1:15pm | Assemblywoman Bonnie Lowenthal, D-Long Beach, has been tapped to head up the state’s Joint Legislative Committee on Emergency Management.
Lowenthal was named the 14-member committee’s chair on July 6. The panel oversees the state’s emergency and disaster preparations and response and is comprised of seven members of the state Assembly and seven members of the state Senate.
“This is an important responsibility” Lowenthal said in a statement. “I take it very seriously.”
The Joint Legislative Committee on Emergency Management grew out of a gubernatorial investigation into the handling of the wildfire season of 2003. A blue ribbon commission examining the state’s efforts recommended that the Legislature create a panel specifically for the purpose of overseeing emergency response, according to information provided by staffers in the 54th Assembly District office in Sacramento.
The Long Beach assemblywoman said she intends to find out whether several years of budget cuts have diminished the state’s emergency-response capacity.
“We’ve been cutting spending since my first day in Sacramento. It had to be done, and there was no way around it,” Lowenthal said. “Now we have to go back and make sure that our emergency plans still make sense and that they don’t rely on resources we no longer have.”
Lowenthal will chair the committee for the remainder of the 2011-2012 legislative session.
It was Lowenthal who in March introduced an Assembly concurrent resolution calling for the joint legislative committee’s reactivation through Nov. 30.