True or false: The Dare County Control Group decides when to evacuate Hatteras Island as a hurricane approaches and when to allow re-entry when it is past.
This is false.
The county says that the Control Group does not make the decisions about evacuation and re-entry but instead functions in an information-gathering and coordination role.
True or false: The Dare County Control Group is a public body.
This may be true or it may be false.
The only thing that is perfectly clear in the law is that it is not clear whether a local emergency management control group is a public body.
The Dare County Control Group is activated during emergencies, such as hurricanes, and consists of the chairman of the Dare County Board of Commissioners or his designee, the county sheriff, the superintendent of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, and the mayors of the six municipalities in the county — Duck, Kill Devil Hills, Kitty Hawk, Manteo, Nags Head, and Southern Shores. All but the seashore superintendent are elected officials.
Here in Dare County, there has been renewed interest in the Control Group and how it operates since Hurricane Arthur passed perilously close to the Outer Banks in the early morning hours of July 4.
Some folks are still unhappy with the county’s decision to allow visitors back onto Hatteras Island, which had been under a mandatory evacuation order, at 4 p.m. on July 5, just a day after the storm.
Southern Hatteras Island had some wind damage to roofs and structures, but there was little or no storm tide. It was July 4 weekend, and the island was more than ready and eager to welcome back visitors.
The tri-villages of Rodanthe, Waves, and Salvo, on the other hand, had wind damage and had a storm surge that in places came close to the tide during Hurricane Irene in 2011.
There were some houses — it’s not clear how many — that were uninhabitable right after the storm and the villages were a stinking mess of high water, flooded swimming pools, scattered power outages, and floating propane tanks.
Some — or perhaps many — folks in those villages did not want visitors back until they could clean up the mess. Some even felt that letting visitors back so soon threatened the public’s welfare and safety.
Property management companies faced especially challenging issues getting homes in the tri-villages ready for a new wave of renters by Saturday afternoon.
In the days after the storm, the county defended its decisions, saying that the emergency had ended. The highway was repaired and open. The island had power, water, and supplies and there was no longer a public safety reason to keep visitors out.
Though county officials were sympathetic to the plight of property managers trying to get hundreds of houses cleaned and opened up on July 4 weekend, they said the fact that some houses were not ready for visitors was not reason enough to keep the island closed.
Last week, representatives from some of the companies met with county officials to express their concerns, especially about public safety issues, which some feel did not get the proper consideration when the re-entry decision was being made.
Also last week, two fire chiefs from the tri-villages appeared before the Dare County Board of Commissioners during the public comment session of the meeting to express their concerns.
Jimmy Hooper, chief of the Salvo Volunteer Fire Department, said that “99 percent” of the people he had talked to thought re-entry was premature.
He talked about “loads” of electric wires down, floating propane tanks, standing water, pool fences down, and phones not working for 911 calls.
Mike Daugherty, chief of the Chicamacomico Banks Volunteer Fire Department, spoke about similar issues. He said visitor accommodations were not “safe and clean.”
Hooper said he wanted to see Hatteras Island have two representatives on the Dare County Control Group — one from southern Hatteras and one from northern Hatteras.
As I wrote in a blog on July 11, evacuation and re-entry are always controversial and someone is always unhappy. That’s been the case in every storm since I moved here 23 years ago, and it’s not likely to change anytime soon.
However, this time there seems to be more interest in the Control Group and how it makes decisions and a desire for there to be more transparency in the decision-making process.
After Hurricane Arthur, Charles Tripp, the Area 2 coordinator for the North Carolina Emergency Task Force, told Island Free Press reporter Connie Leinbach on Ocracoke that none of the control groups across the state allow the media in their meetings and that state protocol is that all information from these meetings needs to go through a public information officer so that the public receives the same message.
I, like some others, disagree and think the control group is a public body, and its meetings and deliberations should be open to the public.
However, whether or not that’s the case is not at all clear.
