The City of Austin's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (HSEM) serves as the coordinating focal point for preparedness, response, recovery, and education in an emergency or disaster that disrupts the community. Carrying out this task requires this office to ensure all City departments and partner agencies in the region are prepared to respond to a disaster and ready to work together. Each year we want to ensure that we are providing training to these agencies to help us be a more disaster prepared and resilient community.

Our target for this metric is to have 67% of partner agencies participate in training or exercises with our office. In 2018 we identified 98 agencies we consider partners, 100 in 2019, 101 in 2020, 103 in 2021, and 111 in 2022. Of the 111 partner agencies we have engaged 104 in trainings and exercises, for a 94% engagement rate. These agencies include other City of Austin departments, other governments in the region, school districts, colleges and universities, state and federal agencies, and non-governmental organizations that are active in disasters. In all the years we have been measuring this data we have met our target of providing training or having partner agencies participating in exercises.

For 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 we met our goal. For 2022, the majority of our partners worked with us during Winter Storm Brandon, the Boil Water Notice, the Spring Festival Season, and continued to work with us to respond to COVID-19 and Monkey Pox. In addition, we engaged with new Federal agencies, as well as local, regional, and state partners to conduct full scale exercise named Cobalt Magnet 22.

Each year HSEM provides training an exercise opportunities on a variety of hazards in the community to City of Austin Departments, other local governments agencies, school districts, state partners, NGOs, and other organizations that help during disasters. This metric also includes disasters we have responded to in the community. The State of Texas considers an emergency operations center activation as a training for their metrics and we do as well. This means that in 2022, all agencies that responded to any incident, like the Colorado River Flood and/or the boil water notice, are considered to have participated in training or exercises with us.