Weber Orders Security Enhancements

Fayette County Judge Joe Weber directed the County’s Emergency Management Chief Craig Moreau to step-up homeland security efforts following the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde last week.

Weber made the announcement at the Commissioners Court meeting last Thursday, 26.

“For the last six months that I’m here, I have asked Craig to put his homeland security hat on,” Weber said. “Not that he’s still not going to be looking at COVID, emergency management, or natural disasters, but we have expanded the facilities in this County. We’ve got the courthouse, the Meadows Building, the old Pioneer Bank building. “We need to look closely to

“We need to look closely to make sure we protect the people who work here,” he added. “That’s everything from panic buttons to single points of entry – locks, cameras, radios, hiring people for a permanent presence – all of those things.”

Weber did not run for reelection and will step down as County Judge at the end of this year.

“Our existing plans for active shooter training have been elevated in response to Tuesday’s massacre in Uvalde,” Moreau said at the meeting. “I’ve been getting a lot of calls on this.”

Moreau said his office will conduct two training sessions at local churches on June 28 and July 12.

“We are working on another event for the general public,” he said.

Pct. 3 Commissioner Harvey Berckenhoff asked Moreau about coordinating active shooter training with all of the schools in Fayette County.

“The schools all do their own training, but I am going to offer the civilian response to active shooter training to all of the schools,” he said. “Some of our schools have on-site police officers and two of our schools have armed teachers through the School Guardian program. There is also a state program called the School Marshall Program where we put retired military in the schools. We’re looking at all those programs.

“Statistics show that these mass shooting stop the second a good person with a gun shows up,” he said. “That good person with a gun could be a police officer, a teacher, or they may be a retired military officer. When a good person shows up with a gun, the killing ends pretty soon thereafter. When that doesn’t happen, the shooting goes on and on and on.”

Moreau said he has directed some changes to security screening for district court. In addition, Moreau said he will attend an emergency management conference in San Antonio this week.

“We’ll be looking at some demos for some security projects and we’ll also talk about best practices with some of the other emergency management chiefs and experts in that area,” Moreau told the commissioners. “I anticipate coming to you in the next month or so with some recommendations.”