Budget Hearing Meeting – OEM, September 30, 2026

This was the Office of Emergency Management budget hearing on September 30, 2026. Finance director Vernon Roth walked a multi-year sheet with OEM director Eric and others in the room. No roll-call votes. No public comment. The county is still short about $400,000 on the larger budget, and the room was told there is not $600,000 left to squeeze from other departments, so every office is being looked at hard. This hearing is the local OEM office, not dispatch and not the $400,000 hole. There are two money piles. The first is the OEM office itself. The working 2027 total discussed was about $132,519, down from roughly $180,000 the prior year. The second is countywide bookkeeping that walked through the room: the $400,000 shortfall and the fact that EMPG reimbursement has been landing in the wrong fund lines. Those last problems are not an OEM spending binge. Revenue is almost entirely EMPG. Eric said Homeland Security grant revenue is zero for 2027 because nothing was reapplied for. MWD grant revenue is also zero for the same reason. EMPG is the only real stream and is expected to be more than $50,000; Eric’s last quarter alone was about $11,000–$13,000. The ledger showed $0 or a suspiciously round $50,000 in prior years, and the room agreed the money has been deposited into special projects or hazard mitigation instead of the EMPG / Homeland Security lines. EMPG reimbursements go to the treasurer and into fund 60. EMPG covers salaries, communications, fuel, and training; it does not cover pure operating supplies. Expense lines moved down. Operations was requested at $500, cut from $4,500, because the office is going 90% paperless and dropping the Xerox. LEPC / OEM operations sits at $500, half of which is EMPG-matchable. Fuel is $3,000 (county-paid, 50% match). Travel is $2,000 for lodging and food. Repairs and maintenance went up $500 to $2,500 for the truck (66,000 miles). Education and training is $750. Communications is $3,000 for one cell phone and one mobile Starlink; the four SAR hotspots are being shut off after years of non-use. Dues and subscriptions dropped from $250 to $0. Support for emergencies is $10,000, down from a proposed $20,000 and from a prior $30,000, after $6,000 was spent on dumpsters last year. CERT at $5,000 is being reallocated to CART (Community Animal Response Team) because there is no active CERT team and the Ash Makers fire after-action report flagged animal response as a gap. Variable messaging signs need repair (one may have been hit by lightning; batteries are low) and the $250 line is not enough. Uniform allowance of $500 was added for embroidered shirts. No salary or benefits figures were broken out as separate numbers in the room; EMPG is the main offset on the personnel side. No motion closed the $132,519 total, the EMPG tracking fix, the CART reallocation, or the VMS repair. Next steps named were to sit with the treasurer on the misposted EMPG receipts, clean the fund-60 coding, and review the lines again.