City of Seattle Selects New Emergency Management Director

Barb Graff was the director of the Seattle Office of Emergency Management (OEM) until she retired on Feb. 4, 2020. Since then, Laurel Nelson, the deputy director, has been the acting director. After several rounds of recruitment, Curry Mayer, the current emergency manager at the city of Bellevue, Wash., has just been announced as the new Seattle OEM director.  

For those of you who watch obituaries to find out where there are job openings, know this: The last four city of Bellevue emergency management directors have ended up moving to the city of Seattle's Office of Emergency Management. 

Here's the announcement coming out of Seattle:

EM Colleagues & Stakeholders,

"First, I want thank all of you for your ongoing partnership and support of the Seattle Office of Emergency Management (OEM), especially here in 2020 when we all have been challenged in facing a novel, unprecedented local, national and international disaster that has come with many secondary impacts worsening the crisis.  The small and mighty OEM team has the vital role daily, monthly and yearly to ensure we coordinate and collaborate with all of you on preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery.  And, we have been doing our best during unimaginable events this year minus a permanent director and down two OEM staff positions.

Today we are excited to hear Mayor Durkan’s announcement of Curry Mayer as our new OEM Director.  With a short-lived breather with COVID, the director recruitment process reopened this fall.  These are challenging times for people to consider changing jobs while also seeing an opportunity to help make a difference and further elevate great programs and teams. 

Curry will bring to our program her depth of emergency management experience, local government experience at city of Bellevue, knowledge of regional relationships, and full awareness and appreciation of our Seattle emergency management program.  She knows the respectability of our Seattle OEM program and understands that a change agent is not needed.  With her experience, skill sets and emergency management commitment, I believe she will take our OEM program to the next levels and elevate the program beyond what any of us can imagine.  As our new OEM Director, Curry will be joining the Seattle OEM team on December 16^th.

The OEM team is working hard to lay-out all the onboarding materials and meetings to help Curry get up to speed in a timely manner.  We’ll be lining-up many opportunities for Curry to meet you and giving her the opportunity to develop the strong relationships that we know she wants to embrace and enhance.

Please join me in welcoming our new Seattle OEM Director, Curry Mayer!"

Stay healthy!

Best personal regards,

Laurel Nelson