Existing law, the California Emergency Services Act, authorizes the Governor to proclaim a state of emergency, and local officials and local governments to proclaim a local emergency, when specified conditions of disaster or extreme peril to the safety of persons and property exist. Existing law establishes the Office of Emergency Services (OES) within the office of the Governor and sets forth its powers and duties relating to responsibility over the state’s emergency and disaster response services for natural, technological, or man-made disasters and emergencies, including responsibility for activities necessary to prevent, respond to, recover from, and mitigate the effects of emergencies and disasters to people and property.

This bill would require OES to biennially convene key personnel and agencies that have emergency management roles and responsibilities to participate in tabletop exercises in which the participant’s emergency preparedness plans are discussed and evaluated under various simulated catastrophic disaster situations, as specified.

This bill would require the tabletop exercises to be designed by OES to enhance the capabilities of the participants to do various things, including to engage the communities that they each serve, as appropriate, in the development of executable strategic, operational, or tactical-level approaches to meet defined disaster response objectives.

This bill would require OES to report on each tabletop exercise it conducts to the committees on budget, the Assembly Committee on Emergency Management, and the Senate Committee on Governmental Organization by February 1, 2028, and biennially thereafter of the calendar year following each biennial simulation and evaluation. The bill would require OES to use federal preparedness grant funding to offset the state, local, and tribal government costs associated with participation in the tabletop exercises to the greatest extent possible.

The bill would require OES to, in cooperation with California Volunteers, coordinate with local Community Emergency Response Team programs to conduct community disaster preparedness training in vulnerable regions of the state, as specified, to, among other things, increase community resilience to disaster. The bill would require those regions to be identified based on data from specified sources. The bill would require a training event to include testing of community notification systems in the area and would require OES to prioritize that testing in specified communities.