Changes in the Air
Saturday December 17, 2005
I got a call on Friday asking me to attend a team leader meeting on Saturday morning at the Area Field Office (AFO) near Lake Charles. This was soon followed by a call from Baton Rouge asking if I could stay after that meeting for a session on how they want the Parishes to prepare the summary report of their meetings.
So Saturday morning I had all had Cliff and Chris join me for the first meeting and then sent them off to get familiar with the Parish.
Any start-up organization has growing pains and different people with different views of how an operation like this should be run. This is even more so because this Long Term Recovery Planning has never before been done as a program unto itself and early in the year when the decision was made to do this as a separate program in the future (ESF-14), no one contemplated that the first time out they would be dealing with the most destructive disaster ever dealt with.
By necessity and circumstance it has been a bit of a one step forward two steps back process. The Governor announced the creation of the Louisiana Recovery Authority in mid-October and charged it with developing recovery plans for all the parishes within 100 days. The LRA and FEMA decided to team up and accomplish this with the technical support for the Long Term Recovery Planning Program. The goal was to have scoping meeting with local officials in November. one round of public meetings in December, a second round of public meetings in January, and reports completed by January 24 – the hundredth day.
Those who planned this schedule were overly optimistic about how quickly the people needed to achieve these goals could be mobilized. The first goal was to hire local planners to lead and largely staff the effort. But Louisiana does not have a strong history of planning, so there were not a lot of local planners available. After a few weeks this became clear and the call for planners, engineers and architects went out through the FEMA technical assistance contractors. Just before Thanksgiving people started arriving with a larger group just after Thanksgiving – including me – and still more in subsequent weeks. But valuable time had been lost.
With insufficient people to plan, promote and run the scoping meetings they were not as well attended as hoped. As I read the guide and waited for my background check, senior managers huddled upstairs with the LRA people evaluating where they stood and the best course of action to take. They, in my view wisely, concluded that local officials owning the process was critical to its success and that in most Parishes the scoping meetings had not achieved this goal. They therefore worked out a new schedule. In most parishes, the time allocated for the first public meeting would instead be used for a Planning Workshop with local government officials. The first Public meetings would then be held in January focusing on vision, needs and strategies. From this recovery strategies would be prepared for each parish as the 100 day deliverable. The second public meeting would be held in February, confirming the interpretation of comments from the first meeting and focusing on projects and priorities. From this the Recovery Strategy would be expanded into a Parrish Recovery Plan. Then the Parrish Plans would be rolled up into regional and finally statewide plans. The final draft products would be completed by the end of March.
The Parrish leads were charged with going out and securing a storefront to work from and working with logistics to get it set up. I have been in Allen Parish for a week and a half. With great assistance from a GSA person we secured a site and I have been working with the logistics folks to get the lease signed, and all the other things needed to set up an business. We are still about a week and a half away, which realistically means the first of January before we are fully functional. I would argue that given the lack of precedence for such an effort, getting three hundred professionals into approximately 20 storefronts, in a six week period while simultaneously holding dozens of public meetings in the hardest hit parishes and Government Workshops in the rest is an impressive accomplishment. But it still leaves us just opening our doors three weeks before the 100 days is up.
Now, add to this a recent change in the senior management of the program here in Louisiana. Now they need to become comfortable with both the way we are organized and the approach / schedule being pursued. There are pressures from the people and press to make some of the hard decisions sooner rather than later and accelerate the start of major actions on the ground. Finally, we are all learning as we go along.
So a new “game plan” is being developed, a new organization chart is being investigated. This afternoon there was a conference call team leader meeting with the new Chief of Staff. We were told again that they had changed there mind and were encouraging people to take off through January 2 and rest up for an intense 60 days. That everyone is being asked to commit to 60 and if anyone requires more than on four day weekend away during this period they will need to be replaced.
So what is coming? Has the end date be moved up from the end of March to the End of February – 60 days? Is the reorganization simply consolidating the reporting structure or will people be moved from Parish to Parish? They hope to let us know by mid-week. We will see.
