[ECAC] A more interesting incident

[John J. McDonough]

A couple weeks ago we had the Michigan Interoperable Communications
Training Conference.  This is an annual meeting of State Police, Sheriff
deputies, 911 directors, county emergency managers, etc.  This year
there was at least one ham per State Police District there on the
State's nickel.

I have been having some discussions with the Emergency Management and
Homeland Security Division about beefing up the RACES cards.  (The
discussion was initially raised by the Captain.)  We have been
gravitating toward having a database of training and background checks
maintained by ARES rather than the State for a variety of reasons.  We
brought up the possibility to see how the Emergency Managers in
particular would respond and had a discussion around trust. 

Rather surprisingly, to me at least, was that there seemed to be no
problem trusting the hams.  The issue was trusting other Emergency
Managers.  Kind of a strange turn of events, but at least for the EMs
there, it tells us something about their relationship with their ECs.

Another rather interesting thing at the conference.  In my District, we
have a number of small counties.  We came up with the idea of certifying
a few hams as COM-Ls so that a smaller county, if they needed a COM-L,
could simply call a ham.

Earlier the state committee that determines public safety communications
policy had brought up that we don't know who our COM-Ls are, many who
have been through training had not completed their taskbook, and many
others seem to have disappeared.  This committee was working on cleaning
up that data and then getting "enough" COM-Ls certified.  When we
brought up the idea of training hams, the chairman of that committee
jumped up and said that was such a good idea that we would be doing that
statewide, and COM-Ts as well as COM-Ls.  And that is how I got added to
that committee and also got tasked with combing through FEMAs tome last
week.

73 de WB8RCR