(a) On or before July 1, 2019, the Office of Emergency Services, in consultation with, at minimum, telecommunications carriers, the California cable and broadband industry, radio and television broadcasters, the California State Association of Counties, the League of California Cities, the disability community, appropriate federal agencies, and the Standardized Emergency Management System Alert and Warning Specialist Committee, shall develop guidelines for alerting and warning the public of an emergency. Those guidelines shall include, at minimum, the following:

(1) Timelines for sending alerts during an emergency.

(2) Practices for sending advance warnings of an impending threat.

(3) Practices for testing, training on, and exercising a city’s, county’s, or city and county’s alert and warning system.

(4) Consideration for coordinating alerts with neighboring jurisdictions.

(5) Guidelines and protocols for redundancy and utilizing multiple forms of alerts.

(6) Guidelines and protocols for chain of command communications and accounting for staffing patterns to ensure a trained operator is always on call.

(7) Practices for effective notifications to the access and functional needs population as defined in subdivision (b) of Section 8593.3.

(8) Message templates.

(9) Common terminology.

(b) (1) The Office of Emergency Services shall provide each city, county, and city and county with a copy of the guidelines developed according to subdivision (a).

(2) Six months after the Office of Emergency Services provides the guidelines to each city, county, and city and county, the office may impose conditions upon a city’s, county’s, or city and county’s application for any voluntary grant funds that have a nexus to emergency management performance that the office administers, requiring that city, county, or city and county to operate its alert and warning activities in a manner that is consistent with the guidelines developed pursuant to subdivision (a).

(c) Within six months of making the guidelines available pursuant to subdivision (b) and at least annually, the Office of Emergency Services, through its California Specialized Training Institute, shall develop an alert and warning training. The training shall include, at minimum, information regarding the evaluation, purchase, and operation of Wireless Emergency Alert system (WEA) and the Emergency Alert System (EAS) equipment and software, including capabilities that address communications for the access and functional needs community; the technical capabilities of the WEA and EAS function within an alert system, pursuant to current Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Federal Communications Commission regulations, as amended from time to time; and the alert and warning guidelines developed in subdivision (a).

(d) The safety of local communities requires designated alerting authorities to ensure that they have multiple operators, adequate testing and training, and functional equipment and software. To the extent designated alerting authorities have difficulty acquiring or maintaining adequate alert and warning resources, they may consult with the Office of Emergency Services on best practices to achieve those goals.

(e) “Operator” means those personnel required by the designated alerting authority to transmit alert and warning messages.

(f) The Office of Emergency Services (OES) may adopt emergency regulations to implement this section. The adoption, amendment, repeal, or readoption of a regulation authorized by this section is deemed to address an emergency, for purposes of Sections 11346.1 and 11349.6 of the Government Code, and the office is hereby exempted for this purpose from the requirements of subdivision (b) of Section 11346.1 of the Government Code.

(Added by Stats. 2018, Ch. 617, Sec. 2. (SB 833) Effective January 1, 2019.)