New state disaster chief in eye of first major storm

TALLAHASSEE — Get a plan! Florida tells us every hurricane season.

Jared Moskowitz had a plan. It was to go to Congress, not prepare for treacherous storms.

But then fate intervened. Improbably, Moskowitz is now the director of the state Division of Emergency Management. He faces his first major test as Hurricane Dorian bears down on a storm-weary peninsula over Labor Day weekend.

“I didn’t grow up wanting to be emergency management director,” Moskowitz said.

Moskowitz, 38, is a former state legislator from Coral Springs and the most prominent Democrat in the young administration of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. In case anyone misses the point, in Moskowitz’s office at the Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee are several framed photos of him with Bill and Hillary Clinton.

He’s hardly the first Democrat to work for a Republican. His predecessor, Craig Fugate, who set the standard for hurricane readiness, worked for Jeb Bush before he ran FEMA for President Obama. Besides, when people are desperate for ice and electricity, nobody cares about party labels.

Moskowitz, a graduate of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, was elected Parkland city commissioner at age 25 and was a vocal supporter of the gun law changes and mental health reforms after last year’s tragedy that claimed 17 lives at his alma mater.

Parkland, followed by visits to the Panhandle after Hurricane Michael’s devastation last October, guided him toward his current job, he said. At the same time, he felt that as a Democratic lawmaker, he was “in a box,” unable to accomplish anything tangible.

“I look at this as a way to help people, and serve with a direct connection to Parkland,” Moskowitz said. “If Parkland hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have taken this job.”

A lawyer, Moskowitz was general counsel for AshBritt, a major disaster recovery firm based in Deerfield Beach. He took a sizable pay cut to accept the $141,000-a-year as disaster management chief.

Moskowitz runs one of the leanest and most obscure state agencies, except in an emergency when his work takes on lifeand-death importance. “Built for speed,” he said. There’s no place to hide if shelters don’t open, power isn’t quickly restored or the unthinkable happens and frail seniors die in a nursing home without a backup generator.

But Moskowitz isn’t alone. President Trump’s re-election prospects could hinge on how well the feds help Florida recover. A botched response could be politically disastrous for Trump. That may explain why the president scratched a trip to Poland to monitor the storm.

When Moskowitz arrived in January, he said, the agency had no general counsel and no chief logistics officer to secure prepositioned contracts for essential services well in advance of a storm. He said the agency is now “built for speed,” that it took too long to pay cities and counties for cleanup costs of storms, and it is wrong for local governments to take out loans to pay for debris removal that’s a shared responsibility.

Moskowitz secured pay raises for his employees in the new budget and 20 new full-time positions. He’s working on building a new operations center and adding two satellite offices, in donated space in Boca Raton and Orlando. He plans to visit emergency centers in all 67 counties. He started in tiny Union County, with its weak property tax base in the heart of the prison belt.

Dorian is the first storm of Category 4 strength or greater to target Florida’s east coast since Andrew pounded South Florida in 1992, or 27 years ago this month.

Moskowitz was 12 years old when Andrew slammed Miami-Dade. He said he was in Washington, D.C., that week with his parents, touring Capitol Hill and the White House. His father, Mike Moskowitz, a political fixture in Broward since the 1980s, is a lawyer, lobbyist and long-time Democratic fund-raiser, for the Clintons, among many others.

Moskowitz may seem too young for the emergency management job, until you remember that his predecessor, Wes Maul, was 29 when former Gov. Rick Scott made him the state’s youngest disaster preparedness czar. Maul was Scott’s body man, or travel aide, and was chief of staff for the previous disaster manager, Bryan Koon.

Speaking of the last administration, Moskowitz is too astute to repeat the senseless mistakes of Scott’s team, such as the excessive secrecy at the Emergency Operations Center that blocked reporters from listening to important but mundane twice-daily conference calls on flooding, shelter capacity, road closings and other real-life issues. After prolonged complaints by Capitol reporters, Scott’s administration gradually lifted the cone of secrecy over basic storm information.

Moskowitz has politics in his genes, so he’s not likely to be a disaster bureaucrat for long. Congress will probably still beckon, but for now, he tracks Dorian, hour by hour.

“We’re battle-tested,” Moskowitz said. “We’re ready. We’re ready.”