The City and County Don’t Know How to Work Together in a Disaster
- Media
- Dec 31, 2024
- 6 min read
The January floods and a previous public health crisis have taught us that the county and city struggle to work together in emergencies.
Everyone knows bureaucracies bumble. But in a disaster, bumbling is not so much an act of slapstick comedy as an act of violence.
And yet, watching the city of San Diego and the county of San Diego work together in a disaster is like watching lobsters try to play basketball.
The city’s and county’s difficulties working together have been evident in two relatively recent disasters. During the floods of Jan. 22, 2024 — and their aftermath — bureaucratic wrangling and confusion caused delays in assisting flood victims and devastated community trust. But those errors might not have been necessary had officials learned obvious lessons from the hepatitis A outbreak of 2017.
The hepatitis A outbreak — which killed 20 people and tore through the city’s homeless community — was a tragic comedy of errors, as Voice of San Diego documented at the time.
Filtered through layers of bureaucracy, even the simplest of tasks took weeks to accomplish.
In one instance, it took county and city officials nearly two months to print public health awareness posters and hang them in libraries and other gathering places.
But one of the greatest screw ups of all — as with the floods — had to do with a particularly unbending bureaucratic device: the permit.
County public health officials quickly keyed into the need for handwashing stations, which literally have the potential to save lives during a viral outbreak like hepatitis A. They say they discussed this with city officials as early as May 2017.
People at the county said that the city people had reservations about the handwashing stations, because they lead unsavory people to congregate and commit crimes. The city people denied this. They said they had concerns about bathrooms not handwashing stations.
Either way, the delays that followed were unnecessary and potentially deadly — as a state audit later confirmed.
Officials didn’t jump into gear until months later. On Aug. 30, 2017, Voice published a story documenting the inanities that had led to the unacceptable delays.
Spurred by the bad press, city and county officials found immediate ways to overcome their bureaucratic fumbling.
Within days, handwashing stations finally hit the streets en masse.
• • • • •
Flash forward to Jan. 22, 2024. The seeming insurmountability of regulatory problems also played a role in the floods.
City officials had known for years that vegetation and trees had taken over parts of the Chollas Creek flood canals. They also knew that the areas around Chollas Creek are extremely likely to flood.
And yet, the canals weren’t cleared — this time because of a problem between state officials and city people. City officials say they couldn’t clear the canals because of state environmental regulations.
But a theme amidst these disasters is that bureaucratic limbo disappears as if by magic once exposed to the public.
Just a few days after the floods, officials managed to clear the canals quickly after making an emergency declaration on the front end of another approaching storm — regulatory issues be damned.
Permits and regulatory issues, for all the pain they can cause, are not at the heart of intergovernmental wrangling. What appears to truly grind the gears of government to a halt is the question of who will take ownership of a given problem.
• • • • •
In the wake of disasters like the floods, which displace people from their homes, it is imperative to set up victim assistance centers, where survivors, who have just been made homeless, can come for assistance. This responsibility typically falls to governments.
As the flood waters receded on Jan. 22, the Jackie Robinson YMCA, situated near the center of the disaster, became a makeshift victim assistance center. Local nonprofits — none of them trained in disaster response — headquartered themselves there and began the difficult work of documenting each survivor and their needs.
Meanwhile, the city and the county began jockeying over whose responsibility it was to set up a center in southeastern San Diego. This painful back and forth wasted days in the flood response, as Voice previously reported.
A new after-action report, released by the county last month, confirms Voice’s reporting. The report makes multiple mentions of how confusion between the county and cities made it harder to respond to people’s needs.
“Staff indicated confusion and conflicting views over who should manage recovery efforts, with [the county] and the cities having differing views on responsibility,” the report reads. “This led to a disconnection in recovery efforts.”
It went like this: County officials kept insisting it was the city’s responsibility to set up the victim assistance center; city officials kept insisting the reverse.
The first problem had to do with the use of official communication channels.
City people asked the county people, in a face-to-face meeting, if they would set up a victim assistance center within the city.
County officials wanted that request in writing, which the city did not send until a week later. Over a simple question of the proper way to request assistance, one week was lost.
After the city sent its written request, the county did not respond as city officials hoped they would.
“Historically, the city has led within its jurisdiction by standing up its own local assistance centers,” one county official wrote to the city.
City officials say they did not understand this to be the case. The county had already set up its own victim assistance center, outside the city, in Spring Valley, where there had also been flooding. City officials say they believed the county is in charge of setting up victim assistance centers. They wanted one in the city, near most severe flooding.
The minutiae of the wrangling — and its devastating consequences — has tested the sanity of flood survivors.
“The more they have these emergency meetings… talking about how many lives they saved and how they were on the ground Jan. 22, only makes it worse, because everyone knows no one was there,” Clarissa Marin, a resident, previously told me.
County officials ultimately won — if it can be called that — the arm-wrestling match. City officials chose the site and opened the victim assistance center at Mountain View community center. The county provided staff.
The center opened 10 days after the floods, after near-irreparable damage had been done to the community’s trust.
Armon Harvey, a football coach at Lincoln High School, was central to the recovery efforts that happened at the Jackie Robinson Y. I spoke to him there, two days before the city opened its assistance center.
“We have built the infrastructure together to be able to deal with this, when the county and city and them have not been able to do it,” Harvey told me. “You’re allowing the community to do it for you guys. And that should be embarrassing.”
For all the frustration it caused, the government’s response has also galvanized southeastern San Diego. More than a dozen nonprofit groups formed an unofficial collective they called the Southeast Disaster Response Team to respond to the floods at the Jackie Robinson Y. Those people are still connected and in contact with each other. To this day, flood survivors and members of the group meet every Monday night at the Y to talk about the ongoing flood response and the survivors’ ongoing needs. The newly-budding activists have seen what they can accomplish on their own – and they are beginning to understand how to apply pressure to government to get their fair share.
Written by Will Huntsberry | December 20, 2024 | Voice of San Diego
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