Holding a Successful Post-Disaster Town Hall Meeting: The Basics for Top Level Local Leaders
Best Practices for Local Leaders
A post-disaster town hall meeting is one of the first and most important opportunities for a top level local leader – such as a mayor, chief elected official, city or town manager, or county administrator – to update the community on the status of recovery, and set the tone for the entire recovery process. Emotions will be running high; community members will demand answers on when they can get back into their homes and when their lives will return to normal. Providing the reassurance your community should receive in a post-disaster town hall meeting requires careful planning and coordination both internally and with external state and federal representatives.
Regardless of the post-disaster scenario, localities should hold a town hall meeting no later than a week to two weeks after rescue efforts are complete; after this time FEMA will have setup their disaster centers and started accepting applications. Holding the town hall meeting earlier on in the process prevents problems that can arise when FEMA representatives begin communicating with property owners — often prior to coordinating their message with that of the locality’s.
“One of our most important successes was orchestrating a town hall meeting in the weeks after our rescue efforts were complete,” says Suzonne Cowart, director of finance for the City of Central, which suffered from catastrophic flooding in August 2016. “We decided to hold the town hall meeting to disseminate as much information as we could to the citizens to help them deal with their individual situations.”
In fact, for communities participating in HUD’s Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program, it’s a legal requirement to hold a public hearing, typically in the form of a town hall meeting.
In addition to the top level local official, other presenters at a post disaster town hall meeting typically include the incident commander, a FEMA and/or HUD representative and a representative from your regional state emergency management agency. Leading up to and throughout the post-disaster town hall meeting, it’s crucial that you keep communication, collaboration and cooperation at the forefront of your interactions with these stakeholders – even when tension rises, don’t lose sight of the fact that you all are working towards the same goal.
Preparing for the Town Hall Meeting
Before the town hall meeting, a top level local leader will be designated to head the meeting. This person will work with incident command – typically the emergency manager – to decide what information should be communicated to the public at the post-disaster town hall meeting. You want your message to be proactive, not reactive – show the community that their local leaders have thought the recovery plan through and provide the specifics on what you have already done and what you have planned.
When planning for the meeting, think about the questions your constituents will likely ask and prepare answers to the extent possible. “Questions ranged from FEMA mobile housing units, to FEMA grants and assistance and various information – some of it was even tax related,” recalls Cowart. “A lot of residents had questions about getting a mobile housing unit on their property, and whether or not they could have them in a flood zone.”
Community members will become frustrated if their questions are not answered; however, it is always better to answer honestly with “I don’t know,” rather than to provide them with inaccurate information. Likewise, know the limits on the information you can accurately provide when it comes to issues like FEMA funding disbursement and flood insurance, and invite representatives from external agencies to provide their expertise at the town hall meeting.
Once you’ve decided on the message you intend to send to the public, it’s important to ensure that any external representatives, particularly from FEMA and HUD, align their message with the locality’s priorities and disaster recovery approach. You want your FEMA and HUD representatives to take on a supportive role, not an adversarial position during the town hall meeting.
Localities often overlook the communication that needs to occur with FEMA and HUD representatives prior to the town hall meeting. It’s recommended that you bring all agencies who will be present at the meeting together for a tabletop exercise to give the local leader an opportunity to give feedback to FEMA, HUD and other state and federal representatives. The locality’s message should come first and foremost; you and your staff know your constituents, and likewise the community is more apt to follow the direction of their local leaders.
“Make sure that the public information officer or a local leader speaks with any FEMA or HUD representatives in advance to ensure their message will support the locality’s approach to recovery,” says Amanda Moody, Director of Economic Development for the City of Central. “External representatives should not be allowed to communicate with constituents in the town hall meeting before this had been done.”
It’s also important to coordinate with your state representative, who will likely give an update on the equipment currently being provided from the state, and their plans for future assistance. In some scenarios, a representative from the Small Business Association (SBA), or the state department of public works or transportation may also give an update if something like debris removal or state road closures are at issue. In Central, for instance, the post-disaster town hall meeting included representatives from FEMA, the Small Business Association (SBA) and the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Management (GOHSEP).
Notifying the Community
When notifying the community of the meeting, you should provide the time, location and details of who will be presenting, in addition to what representatives will be available at the conclusion of the meeting to answer questions on an individual basis.
You can work with incident command’s designated public information officer to notify the community of the meeting through the local media and social media. If power is not yet restored, you may also need to rely on social media or other live streaming platforms to stream the meeting to the community. If your locality has live streaming equipment, make sure it is in place at the meeting. However, if you’ve never live streamed, Facebook’s live streaming feature is an easy solution that can be implemented quickly with just a smart phone.
See our step-by-step instructions below for live streaming via the Facebook iOS or Android app, or check out this brief tutorial video. The public information officer is typically responsible for facilitating the live stream.
