Jeff Martin

Park County Homeland Security Director Jeff Martin said there may be a better way to address food insecurity in case of an emergency as opposed to a large storage facility for all 30,000 county residents.

Martin spoke with commissioners Tuesday during a monthly staff meeting after being asked to investigate the issue. The week prior a couple of county residents had approached commissioners with a proposal to have the county store three months of food for all county residents.

“Everybody’s talking about food security,” he said. “So there’s different work groups going on, I know down in Washakie County a food security work group is going, trying to figure out what’s the best way to approach this without having to actually set up buildings and put food inside of everything.”

Martin said it’d be better, and much cheaper, to encourage residents who can to store one month of food as Homeland Security recommends and then to focus on the populations who aren’t able to do that.

“We’re not aware of anything at the community level at this size community where they’re doing something like this,” he said. “If we did if we ventured down this road. We’re kind of setting the path, it can end up being an expensive path.”

He did find a neighborhood sized community in Utah doing something similar, but nothing at the level of a county. And, he said, the Utah example is being done privately, which he said might be better as the people who proposed the idea were wary of having governmental involvement beyond the county level.

“Well, yeah,” he said he told them, “but you’re asking the government to do this.”

Commissioner Lee Livingston said if they did something they should focus on only the residents in need a program could be done more efficiently.

“Where we need to be concerned is with our at risk population,” he said. “Those are the folks we need to help.”

He said, for instance, that a quarter of county residents rely on electricity to survive, whether that means needing to use a medical device that requires power or have medication that need to be stored at certain temperatures.

Martin said he’d get more information from the Washakie County group and provided info to the commissioners and the residents who have brought forward the proposal in the first place. As for the majority of county residents, he reiterated the recommendation to store a month of food in case of an emergency.

“I like putting it on the individual,” he said. “You know, this is your house, it’s your family you need to go and make sure that you’re taking care of them.”