Spring Hill mayor says recent storms show city needs an emergency response plan
.jpeg "The downed tree in Susan Pilgrim’s backyard. It landed on the Spring Hill resident’s roof during Monday’s storms.")
After jumping in late to storm recovery this week, Spring Hill Mayor Chad Young wants the city to have a better protocol in place to handle emergency events.
“We’d like to be proactive rather than reactive, and at this point, we’re being a little bit reactive because we didn’t have a plan,” Young said. “So going forward hopefully we’ll have a plan that will be a lot more seamless and people will know what to expect.”
The small city between Johnson and Miami counties didn’t have a tornado touch down like other small Kansas towns experienced earlier this week, but high winds uprooted trees, sent debris flying and damaged several properties in the community.
The city didn’t qualify for state or federal emergency relief funding, which left Spring Hill with limited options, Young said. Following the storms, on Tuesday morning the city posted on its public Facebook page that damage wasn’t “widespread” and that it wouldn’t provide cleanup assistance — frustrating residents who later took to the comment section to demand their city take action.
After receiving more than 300 comments in less than 24 hours, the city quickly pivoted and is now helping with cleanup efforts across the community.
Lifelong Spring Hill resident Jenni Hart said she was pleased to see her city listen to its constituents, but she’s worried about how prepared it is for the future.
“If we don’t qualify for funding from the state, if this isn’t part of the state of emergency, does our town not have funding for this allocated? Does funding not exist already within the city budget?” she said. “If we’re not setting aside any of that budget for emergency response, that’s a concern, especially in a town where we’re in tornado alley, we don’t have a public shelter, we don’t have any clear plan for clean up.”
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Creating emergency protocols
It’s a concern Young hopes to address at Spring Hill’s next City Council meeting.
“We’re going to make it a point to create a plan and start figuring out for future emergencies that happen and make sure we have a dedicated budget that we put money towards annually … and have it ready to go whenever something like this happens,” he said.
The city has a reserve fund in place in its budget that can be allocated toward emergencies, but Young said he’d like to see the city allocate dollars specifically for emergency response to help in times when the city may not hit the required thresholds to receive relief funds from the state or federal government.
Along with money in place,Young said he’d like the city to lay out what private contractors they could partner with or have on-call to help with recovery efforts after emergency events.
“These events don’t happen every year, but when they do happen it usually can be a significant cost,” he said. “So I want to make sure that we have something set up for future governing bodies. When I’m gone, they’ll have some sort of plan in place and then they can adjust as they see fit, but at least there’s something there.”
The next City Council meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. on April 23 at the Spring Hill Civic Center, 401 N. Madison St. As of April 17, the city hasn’t posted the meeting’s agenda.