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Emergency-management staff outline COOP, incident communications and neighborhood preparedness program
Summary
Emergency-preparedness staff described the office's role, the city's continuity (COOP) and emergency-operations framework, coordination with county and state partners, mobile EOC capability, and a neighborhood preparedness program to be rolled out through neighborhood associations.
Rachel Holford and Mallory Wilson presented Boise's emergency-preparedness work, describing how the small office coordinates citywide planning, exercises and incident response.
Holford said the office's vision is to partner across city, county and state resources to prepare, respond, mitigate and recover from disasters and that the office focuses on preparedness, stakeholder engagement, response support, training and grant research. She emphasized making plans usable in an incident and highlighted the city's continuity-of-operations (COOP) site and accessible playbooks that prioritize essential functions.
The presentation described the incident and policy-group notification structure used to share timely information with council and leadership during incidents. Holford cited recent activations as examples: the airport hangar collapse, the Valley Fire, a public-works sewer incident and a significant network outage (CrowdStrike), and said after-action reviews are used to refine procedures. She noted the policy notification sequence generally begins with the incident commander and can scale to a liaison group, multi-agency coordination and the EOC.
Staff said the city does not currently maintain a permanent physical EOC; it can operate virtually or use Council Chambers or a conference room, and it also maintains a grant-funded mobile trailer to operate an off-site EOC when needed. Holford also described the special-events hub that helps plan complex events; staff said they processed 204 events in 2025 and that more complex events required dozens of coordination meetings and after-action reviews.
Holford introduced a neighborhood-focused community preparedness program, piloted at Warm Springs Mesa, that will initially accept applications from neighborhood associations for tailored planning and support; staff said they will expand eligibility later as lessons are learned and capacity allows.
The presentation closed with a list of near-term projects including EOP and COOP updates, countywide evacuation-zone work and improved special-event resource tracking. Mayor MacLean thanked staff and recessed the work session to a short break.
