Montgomery County officials moved Feb. 12 to update the county’s National Incident Management System training and reporting plan.
County staff said the overhaul is needed now that participation demands and state requirements have changed, and the county wants more control over what responders are learning.
The context
During the Montgomery County Commissioners Court meeting, Jason Millsaps, executive director of the county Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, told the court the update is about compliance and keeping county departments and partner agencies on track without repeated exemptions.
“What we’re doing is refreshing, updating the NIMS requirements for the county. Last time we did this was a couple years ago,” Millsaps said.
He said the plan approved in 2023 included a class that county departments and partners, such as fire departments and emergency medical services, were required to take, but a combination of a legal shift and limited enrollment is causing problems with meeting that requirement.
“Due to state law change, since that plan is done, we’ve been mandated by law enforcement to do Alert 1, so we have a lot of officers taking Alert 1 …, and there’s just not enough participants in that one other class that was required, which was AAIR: Active, Attack, Integrated Response, so we’re having to issue variances constantly for not having everybody through it,” Millsaps said.
Instead of continuing to rely on the prior course setup, Millsaps told the court the sheriff’s office, emergency management and partners are building their own replacement class.
“We also found that the curriculum … is not necessarily conducive to what we want to do in Montgomery County,“ Millsaps said. “Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, OEM, emergency management, with our partners at [Montgomery County Hospital District] and our Fire Chief Association, are in the process now of developing an in-house curriculum.”
He said the new course—called MICRT—will replace AAIR in the county’s plan and condense training time while adding radio operations instruction.
“What we’ve replaced it with will do not only everything AAIR does in one day versus two days, but it also will integrate radio operations training in there too,” Millsaps said.
What this means
Millsaps summarized it by saying the difference between the 2023 plan and now is the removal of two three-day classes and condensing them into one that is being developed in-house.
Under the update, he said, anyone with AAIR training for the next three years would be exempt from it.
When asked about baseline disaster-related training, Millsaps said required online courses remain in place.
Also on the agenda
A final change order shows work is still underway at the Precinct 2 Emergency Response Building.
In a Feb. 3 Facebook post, Montgomery County Precinct 2 Commissioner Charlie Riley said the west end of the county is set to gain an emergency-response hub designed to reduce dangerous travel during major events.
The facility is an 8,000-square-foot Emergency Response Building equipped with essential supplies, equipment, and a backup generator, and will soon be operational, according to the post.