Matthew Kolpitz, who joined the City of Auburn as emergency manager on July 1, told a city podcast that his office’s job is to “help communities prepare for, respond to, and recover from emergencies.” Mayor Nancy Backus hosted the July conversation and asked Kolpitz and Emergency Management Coordinator Tyler Turner to explain priorities for the city.

Kolpitz said the work centers on preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery while relying heavily on relationships with neighboring jurisdictions, nonprofits and state and federal partners. "We don't really have much authority…most of it comes from the relationships and agreements that we can establish," he said.

Tyler Turner described the day-to-day work as largely administrative and compliance-driven, including updates to the city’s emergency planning documents and ongoing training. "Right now, Matt and I are looking at updating our comprehensive emergency management plan and our regional hazard mitigation plan," Turner said. He also described coordinating volunteer programs, training logistics and community outreach.

Both officials emphasized Auburn’s assets that affect emergency work — an airport, rail lines, notable manufacturing and a casino — and said those increase both risk and the need for cross-agency planning. Kolpitz said those assets make Auburn’s emergency workload “more interesting than maybe another city of comparable size.”

They noted the role of mutual aid agreements and regional committees in multi-jurisdiction incidents and gave examples of support functions emergency management provides in structure fires, such as coordinating shelter, notifications, and liaison work with the Red Cross and the U.S. Small Business Administration.

Turner recounted a multi-unit residential fire that displaced dozens of people overnight and described how emergency management helped place families at a hotel, assign social workers for longer-term housing needs and manage donation offers from the community. "Community coming together for donations… that's something that emergency management plays a big part in as well," Turner said.

Both officials identified communications as a core daily task, including maintaining equipment and interoperability with King and Pierce County systems. They also said emergency management work requires regular exercises and maintaining equipment such as radios.

Kolpitz and Turner encouraged residents to use Auburn’s emergency web resources and county alert systems and to engage with local programs such as CERT (Community Emergency Response Team). Mayor Backus closed the interview by thanking the pair and saying she hoped they would be "bored" — a reference to the ideal that emergency managers have no major incidents to handle.

Ending: The city’s emergency team said their immediate tasks include updating the city’s comprehensive emergency management plan and hazard mitigation annexes and preparing upcoming community trainings; no formal policy decisions or votes were made during the interview.