilience: making real decisions under uncertainty, accepting responsibility if something goes wrong, sitting with the discomfort of not knowing whether they are ready for disaster. Who among us doesn't know someone who was fired after a disaster where not everything went right, and the blame was cast on that person despite every right thing they did?

I want to be clear: I do not think this is conscious. Nobody is sitting in a budget meeting thinking, the emergency manager is competent, so I do not have to care. It is quieter than that, and more human. Competence is reassuring, and reassurance makes it easy to move on to the next thing. That is not malice. It is just the path of least resistance, and in local government, that path gets walked every single day.

Regardless of intent, the effect is the same. That is the thought I keep coming back to: are they experiencing my competence as permission to disengage, rather than as a foundation to build on? I have asked myself this question many times, and the honest answer, often, has been the first one.

I do not think this is a failure of communication on my part, and I want to be direct about that, because I spent a long time assuming it was. I have asked clearly. I have framed requests well. I asked leadership directly for one thing: designate a liaison for each jurisdiction. I called it a game changer, both for the program and for me as a director. They did not designate a liaison. Not because of indifference, exactly. These are people genuinely overwhelmed with immediate demands, and like everyone else that has not had a really bad day in over a decade, they have not yet been handed the proof that changes the calculation. Nothing has required them to engage. Doing nothing has never cost them anything.

I did the math on what I have asked for in terms of engagement. One coordinating group meeting a month for those who would staff the EOC. One ninety-minute advisory board meeting a quarter for public safety leadership. Add a three-hour annual exercise and a handful of planning meetings for a select group. All in, we are talking about somewhere between twenty and twenty-five hours a year, depending on role. Against a standard forty-hour work week, that is still well under one percent of a working year. It is less time than a single average workday, spread across twelve months. I am not asking for an hour or two a month as an aspirational ideal. I am asking for less than that, and it is still too much.

The Same Evasion, a Different Altitude

Here is where I think this story stops being about my program and starts being about the whole field. For the better part of two decades, FEMA and other federal grant money has let almost everyone, mayors, councils, fire boards, and yes, practitioners too, avoid asking whether the emergency manager's competence has become a substitute for their own engagement rather than a foundation for it. EMPG dependency has functioned at the national level exactly the way an EM hire functions at the local level: a way to feel the obligation is handled without anyone having to own it, much less understand it.

That is the part I think most of us in this field do not want to say plainly, because we have benefited from it too. It has been easier, and frankly, less frustrating, to write the grant than to keep trying to build the relationship. It has always been easier to point to a federal funding stream and follow federal guidance than to think about what the community's program really needs to look like. It is a subsidy, and it buys a car that runs, not a Cadillac. Worse, the subsidy started dictating the program, disconnecting it from communities even further. The federal check and grant guidance was, quietly, a comfortable substitute for ownership, the same psychological move I watch happen at the local level every budget cycle, just performed at a different altitude with a bigger checkbook and better cover.

Now that substitute is going away, or has already gone away in some places, faster and with less warning than anyone would have liked. Whatever you think about why, the practical reality is the same: the thing that let everyone avoid this question for fifty years is no longer reliable enough to lean on. It might be hard to see it that way, but I think this is a good thing. It forces the question that should have been asked all along: what does your community actually own, and are you willing to do the work to own it?

Where That Leaves Us

I do not think the answer is to ask elected officials to suddenly care more, because I have tried that, sincerely and repeatedly, and explaining it harder does not work on its own. Nor is the answer to quietly build a program sturdy enough to function no matter how little anyone engages. I have done that pretty effectively for years, and I am calling myself out: doing the work in the background lets the disengagement continue without ever being named. And that needs to stop.

Organizations that house emergency management programs: build something that works even when engagement is inconsistent, because often it will be. Stop seeing emergency management as subordinate to whatever matters most to you this budget cycle. Stop absorbing every gap quietly. Make the cost of disengagement visible.

Local leaders: stop treating your emergency manager's competence as permission to disengage. Show up and own your program.

Emergency management professionals, your call is equally plain: stop doing their job for them. Name what is missing. Make the ask concrete and small enough that a refusal becomes indefensible. Document what happens when the answer is no. Every time you quietly fix what they would not own, you make it easier for them to disengage again next time.

The Next Era

The next era of emergency management will be defined by getting back to preparedness as the mission, the responsibility owned by local leaders, businesses investing in their own resilience, and the measure of a great program is not whether it survives without engagement but whether it has made engagement so normal that no one can remember when it wasn't that way.

My greatest hope is that this season of disruption becomes a foot in the door, an invitation to a seat at the local government table, and a chance to demonstrate the unique value emergency management brings: a singular focus on preparedness, a tolerance for ambiguity, comfort operating in complex environments, the ability to plan under uncertainty, and a talent for moving things forward with the community in mind.

That would be a great foundation to build on.