The MEMA Advancement Program is composed of four major areas of emphasis:

• Emergency Services Infrastructure: Upgrades in emergency services communications and situational awareness infrastructure, data collection, management and dissemination to support policy making, resource allocation and incident support. These systems will also provide key inputs to public information and advisory notices during incidents to include response and recovery.
• Emergency Services Staffing: Create a MEMA Reserve (on-call paid) and MEMA Volunteer (on-call unpaid) program to provide MEMA with staffing during activations.
• Shelters, Resilience Centers and Assembly Areas: Building upon previous efforts, suitability analyses will be updated and needs analyses generated for sheltering utilizing both County and Department of Education facilities under various scenarios. Additionally, sites for resilience centers and assembly areas will be identified with associated support requirements under various contingencies.
• Community Engagement: In addition to ongoing community education and preparedness activities, implementing a comprehensive social media strategy utilizing social media monitoring for situational awareness, can provide emergency alert and other relevant information to affected communities during response and recovery and a renewed emphasis on recruitment and training of Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) and Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service (RACES).

This program will improve the County’s ability to identify, mitigate and respond to all hazard threats to the community, as well as the community’s awareness and ability to prepare for and respond to all hazards and threats. While situational awareness tools are improving, additional tools and procedures would improve information dissemination, planning and decision making both by MEMA and various partners. Even with the increase in civil service staffing for MEMA, additional personnel resources may be needed to ensure that incident support functions are fully staffed for incidents that last over several operational periods. Creation of a MEMA Reserve would provide Incident Management Team (IMT) support to unified and area commands within the County while a MEMA Volunteer Corps could assist with incident support in the Emergency Operations Center to backfill civil service personnel. The County lacks sufficient hurricane-resistant shelters. This effort will assess the inventory of available shelter facilities, identify needed capital investment to make hurricane-resistant and prioritize improvements.

• Completion of the MEMA Strategic  Plan to include review and approval  by Department of Management