The Bexar County Commissioners Court voted unanimously to form the Suburban Cities Emergency Management Advisory Committee during its Jan. 7 meeting.

The big picture

The creation of the committee allows the Bexar County Office of Emergency Management to provide all suburban cities—that are within the Bexar County’s Emergency Management Program—a collaborative forum dedicated to proactive planning and readiness for emergency management activities throughout the county.

The core functions of the SCEMAC are:
  • Emergency planning
  • Mitigation planning
  • Response inventory/asset management
  • Homeland security grant management
  • Incident/event response
  • Volunteer management
  • Public outreach and emergency alerting
  • Mass care
  • Disaster recovery
  • Stakeholder/partner training and exercises
The SCEMAC includes municipalities who have selected BCOEM as their designated emergency management program and have appointed a Bexar County Emergency Management Coordinator through the Texas Division of Emergency Management Form 147 process.

Additionally, each municipality must complete four additional steps in order to participate.


Participating municipalities must:
  • Adopt the Bexar County Emergency Management Plan, which provides for disaster mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.
  • Adopt the National Incident Management Systems as the standard incident management system.
  • Adopt the Incident Command System as its organizational system.
  • Enter into a joint resolution with Bexar County to create joint emergency management programs and plans.
The committee will be composed of:
  • A Bexar County emergency management coordinator
  • A Bexar County emergency management deputy chief
  • A city mayor or appointee from each participating suburban city
BCOEM personnel will be responsible for developing a meeting agenda, scheduling meetings, facilitating meetings, developing meeting minutes, documentation storage and overall communication to the committee. According to county documents, these additional responsibilities will not have any additional fiscal impact to the county’s overall budget.