Annual Report - County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania

County GovernanceCommitteeTOGETHER, WE WORKTO PROTECT OURNEIGHBORHOODSAND NEIGHBORSIt has been my pleasure to servethis year as Chair of CCAP’sCounty Governance Committee. Itis fitting to note that in our 125thanniversary year, the County GovernanceCommittee is, along with Resolutions,CCAP’s oldest committee, the directdescendant of our original LegislativeCommittee. Governance is the catch-all,and because we work on all of the legislationthat is not under another committee’sjurisdiction, the members of our committeehave to work through a broad range ofissues.Over the last several years, our greatestwork load is emergency managementissues. This year, we are beginning work,along with PEMA and our emergency providers,on a comprehensive review of theentirety of the Public Safety EmergencyTelephone Act. While our superficial concernis the adequacy of funding – the allowablesubscriber rates of about $1 havenot changed since the law’s enactment in1990 – it is really a much larger task thatinvolves merging the three main fundingstreams and three planning regimens intoa single, understandable whole. We areproud of what counties have done to bringthis important service to all Pennsylvaniansbut, as we learned over the yearsas we dealt with the advent of wirelessphones, and VoIP, we know we have toadapt to new technologies. So we anticipatethat our rewrite will have to grapplewith next generation technologies – howdo we incorporate communications comingfrom increasingly common sourceslike texting, streaming video, and socialmedia? We deal with peripheral issues aswell; most recently, we achieved legislationto improve collections from prepaidwireless, and we are now working on legislationto better balance the privacy rightsof 911 callers against the public need foraccountability within our 911 systems.An integral part of our emergency managementoperations are communications,and we trying to help our membership sortout its requirements and options regardingnarrow banding, on the state radio systemand on the shift to digital communications.A breakout session at the AnnualConference is part of this effort.We also continue to work with PEMA onits full rewrite of Title 35, the EmergencyManagement Code. The draft, underdevelopment for several years, wouldmean significant structural changes in howemergency management functions arecarried out and, while many of our commentshave been taken into account, thereremain several issues, particularly shiftsin authority and responsibility amongstate, county, and municipal partners, thatneed to be worked out. An intermediateimprovement was legislation to providefor statewide mutual aid, where we sat onPEMA’s implementation committee.A priority which was the quintessentialthrill of victory and agony of defeat wasour achievement of passage last year oflegislation to give counties the option toabolish the office of jury commissioner,20 Annual Report 2011 County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania