In July 2016, the City of Cleveland and the Greater Cleveland community hosted the 2016 Republican National Convention (RNC). It was the first National Special Security Event (NSSE) ever held in Ohio. The Cuyahoga County Office of Emergency Management supported the City of Cleveland throughout the two-year planning process and the one-week event. Overall, it went pretty well, and while we can’t take credit for the good behavior of demonstrators and the excellent weather, we did learn a few things that might help other emergency managers in similar circumstances.
Here are five key things we learned that we wish we had known at the start of the process:
1. Everybody wants to help
Everyone in emergency management knows that spontaneous volunteers are a huge part of managing disasters. The same impulse drives people and agencies to want to help during large-scale scheduled events, including National Special Security Events (NSSE). Throughout the RNC’s two-year planning period we received many more offers of assistance from individuals and agencies than we could possibly accept. In the end, 54 different agencies provided staffing support which allowed us to fill all essential seats in our EOC for the duration of the convention.
2. This is your event, not the federal government’s
At the start of the planning process we looked to federal agencies for guidance and assistance. But over time we realized that the federal government’s role was limited, while ours was not. Eventually, we learned that federal officials were not going to take over the event. They handled their specific responsibilities but they expected us to manage the overall event.
3. Everybody has questions
If you do not conduct events like this routinely, everyone in town will want to know how it will affect them and their organization. You cannot stop the questions so you need to create a place where people can go to get accurate information. You can use a website, a social media site, a telephone information line, or a staffed information desk at the County headquarters, but you need to provide a place for people to find out about road closures, traffic impacts, possible threats, community planning, and a thousand other details. Otherwise, you will be answering the same questions every day for a year.
4. Nobody has answers
Well, nobody has all the answers. Planning for an event of this scale will be fragmented among dozens of federal, state, county, city, and regional agencies. No one agency, and certainly no one person, can possibly keep track of everything. As a result, you will need to dig aggressively for any information that you need. There will be no one-stop shop where you can go to coordinate your efforts with everyone else’s and find critical information. The planning stovepipes – and there are dozens – will never merge.
5. You know how to do this
You may never have planned a national political nominating convention before, but you know how to write a plan and how to prepare for a disaster or a large-scale special event. It was reassuring to us when we realized that no one was going to ask us to do anything that we didn’t already know how to do.
September 30, 2016