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Office of Emergency Management
Emergency management office positions reclassified
By ZenT.C. Zheng - Houston Chronicle, Jan. 13, 2009
Fort Bend leaders on Jan. 13 raised the levels of all positions at the county’s emergency management office with higher salaries to reflect increased duties and to help retain and attract personnel.
In a reclassification of the office’s eight positions, Commissioners Court elevated emergency management coordinator Jeff Braun to executive manager, converted a part-time clerk to full time, adjusted job titles of others and put all employees on a higher compensation level.
Braun will continue to hold the second top position of the office under County Judge Bob Hebert, who is the director of emergency management.
As executive manager, Braun had his salary increased to $90,014 from $84,648. Annual salary adjustments for the entire office total just under $35,000, Hebert said."It’s long overdue. Jeff has been functioning as an executive manager for at least the last two years," Hebert said. "The role of the entire office has tremendously expanded. But we are still dealing with job descriptions under the previous county judge."
Braun started as the county’s emergency management coordinator on Dec. 1, 2003, when the department had two full-time employees and two part-time positions.
"Over the five years that I have been here, because of a lot of the requirements of Homeland Security and the nature of our department, we have increased the workload on staff and increased the need for more experienced people. The job descriptions we had before just didn’t make it," Braun said.
Employee departures have been an issue, including a planning coordinator’s position that has had frequent turnovers, Braun said.
During Hurricane Ike, two employees resigned after one accepted a job with the city of Houston and the other with Harris County.
"They are doing pretty much the same thing we do but for higher pay," said Braun, whose assistant took a job at the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Office in October. Braun said his department was jokingly
described as a training academy that produces emergency management personnel for other agencies.
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