Q: You were recently appointed to the Federal Emergency Management Agency National Advisory Council. What’s that all about?
A: It’s a collection of 33 individuals from across the country with varying backgrounds but all for the purpose of advising the administrator of FEMA on issues that affect it, such as emergency-response preparedness, prevention and that kind of thing.
It’s an advisory capacity so I imagine any topic of interest that we feel could be improved upon — the response capability, reviewing existing policy, partnering with private sector or developing citizen initiatives — are topics that we might recommend as an avenue to pursue.
Q: Where does the appointment come from, and how did they find you?
A: It’s an appointment by FEMA Director David Paulison, the administrator, and it’s good until 2011, which sounds like a very long time.
They posted the vacancies, and I contacted Paulison’s officials. I submitted a resume, and they took it under consideration.
Q: Your experience is pretty varied, including the U.S. Department of Justice and an emphasis there on domestic terrorism. How did you get to be such an expert?
A: I was head of Colorado public safety under Gov. Bill Owens, and in that time, from 2000 to 2003, we had these attacks on 9/11. I helped Gov. Owens organize the state to prepare for a disaster, to set up regions and look at risks and analyze the needs for the state to respond or to prepare.
My efforts were recognized by then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, and he asked me to come back and work for him.
I did and became the director of the office of domestic preparedness, which was in essence all the grants, the training and exercises for all the first responders across the nation.
Before all that, I spent 20 years with the FBI and finished as a supervisory special agent here in Denver, supervising the domestic-terrorism squad, which came to be after the Oklahoma City bombing.
Q: This doesn’t seem like the career path FBI agents think they’ll be taking when they enter the academy at Quantico. How did you get there?
A: I was a schoolteacher before I was an FBI agent, so if you really want to talk things that aren’t believable, try being a Spanish teacher and then being in the bureau.
Foreign counterintelligence is also in my background, and I was a street agent in New York City as well. As a Spanish teacher, my expertise was in that language, so the progression into terrorism came from the foreign work I did.
Q: Did you do any overseas work?
A: Yes, I went to Rome on one case.
Q: So did you wear the trenchcoat and all that spy-type stuff?
A: (chuckles) Actually, I don’t think I can tell you that.
Q: What has changed in the way the private and government sectors collaborate nowadays?
A: We had a tendency in the public sector, law enforcement in particular, of not really relying much on the private sector for input, either into what we were doing or how we were going to do it.
Since 9/11, we realized any disaster involves everyone, whether it’s man-made or a natural one. We must have everyone on the front end when looking at planning and preparedness, and include them in response and recovery.
Any first responder is the person sitting next to you at your desk. Everyone has to know how to work together as a community.
Most people have the impression that government works in a vacuum, that they never talk to or listen to anyone else. Clearly that’s not the case.
The Advisory Council is set for the administrator to hear from those who don’t live inside the Beltway in Washington, D.C.
Edited for length and clarity by David Migoya.
