The City of Janesville is prepared to operate under an emergency operations plan, city leaders say.
This week, city leaders practiced running an emergency operations center – a room in which essential city staff can make decisions on how to allocate public resources during a crisis.
“A lot of our everyday regular stuff gets pushed to the side if it’s not essential”, said Janesville’s Management Information Specialist Molly Nolte. “We focus on things that are essential such as police, fire, sanitation and engineering. The things that people really truly need on a daily basis.”
Nolte says the center itself has existed for years, but city leaders, like City Manager Mark Freitag and Fire Chief Ernie Rhodes, have been working on a plan specific to COVID-19 for the last several weeks.