Agency official urges year‑round hurricane preparedness, praises federal flight crews

An agency official with the Sarasota County Public Safety Team said partnerships with federal, state and local emergency‑management agencies are critical to keeping residents safe and urged continued year‑round planning and training.

"We work year round to make sure that we are planning, training, and coordinating together," the official said, adding that preparedness is not only active during storms. The speaker pointed to the 2024 hurricane season — "where we had 3 storms come through with significant impacts to our community" — as evidence of why sustained coordination matters.

The official also described making evacuation decisions "for hundreds of thousands of people" and credited information gathered by NOAA and Air Force Reserve aircraft as essential to those choices. "We can't tell you enough how grateful that we are for the way that you risk your lives in order to get us that critical information so that we can make evacuation decisions," the official said.

The speaker framed strong relationships across federal, state and local levels as an advantage heading into the next season and specifically named Sarasota and Manatee County public‑safety partners. They closed by saying the counties are "looking forward to being ready together with our federal, state, and local partners this year, as well as the public as we enter into the 2026 hurricane season."

No formal motions or votes were recorded during the remarks; the remarks were delivered as a preparedness briefing and expression of appreciation to intergovernmental partners.