County hires emergency management director
May 16—Santa Fe County has a new director of its Office of Emergency Management, which residents and county leaders alike have recently criticized for shortcomings.
Don "Brad" Call was hired April 20, county spokeswoman Olivia Romo wrote in an email Thursday. He earns $52.61 per hour, the equivalent of about $109,400 per year.
He comes from Cascade County, Mont., where he spent the last four years as director of emergency management. Before that, he served as a Community Emergency Response Team member and lead public information officer in Arizona; a Regional Emergency Preparedness Planner for Jackson County, Mo.; and a team lead contractor providing emergency support after Hurricane Harvey in Texas in 2017, a county news release Thursday said.
Call has a master's degree in emergency management and homeland security from Arizona State University. He also has a bachelor's degree in business and human resource management from Northern Arizona University and a master's degree in organizational management from the University of Phoenix.
Santa Fe County's Office of Emergency Management has been in transition as it moves from being a unit of the Fire Department to a standalone office under County Manager Greg Shaffer at the recommendation of a county task force and public safety consulting firm. An "immediate focus" of the restructured office will be creating a Local Emergency Planning Committee and Community Emergency Response Team, the county news release said.
State and federal laws require the county to have an active emergency planning committee made up of diverse stakeholders, but the State Emergency Response Commission, charged with appointing those members, has failed to do so in recent years in several New Mexico counties. County and state leaders agreed last month setting up such a committee is a priority after residents raised the alarm on the county's noncompliance with the law.
Once established, a local committee would create and regularly update an emergency response plan, which Santa Fe County has not updated since 2007.
Call said his team will follow a "road map" of dozens of recommendations the Fairfax, Va.-based consulting firm Federal Engineering, Inc. presented to the County Commission in November to shore up the county's emergency planning.
"As your new OEM director, I stand ready to serve this community and its citizens, working with them to be better prepared and, ultimately, resilient in the face of both natural and man-made disasters," Call wrote in a statement.
