Scotts Valley City Council · Wednesday, October 7, 2026, 6:00 PM · Item 1 · REGULAR AGENDA
Council to take up emergency preparedness and winter storm readiness
In plain English
City staff is giving the Council an update on winter storm and emergency preparedness. On the morning of October 7, staff will attend a regional briefing hosted by the Santa Cruz County Office of Response, Recovery & Resilience with the National Weather Service about the weather outlook under the current El Niño pattern, and will report back verbally at the evening Council meeting. Staff is also building a new Emergency Preparedness section on the City website that gathers preparedness links in one place and posts the City's 2024 Emergency Operations Plan with an explanation of what it is. The recommendation is for Council to receive the update, give input on the webpage, and promote a free online preparedness workshop on October 14.
Scotts Valley residents heading into storm season would get a single City web page pointing them to CruzAware alerts, their evacuation zone, and flood, wildfire, earthquake and power outage preparation, plus a free Zoom workshop with Spanish interpretation on October 14 at 5:00 p.m.
Key facts
- Staff will attend an Operational Area briefing on October 7 hosted by the Santa Cruz County Office of Response, Recovery & Resilience (OR3) with the National Weather Service, and report updates verbally at that evening's Council meeting.
- The planned webpage will cover CruzAware alert sign-up, evacuation zones, household emergency plans, supply kits, wildfire, flood and storm, earthquake, power outages, evacuation information, access and functional needs, and local emergency resources.
- Links will go to partner agencies including Santa Cruz County OR3, Scotts Valley Fire Protection District, Cal OES, FEMA, PG&E, 211 Santa Cruz County, and the National Weather Service.
- The City's 2024 Emergency Operations Plan will be posted with context explaining it is a government operations document, not a step-by-step guide for residents.
- The Stay Ready Emergency Preparedness Workshop is Wednesday, October 14 at 5:00 p.m. via Zoom, presented by the Housing Authority of the County of Santa Cruz with OR3, with live Spanish interpretation; registration at https://hacosantacruz.org/stayready/.
- Fiscal impact: none. The webpage will be developed and maintained by City staff using existing resources.
Reasons to support
- Residents currently have to hunt across county, state and federal sites; one City page would collect alert sign-up, evacuation zone lookup and storm, fire and earthquake guidance in a single place.
- The page costs nothing new, since staff will build and maintain it with existing resources and mostly link to material already maintained by agencies like OR3, Cal OES, FEMA and PG&E.
- Posting the 2024 Emergency Operations Plan with an explanation clears up a common confusion, by distinguishing how City government coordinates a disaster response from what households should actually do before and during an emergency.
Reasons to oppose or change it
- Because the page mainly links out to other agencies' websites, it adds a step rather than new local guidance, and the quality of the information depends on partners keeping their own pages current.
- Maintaining the page with existing staff resources means staff time is drawn from other work, and an outdated preparedness page could mislead residents during a storm.
- The October 14 workshop is Zoom-only, which may not reach residents without reliable internet or those most likely to need help during a power outage.
Official wording
Emergency Preparedness and Winter Readiness
Summary written by claude-opus-5 from the agenda and the Staff report (agenda packet, pages 149-150). It can contain mistakes. The official documents govern.