“There’s a question in my mind whether or not it is a public body,” said Bobby Outten, Dare County manager and attorney.
He says there is no case law on whether emergency control groups fall under the state’s open meetings law. Even though they are not open to the media in most of the state, no one has ever challenged that.
Norma Houston, a former Dare County attorney and faculty member at the University of North Carolina’s Institute of Government in Chapel Hill, agrees with Outten on that point.
“Legally, it’s not clear as defined under the law and interpreted by the courts,” she says.
She says that no person or group has asked the courts to decide whether or not control group meetings should be public. And she said she wouldn’t even begin to guess how a court might rule.
Generally, she said, the courts interpret the public meetings law very broadly in favor of public access. However, she said, the courts also interpret the emergency powers of local governments very broadly in favor of the local governments.
Outten says he feels that making meetings public would be problematic because of their emergency nature and problems with public notifications.
And even though most members of the control group are elected officials that in itself, does not make it a public body.
However, over and above that, he argues that “there is no collective control group authority.”
While the state’s General Statute 166A says it is the responsibility of local
government to organize and plan for the protection of life and property in an emergency or disaster, the law does not specifically require the establishment of a control group.
Again, Houston agrees that in deciding whether meetings should be public, the court would look at the decision-making process of the control group.
“Is it making binding decisions?” she asks. “Or is it (conducting discussions) that individual officials can take back and make their own decision?”
Outten says that the control group does not make decisions about evacuation and re-entry.
Instead, he says, the group plays an advisory role, gathering information and coordinating. The county board chairman and the mayors make their own decisions for their jurisdictions. They are the only ones who can legally decide such issues as evacuation, re-entry, curfew, or liquor sales.
The rest of us may have a different impression about the role of the Dare County Control Group and its powers.
And we would get that impression from the county’s own media releases during emergencies.
For example, take this release from Wednesday, July 2, during Hurricane Arthur:
“The Dare County Control Group has issued a mandatory evacuation order for residents and visitors on Hatteras Island beginning at 5 a.m. Thursday.”
Later, the release says that the Dare County Control Group is “the decision making body for Emergency Management.”
However, according to Outten, it is actually the chairman of the Board of Commissioners — who has been delegated by the other board members — who makes the decision for unincorporated Dare County, including Hatteras Island.
Outten notes that the chairman does not make that decision in a vacuum but after consultation with board members, public officials, utilities, members of the business community, and others.
For now, the dispute about whether or not public safety was duly considered before allowing visitors back should probably be chalked up to some level of miscommunication.
One suggestion to remedy that is to re-activate a Hatteras Island support group, which is still included in the county’s 2007 Emergency Management Plan.
The plan says:
“Dare County has established a Support EOC on Hatteras Island to enhance the flow of information to the Dare County Emergency Operations Center and back to the residents of Hatteras Island. This facility is staffed by support personnel from key agencies on Hatteras Island under the guidance of the Hatteras Island Commissioner. Control remains under Dare County.”
Outten says a Hatteras Island group is no longer needed because new technologies allow those who once had to gather together to communicate with Manteo to be in touch by phones or radios from wherever they are located.
County officials, he said, are constantly striving to improve the evacuation and re-entry process.
After hearing the latest round of complaints, Outten and others are looking at how individual villages on Hatteras Island might remain closed to the public, while others are opened.
That was pretty easy to do after Hurricane Isabel in 2003 cut an inlet just east of Hatteras village, since that village is the southernmost on the island.
It will be more difficult in the tri-villages, the northernmost villages that visitors must pass through to get to the rest of the island.
Perhaps, though, it can be done. That would be a good thing.
Meanwhile, going forward, making the Dare County Control Group meetings public would definitely make the process more transparent.
It would be an improvement over what we now have and perhaps leave fewer folks unhappy about the decision — fewer but probably not all.
FOR MORE INFORMATION.
Click here to read the 2007 Dare County Emergency Management Plan.
