Brooklyn Park staff outline hazard mitigation plan, request land use for county weather station

Fire Chief Sean Conway and Emergency Management Coordinator Dan Johnson Powers told the Brooklyn Park City Council that the city is shifting from basic preparedness to a multi-year emergency management program and asked the council to adopt a county-coordinated hazard mitigation plan and approve a land-use agreement for a Hennepin County weather station.

Conway said the city is moving beyond early planning stages and described emergency management as “more than just a program.” He and Dan Johnson Powers outlined what they called core priorities: complete emergency operating procedures, provide National Incident Management System and Incident Command System training across city divisions, exercise a full-scale resident-focused training within roughly three years, and improve local public warning capability.

The briefing emphasized why formal adoption matters. Dan Johnson Powers told the council the process of identifying hazards and critical infrastructure is required under federal law: “We do this because it’s the right thing to do. We also do this because federal law, specifically the disaster mitigation act of February, says we have to do it.” He described the hazard mitigation plan under consideration as a three-volume document — “all told, we’re looking at about 700 pages of documents” — compiled with Hennepin County and other cities in the county.

Powers and Conway described several operational upgrades and constraints. The city currently lacks written emergency operating procedures that can be deployed “off the shelf,” Powers said; standing up an emergency operations center can take roughly two hours, and coordinated mutual-aid relationships are essential because a single city cannot resource large incidents alone. Conway noted work on tornado sirens and battery backups that staff expect to finalize by the end of the year, and both speakers flagged communications tools such as Everbridge as priorities for multilingual public messaging and rapid outbound alerts.

On a separate, related ask, Powers said Hennepin County Emergency Management requested permission to install a local weather sensor to fill a gap in the county’s network. He described the proposed installation as a roughly 30-foot tower anchored to a poured pad of about 3-by-3 feet, with footing about 9 feet deep, no utilities required, and self-sufficient operation. The recommended site is in the fields behind Inam Farm; Powers said the sensor would improve local weather data for northeastern Hennepin County.

Councilmember McGarry asked whether the city participates in large-scale airport exercises run by the Metropolitan Airports Commission at MSP. Conway replied, “we do not,” and explained airports stage mass-casualty and other scenario-based exercises that typically draw many regional partners.

Conway and Powers said the next step is administrative: staff will place formal adoption of the hazard mitigation plan on the consent agenda next week and will ask the council to approve the land-use agreement for the weather station. No council vote on either item was recorded in this meeting.

The presenters framed the work as largely preparatory and collaborative: training city divisions in NIMS/ICS, coordinating with Hennepin County Emergency Management and neighboring cities, and improving communications with limited near-term budget implications for systems such as Everbridge. The city will return to the council with formal adoption and land-use items for decision.