Anniston CDP increases training footprint

Feb. 21—Center for Domestic Preparedness Superintendent Tony Russell said the agency's current operations are "not your grandfather's CDP," and that those operations are expanding.

Addressing the Calhoun County Chamber of Commerce's Military and Security Affairs Committee Tuesday morning, Russell said, "We are trying to be even more impactful in a national way. We want to innovate, integrate and we want to be impactful. That is the message I am trying to share with our friends in Washington. D.C."

Russell said he would like the $71 million budget to be increased for both capital improvements and an expanded training presence for emergency responders.

The expanded mission and the capital improvements could entail the Anniston campus becoming a staging area for hurricane relief efforts.

Russell said the CDP currently sits in FEMA's Region 4 which is headquartered in Atlanta, a region which has to deal with numerous hurricanes and their effects as they move into land.

"We are now trying to look at the possibility of being able to stage commodities here on the Anniston campus," Russell said. "If there were to be a hurricane in the Gulf or on the eastern coast, we would be able to ship things from Anniston to those locations to get people prepared."

Russell said there are staging areas that exist "too close to the situation" and the region also includes Tennessee and Kentucky.

"What I am trying to say is we are in a better location," Russell said. "We are in talks now and if it happens it would be huge."

Russell said he is also pursuing having more full-time personnel — "folks who live here and have their roots here."

He also said he would pursue purchasing the commodities locally if local businesses could handle the quantities needed.

"It would save transportation costs," Russell said. "If it comes to that, I am going to push local businesses. I know the big push from FEMA is to do things locally if at all possible."

Russell said the numbers of those trained at the Anniston campus has already increased.

He noted that out of a total of 57,537 FEMA trainees, 8,655 were trained in Anniston in fiscal year 2022. The projected totals for fiscal 2023 are 55,800 trainees, with 12,000 trained on campus.

Russell said several thousand of those were trained at a facility in Maryland, where FEMA trains those considered to be in the "FEMA Incident Workforce."

"One of my big pushes last year was to bring more of that training here to Anniston," Russell said.

Russell also called the CDP infrastructure "old" and "without much maintenance done."

"We are now beginning to invest in our buildings and reimagine what we are doing," Russell said, adding he serves on the FEMA Real Property Governance Board, which makes the decisions on how capital investments are distributed throughout the agency.

"We now have a lot of money coming here because we are doing more than one thing," Russell said. "As we move forward, we get a lot more funding because we show a direct link to the goal of national preparedness with the facilities and a trained workforce."

Staff Writer Brian Graves: 256-236-1551.