Board earmarks funds to prepare against attacks.

Byline: County Beat by Joe Mosley The Register-Guard

TERRORISM'S THREAT REACHED into the Lane County coffers this week, when commissioners took the unusual step of pulling money from the county's reserve fund to pay for formulation of an emergency operations plan to address terrorism, bioterrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

The county has long had an emergency operations plan that addresses such general issues as chain of command within the county organization, and such specifics as management protocol for fires or hazardous material spills. Terrorism rates only a one-paragraph mention in the "hazard definitions" section of the 26-page plan.

The commissioners' action recognizes that the county is less than prepared for a terrorist attack, and carves out $53,269 for salary and office expenses of a full-time employee to create within six months "an enhanced emergency operations plan in the specific areas of terrorism, bio-terrorism and weapons of mass destruction."

The completed document will lay out steps to prepare for, prevent, respond to and recover from such attacks.

"This is a whole new thing, so they want to get somebody in there to really beef that up," says David Garnick, the county's chief budget officer.

Garnick acknowledges that it's rare for commissioners to dip into the county's reserve fund to pay for projects that come along in the middle of a budget cycle. Most such items are covered within a particular department's budget or by a county contingency fund.

But Garnick says the money was available this year from reserves, because federal payments for forest-related projects within the county have freed up money elsewhere in the county's budget - which in turn was salted away in the reserve account.

"So at the same time we're taking some money out to pay for some of these things, we're also putting back into (the reserve fund) even more," Garnick says.

The bottom line is that despite the $53,269 cost of a terrorism preparedness plan, the reserve account will grow this year by $476,000 to a total of $2.74 million.

New overall emergency plan

Also this week, commissioners adopted a new and improved emergency operations plan to deal with those workaday disasters such as floods and fires.

The plan must be updated at least every five years for county officials to remain in the good graces of state and federal emergency management bureaucracies, and Lane County's previous plan was adopted in March 1994.

"The old one remained in effect," County Administrator Bill Van Vactor says. "This is just bringing us into compliance."

The revised plan fine-tunes chain-of-command issues and identifies the functions of those in various positions. The sheriff is in charge during emergency situations, and can order anything from the clearing of a road by county public works crews to a medical assessment by public health employees.

"Most of the (plan's changes) were just what I would describe as housekeeping," Van Vactor says.

The emergency plan is administered by Ike Jensen, the county's only full-time emergency-preparedness employee, and has come into play during such events as the 1996 floods and nonevents such as the Y2K scare of Jan. 1, 2000.

Speaking of floods

The McKenzie River is restless, and apparently trying to cut itself a new course through the Cedar Creek basin and into Springfield's Thurston area, which would almost definitely qualify as an emergency - and a disaster - under the terms of any preparedness plan.

It seems that the river, during periods of high water in recent years, has eroded a pair of revetments - rip-rap embankments intended to prevent meandering - that were placed in the river during the 1950s and 1960s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The river is threatening to cut through two farms on McKenzie Highway and Weaver Road, creating a new channel into the Thurston suburbs.

"Much potential damage to homes and public facilities located in Thurston's Cedar Creek basin can be avoided if repairs can be made to the existing revetments located on these two agricultural lands in the near future," Commissioner Cindy Weeldreyer said in a memo this week to her colleagues on the board of commissioners.

Weeldreyer also had an off-beat recommendation for a round-about solution to the problem. She suggested that the county throw up its organizational hands and ask for help, which the commissioners unanimously agreed to do.

The deal is, neither the farmers nor the county have the financial wherewithal to do battle with the river - which, as it turns out, is a good thing. Because if the county can declare that it has "exceeded its ability to address this problem," it can qualify for help from the state Office of Emergency Management and the corps.

Weeldreyer already had laid groundwork for the maneuver with a call to the corps' Emergency Management Division, and an interagency meeting on the situation is expected to be scheduled next week.

"I get the impression ... if this goes into the emergency category, they'll be able to act this winter," Van Vactor says.

Lane County reporter Joe Mosley can be reached at 338-2384 or by e-mail at [e-mail]