Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Emergency Managers As Change Agents, Christine G. Springer

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Publications

Since 2001, FEMA and others have been defining and refining competencies for emergency management professionals. In so doing, they have addressed directly and indirectly the qualities of leaders. We know that leadership is not a person or a position. It is a complex relationship between people, based on trust, obligation, commitment, emotion, and a shared vision of the good. We also know that transformational or change-based leadership has become an organizational necessity given the fact that emergency management as a profession is just now coming into its own and emergency management jobs are not traditional in terms of the how, …

P.A. In The Era Of Competitive Sourcing: Quality, Qualitatively, M. Ernita Joaquin

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Publications

Among President George W. Bush's management initiatives, competitive sourcing was the most complex, most challenging, and most politicized, admitted Angela Styles, chief of procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in 2002.

Styles had left OMB when I started my research but behind her the battle raged on how to subject thousands of federal commercial jobs for public private competition under the rules of Circular A-76 and according to performance criteria set by the OMB Scorecard.

In competitive sourcing, if contractors can perform the job more efficiently than the govemment team, the work is outsourced and the …

Taking The Time To Rebuild Trust In Government, Christine G. Springer

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Publications

The author reflects on the importance of trust. She stated that trust is more significant than ever to public managers as trust in the government ebbs. It is important to public managers because it directly impacts the speed and cost of getting things done. Moreover, she considers command and control management and downsizing and reengineering as threats to any trust infrastructure.

Uncertainty, Climate Change And Nuclear Power, David M. Hassenzahl

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Publications

Long time-horizon environmental risks with potential for global impacts have increased in visibility over the past several decades. Such issues as climate change, the nuclear fuel cycle, persistent synthetic chemicals, and stratospheric ozone depletion share some characteristics, including intergenerational impacts, strongly decoupled incidence of risks and benefits, substantial decision stakes and extreme uncertainty. What is not well understood are the similarities and differences among sources and implications of uncertainty among these global environmental threats, especially those associate with current and future human behavior. This describes the uncertainties associated with managing two global concerns: the nuclear (fission) fuel cycle and anthropogenic …

Evaluation Of The Hud Elder Cottage Housing Opportunity (Echo) Program, C Theodore Koebel, Julia Beamish, Karen A. Danielsen, Virginia Polytechnic Institute And State University

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Publications

ECHO housing was introduced in the United States in the 1980s based on a program started in Australia in 1975. An ECHO unit is a small house in which an elderly person resides and which is placed near the home of a host (either relatives or close friends of the elderly person). The purpose of this arrangement is to make it convenient and efficient for the occupants of the host family dwelling to provide assistance to the elderly person residing in the smaller ECHO house.

Although ECHO housing provides a means for keeping an elderly resident close to family and …

Clark County Gis Vulnerability Assessment Project: Looking Ahead, Designing Mitigation, And Managing Uncertainty, David M. Hassenzahl

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Publications

After reviewing the progress of the Clark County GIS Vulnerability Project to date, it appears to me that now is an appropriate time to look to the end of the project, and use that to shape the next several steps. The NOAA guidelines may still have use, but it is more important that the project make progress than that it meet particular prescriptive steps.

Clark County Pre-Disaster Mitigation Project: Suggestions For Project Initiation, David M. Hassenzahl

Public Policy and Leadership Faculty Publications

Attention to several organizational issues will facilitate the efforts of the Clark County regional Pre-Disaster Mitigation project. Key considerations include defining terms efficiently, establishing and maintaining a clear timeline, determining rules for acceptability of new information, determining the nature and boundaries of concerns to be addressed, evaluating a full range of mitigation options, considering how to manage uncertainty, and ensuring stakeholder buy-in and participation. The NOAA seven-step process should serve as an operational template. Project participants should anticipate substantial uncertainty, and consider probabilistic methods (e.g. Monte Carlo analysis) for coping with uncertainty within a GIS framework.