Montana Disaster and Emergency Services said it has seen 60% staff turnover in the two years since the Yellowstone River flood and asked lawmakers Tuesday for 14 more full-time employees.

Administrator for the Disaster and Emergency Services Division Delila Bruno told legislators the staff losses are in part due to burnout, and most often they lose employees to the private sector after training them.

Legislators are looking into disaster and emergency service recovery response in Montana as part of a study bill passed in the last legislative session. Lawmakers in a subcommittee of the State Administration and Veterans’ Affairs Interim Committee will eventually have to draft recommendations for how to improve emergency response in the state.

Department suggestions beyond staff increases included enhancing recovery coordination between agencies pre-disaster, training state experts to provide damage assessments to reduce reliance on federal partners, developing a statewide debris management plan and increasing staffing to assist individual assistance post-disaster.

In June of 2022, the Yellowstone River flooded in a 500-year event with nearly 10 inches of rain and snowmelt in 24 hours, destroying homes and structures along the river and sections of northern roads leading into Yellowstone National Park from gateway towns. The event required a massive recovery effort.

In the past 12 years, Montana has made 50 statewide disaster declarations and 15 federal declarations, including the 2022 flood, Bruno said. The recovery team, which works to restore a community to pre-disaster conditions, has six open disasters it is working on – half of which are floods.

She said federal resources for recovery efforts significantly outweigh what’s available at the state and local level. It would be better to reduce the reliance on the federal government to get communities back on their feet, she said, and may allow for a faster response.

Rep. Kelly Kortum, D-Bozeman, proposed writing a bill to provide emergency services with the additional 14 staff members, but other lawmakers shot the idea down as premature and wanted to hear from other stakeholders first.

Bruno said in an example of how the department loses staff, if they trained someone up to be a floodplain manager, then they suddenly became incredibly marketable for disaster firms for nationwide projects.

“They pay way more than we do,” Bruno said. “That’s very, very common to see people get gobbled up in the private sector and work nationally.”

The legislature gave staff raises during the last legislative session, which Bruno said has been a huge help in retention. She said getting more employees to share in the workload could also help with burnout.

Bruno said there also needs to be an emphasis on hiring for different skill sets in the division, and said they need more grant writers and people who understand local policies.

“What is appealing to a lot of emergency managers that we have apply for these positions is that they still associate the work with kind of a first-responder type work,” she said.

She said the division is looking to develop a certification program to train people on the recovery aspect of the job and the more administrative side of the division, which she said is the bulk of their work, though there are opportunities for first responders as well.

“We want to make sure that whether you’re at the local level or you’re at the state level, when you take a job with disaster emergency services, it’s clear what your what your job really is,” she said.

Bruno said Montana needs to increase support for local communities to be able to respond and recover from disasters.

“We know we need more training at both the state and local levels,” she said. “We do know that Montana communities do a better job when they have the resources at their fingertips.”

The SAVA sub-committee did not take action Tuesday, but will meet with the full interim committee on May 23.

Nicole Girten is a reporter for the Daily Montanan, a nonprofit newsroom. 

A Pennsylvania man was convicted in the 2019 kidnapping and death of a woman whom he lured into traveling with him to Southern Nevada and later tied her to a signpost, taped her mouth and nose and watched her die from asphyxiation.

John Matthew Chapman, 44, was found guilty by a jury Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas of one count of kidnapping resulting in death. He is set to be sentenced on Aug. 24, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

Chapman faces a maximum sentence of life in prison, prosecutors stated in a news release.

Based on court documents and evidence presented during Chapman’s eight-day trial, on Nov. 14, 2019, police in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, conducted a welfare check on the victim at the request of a friend, according to prosecutors.

The friend had not seen the victim for about two months but had observed a man they believed to be her boyfriend, Chapman, entering and leaving the victim’s home, prosecutors said.

While searching the victim’s residence, “officers found identification cards with Chapman’s name and photograph, the victim’s cellular telephone, multiple zip ties, and a roll of duct tape,” prosecutors said in the release.

Detectives arrested Chapman the following day, and during an interview, he admitted to driving the victim from Bethel Park to Las Vegas and misleading her into believing the trip was a vacation and that they might buy a residence in Las Vegas, according to prosecutors.

“Chapman, however, had planned to kill the victim before their departure to Nevada,” prosecutors stated in the release.

Chapman admitted to investigators that he drove the victim to the desert in Lincoln County and under the pretext of a bondage photo shoot, bound the victim’s hands and feet with plastic zip ties and tied her to a signpost.

“Then he applied duct tape to her mouth and nose and watched her die from asphyxiation,” prosecutors stated.

The joint investigation, involving the FBI in Las Vegas, the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office and Bethel Park police, found that Chapman had returned to Pennsylvania and posed as the victim, including using her Facebook messenger account, living in her residence and using her money after her death, they said.

Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0382. Follow him @JeffBurbank2 on X.

New Mexico labor announced a legal settlement that resolves longstanding accusations of unpaid wages against a restaurant business in northwestern New Mexico.

The Workforce Solutions Department said in a news release that 505 Burgers Farmington LLC has agreed to pay out $100,000 to resolve claims by two former employees that they received only a small portion of the wages they were due for more than 3,000 hours of work, including overtime.

The settlement resolves a complaint originally filed in 2017 by Francisco and Sandra Olivas with the state labor relations division that wound its way through an administrative investigation before going to trial in 2022. The New Mexico Court of Appeals rejected a challenge by the employer before a final settlement was reached.

505 Burgers owner Morgan Newsom declined to comment on the settlement.

Workforce Solutions Secretary Sarita Nair said her agency strives to provide education and training to businesses to ensure employees are paid fairly.

“But when prevention does not work, our capable team will pursue these cases for workers, no matter how long it takes,” she said in a statement.

New Mexico workplace regulators have struggled in the past to keep pace with complaints of alleged wage theft linked to enforcement of the state’s minimum wage law.

The state labor relations division said it collected more than $689,000 during the 12-month period ending in June 2023 for New Mexico workers claiming underpayment or nonpayment of wages. Most of the complaints have raised allegations of unpaid overtime, failure to pay minimum wage and an employer withholding a final paycheck.

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