I got a call on Friday asking me to attend a team leader meeting on Saturday morning at the Area Field Office (AFO) near Lake Charles. This was soon followed by a call from Baton Rouge asking if I could stay after that meeting for a session on how they want the Parishes to prepare the summary report of their meetings.
So Saturday morning I had all had Cliff and Chris join me for the first meeting and then sent them off to get familiar with the Parish.
Any start-up organization has growing pains and different people with different views of how an operation like this should be run. This is even more so because this Long Term Recovery Planning has never before been done as a program unto itself and early in the year when the decision was made to do this as a separate program in the future (ESF-14), no one contemplated that the first time out they would be dealing with the most destructive disaster ever dealt with.
By necessity and circumstance it has been a bit of a one step forward two steps back process. The Governor announced the creation of the Louisiana Recovery Authority in mid-October and charged it with developing recovery plans for all the parishes within 100 days. The LRA and FEMA decided to team up and accomplish this with the technical support for the Long Term Recovery Planning Program. The goal was to have scoping meeting with local officials in November. one round of public meetings in December, a second round of public meetings in January, and reports completed by January 24 – the hundredth day.
Those who planned this schedule were overly optimistic about how quickly the people needed to achieve these goals could be mobilized. The first goal was to hire local planners to lead and largely staff the effort. But Louisiana does not have a strong history of planning, so there were not a lot of local planners available. After a few weeks this became clear and the call for planners, engineers and architects went out through the FEMA technical assistance contractors. Just before Thanksgiving people started arriving with a larger group just after Thanksgiving – including me – and still more in subsequent weeks. But valuable time had been lost.
With insufficient people to plan, promote and run the scoping meetings they were not as well attended as hoped. As I read the guide and waited for my background check, senior managers huddled upstairs with the LRA people evaluating where they stood and the best course of action to take. They, in my view wisely, concluded that local officials owning the process was critical to its success and that in most Parishes the scoping meetings had not achieved this goal. They therefore worked out a new schedule. In most parishes, the time allocated for the first public meeting would instead be used for a Planning Workshop with local government officials. The first Public meetings would then be held in January focusing on vision, needs and strategies. From this recovery strategies would be prepared for each parish as the 100 day deliverable. The second public meeting would be held in February, confirming the interpretation of comments from the first meeting and focusing on projects and priorities. From this the Recovery Strategy would be expanded into a Parrish Recovery Plan. Then the Parrish Plans would be rolled up into regional and finally statewide plans. The final draft products would be completed by the end of March.
The Parrish leads were charged with going out and securing a storefront to work from and working with logistics to get it set up. I have been in Allen Parish for a week and a half. With great assistance from a GSA person we secured a site and I have been working with the logistics folks to get the lease signed, and all the other things needed to set up an business. We are still about a week and a half away, which realistically means the first of January before we are fully functional. I would argue that given the lack of precedence for such an effort, getting three hundred professionals into approximately 20 storefronts, in a six week period while simultaneously holding dozens of public meetings in the hardest hit parishes and Government Workshops in the rest is an impressive accomplishment. But it still leaves us just opening our doors three weeks before the 100 days is up.
Now, add to this a recent change in the senior management of the program here in Louisiana. Now they need to become comfortable with both the way we are organized and the approach / schedule being pursued. There are pressures from the people and press to make some of the hard decisions sooner rather than later and accelerate the start of major actions on the ground. Finally, we are all learning as we go along.
So a new “game plan” is being developed, a new organization chart is being investigated. This afternoon there was a conference call team leader meeting with the new Chief of Staff. We were told again that they had changed there mind and were encouraging people to take off through January 2 and rest up for an intense 60 days. That everyone is being asked to commit to 60 and if anyone requires more than on four day weekend away during this period they will need to be replaced.
So what is coming? Has the end date be moved up from the end of March to the End of February – 60 days? Is the reorganization simply consolidating the reporting structure or will people be moved from Parish to Parish? They hope to let us know by mid-week. We will see.
posted by J Corlss at 9:04 PM
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