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Bryan Kunze and Bill John, Howard County Emergency Management co-directors, were selected as recipients of the Fayette Rotary Club’s annual Business and Professional Leadership Award last week.
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Bryan Kunze and Bill John, Howard County Emergency Management co-directors, were selected as recipients of the Fayette Rotary Club’s annual Business and Professional Leadership Award last week.
Both Howard County natives and Fayette High School graduates, Kunze and John have served the emergency management office since 2006. Since then they have led the county through tornadoes, winter storms, historic flooding, and four Presidential Disaster Declarations. They are currently working with state, federal, and local entities during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Before joining the county’s emergency management office, Kunze was best known as the Fayette police chief, a position he held for 24 years. In total he was with department for 31 years until his retirement in 2010.
Kunze also served as chief of the Howard County Fire Protection District for five years and has been a member of the Fayette Volunteer Fire Department for more than four decades.
John retired from the Fayette police department as captain in 2016 after 28 years in uniform. He is also a board member of Howard Electric Co-Op, for which he has served a treasurer since 2002. He is the co-op’s representative to the board of directors of the Association of Missouri Electric Co-ops.
Howard County has three fire departments, four law enforcement agencies, a county health department, and city and county governments. It’s up to John and Kunze to streamline communications between them and the state and federal emergency management agencies.
“I didn’t expect to be so busy in retirement,” Kunze said not long after the novel coronavirus had been declared a pandemic by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention the second week of March.
A year ago Howard County endured terrible flooding. The EMA office has trained for floods, ice storms, tornadoes, but never a disease outbreak such as COVID-19. “We’ve never lived through anything like this,” John said.
The Rotary Club established the award in 1984 to honor business owners and professionals who reside inside the Fayette R-III school district. The names of award winners are affixed to plaques which hang in the Commercial Trust Co. Community Room in Fayette.
Bryan and his wife, Connie, have two children and six grandchildren. Bill has one daughter and two grandchildren.
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