You can also rely on local organizations, such as neighborhood or homeowner associations to help notify the community on the town hall meeting. You should build relationships with the leaders of these organizations prior to a disaster, and maintain an accurate list of contact information for each organization’s leadership group, officers and board of directors.
During the Meeting
Meetings can be focused on a single topic or a range of topics, from insurance, FEMA and CDBG-DR applications to restoring infrastructure and debris removal. The local leader designated to head the meeting, however, will likely be responsible for opening the meeting and giving the initial update on disaster recovery efforts. Although others will speak, you will facilitate the meeting, and also lead the question and answer session at the conclusion of the meeting. Click here to download a post-disaster town hall meeting agenda template, and here for press releases and agendas used by other localities.
During the town hall meeting, it is important that you be compassionate and honest; residents are looking for the “human touch” to reassure them that their lives will return to normal. Be certain to offer sympathy, but don’t make promises. Offer statements such as, “We are attempting to complete four houses a week, but we can’t guarantee that it will happen” to make sure you are setting reasonable expectations. Your goal is to calm the public and reassure your constituents that over time, the community will return to a sense of normalcy and life will return to its pre-disaster state.
Don’t forget to take your own emotions into consideration. Be prepared for criticism and personally-directed comments. A post-disaster town hall meeting is not a typical town hall meeting, and distressed residents will take their frustrations with the recovery process out on their local leaders. Keep in mind that it’s the community’s first opportunity to provide feedback to their local leaders.
After the Meeting
After the meeting concludes, you should work with the public information officer to record a summary and highlights of the meeting. Likewise, the top level local official typically gives an interview to local news stations. Make sure to coordinate with your public information officer prior to giving an interview to get the most up-to-date and accurate information. The media interview after the initial post-disaster town hall meeting is an important opportunity to ensure the media sends a message that is representative of local government’s recovery efforts and goals. You want to be purveyor of information to the media; if not, the media will seek other, less reliable sources.
It’s also recommended that you work with your public information officer to send a weekly or bi-weekly update throughout disaster recovery to keep the community up to speed on the status of recovery.
Live Streaming from a Smart Phone
- Log into the Facebook App using your locality’s Facebook account information.
- Once on the home screen, tap, “What’s on your mind,” at the top of your News Feed.
- Next, click on “live stream” from the drop-down menu that appears. Your camera will open, but the video will not yet be streaming live.
- You can adjust who can view the video by clicking “only me.” A menu of privacy settings will then appear. You should click “public” to make it available to the largest amount of community members. Click “done” in the top right hand corner to return to the camera.
- You can also include a description of your video by clicking where it says “Describe your live video…” and simply typing your description. This is a good place to include that a FEMA and/or HUD representative will be speaking about the application process.
- You will then ensure your phone’s camera is facing in the right direction by clicking on the icon in the top right hand corner with two arrows.
- To begin streaming, hit the blue “Go Live” button in the bottom right hand corner. Note that while broadcasting, you can notify users to submit their questions by commenting on the video. The comments will appear at the bottom of the screen, and you can then read these questions to the presenters to have them address viewers’ concerns.
- When the meeting is over, click “Finish” to end the broadcast. The video will stay on your locality’s Facebook page as a video post, allowing the community to view the post after live stream ends.
Click here for a brief tutorial video on how to use Facebook’s live streaming future.
In August 2016, over seven trillion gallons of rain fell in a 48-hour period in the city of Central, Louisiana, swallowing the city – and most of southern Louisiana – in more than four feet of water, and in some places up to six feet. The City of Central, which is located at the confluence of the Amite and Comite rivers, was still recovering from flash flooding that had occurred earlier in the year when the August flooding occurred.
More than 5,000 homes in the city sustained “substantial damage,” meaning that the damage was estimated to cost 50 percent or more of the structure’s value to repair. In total, 25,000 of the 27,000 residents of Central were impacted by the flood. While homeowners took a big hit from the storm, fewer than 50 businesses in Central were damaged.
“If this happens again, we’ll have to rethink everything,” says Kathi Cowen, IBTS/Central’s Floodplain Manager and GIS Specialist. “We hope we won’t see something of this scale again in our lifetimes.”
At the time of the flood, 75 percent of Central was in the 100-year flood zone, where there is a 1 percent chance of flooding each year and residents are required to carry private flood insurance. Yet 90 percent of the houses and businesses in the city sustained flood damage as a result of the August 2016 flooding, extrapolating the costs of damage due to the nearly 2,000 homes that did not have and were not required to have flood insurance.
The flood was the fourth most costly and the largest since Hurricane Sandy. In total, the flood damaged 55,000 southern Louisiana homes, and had initial damage costs estimated at $8.7 billion.