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In recent decades, emergency management and homeland security practitioners have laid claim to a widely accepted declaration: All disasters are local. The core principle expressed in this statement is that—regardless of the size of the geographic region affected by a catastrophic event; the event’s complexity; or the number of people injured, killed, or displaced—the local first response community is the leading force of emergency response. This suggests that, operationally, disaster management, or incident management, is predicated upon a bottom-up approach, rather than a top-down management style.
Disasters may affect an entire county, state, or region within a nation, but it is at the community level that response and recovery take place. For instance, the first responders at the scene are going to have the greatest effect on the outcome of the incident they are trying to mitigate. In the scope of a disaster, it is the cumulative effect of hundreds or even thousands of local first responders, each managing one piece of the disaster, that leads to the incident's resolution.
America is not comprised of homogenous state and local governments; rather, the nation consists of a patchwork of different types of governments. In some instances, the state government has greater authority over local governments, whereas in others, local governments have tremendous independent authority to govern and act. The latter examples are referred to as home rule states. In a home rule state, local government has supremacy for incident management, with support being provided by the state when requested. However, even that particular definition has issues that must be understood and navigated by the homeland security practitioner.
Whether or not home rule is in effect, each state’s constitution establishes the relationship that the state government has with its local jurisdictions. Citizens within each jurisdiction determine what their local government will include. The following are examples:
· Texas contains towns and cities, but most of the power, authority, and responsibility rest at the county level, with county judges as the chief elected officials.
· Massachusetts, on the other hand, has counties on its maps and uses those geographic definitions for various activities; however, there are no county-level governments.
· New York has 62 counties and more than 1,800 local government jurisdictions, each having considerable authority, and these often overlap.
The style of government that a citizenry has chosen to create over the decades is what determines the varying level of authority among jurisdictions. There are states where the citizens do not prefer much government involvement and others where the citizens have decided that they do.
Regardless of where a state falls along the spectrum of degree of local government involvement, state and in most cases county governments provide public safety services that, by their legislatively mandated charters, have authority and responsibility to perform services and enforce laws and regulations within various jurisdictions. For instance, as noted, New York is a home rule state. The citizens have repeatedly determined that they wish to have many local governments rather than cede power to a geographically larger political division. Despite this, the New York State Police (NYSP) has authority and responsibility granted by the New York state legislature to enforce the laws of the state in every jurisdiction, regardless of the presence of a county sheriff’s office or local police department.
Several other state-level departments hold legislative authority as well:
· Departments of Health
· Departments of Education
· Departments of Environmental Conservation
· Departments of Tax and Finance
Every state has similar agencies or departments that have some authority and responsibility to act within a local political subdivision. Understanding this complicated patchwork of government agencies is important because homeland security practitioners, to be successful, must understand the environments in which they operate.
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