Emergency preparedness committee to compile comments on Portola Valley draft safety element

The Portola Valley Emergency Preparedness Committee agreed June 4 to create an ad hoc safety-element subcommittee to collect and prioritize the committee's feedback on the town's draft safety element.

Committee members said the draft is intentionally higher level than the 2022 version and that detailed, actionable items should instead go to the town's Safety & Resilience list. The subcommittee will compile comments, aim to present or clarify priorities at the June 10 council meeting, and have material ready for the official June 30 comment deadline. The chair said a special full-committee meeting would be required if the EPC wanted to transmit comments officially as an EPC position.

Rebecca, who has worked with prior safety-element drafts, urged reviewers to use the separate multi-jurisdictional hazard mitigation plan and the town's Safety & Resilience list for detailed mitigation actions. "The safety element is a much higher level document than what everybody in town expects," she said, adding that the mitigation plan contains site-specific actions for Portola Valley.

Town staff explained the council's direction: to publish a concise safety element that meets state requirements and then treat more detailed implementation tasks as separate work items. Staff noted the state fire marshal has a statutory review window (about 90 days) and that the Department of Conservation also reviews elements; factual errors should be corrected, but policy additions have budget implications.

Members discussed process constraints under the Brown Act and agreed to use a subcommittee (within the allowable membership limits) to compile comments publicly; any official EPC transmittal would require an open meeting and vote. The committee asked interested members to review the draft now, attend the June 10 meeting for context, and prepare high-level comments that the subcommittee can refine.

The subcommittee will report back to the full committee before any formal EPC submittal; the committee's next regular meeting was set for July 2.

The committee did not take a formal roll-call vote to transmit EPC-wide comments at the June 4 meeting; it established the subcommittee and next steps.