There’s a revolt inside San Francisco’s emergency department.

Staffers are calling into question the competence of a leader who played a critical role during the city’s COVID-19 response and a mass blackout, and who would oversee the city’s response in the event of an earthquake. 

Employees of the Department of Emergency Management say Executive Director Mary Ellen Carroll displayed a lack of knowledge during the widespread Pacific Gas & Electric outage in December and is laying off a key financial leader while foisting that work onto unqualified subordinates. They further allege that Carroll is cutting back staff at an emergency watch center that serves as eyes and ears to head off the city’s worst disasters. 

A petition is circulating within the agency alleging a “vote of no confidence” in Carroll’s leadership.

A growing number of the staff wants Mayor Daniel Lurie to toss out Carroll.

“She doesn’t have any idea of what she’s actually doing,” one staffer alleged, in a message echoed by others who spoke to The Standard. “She’s not interested in knowing what the staff is supposed to do.”

Another said Carroll “always has questions” about what various divisions within the DEM do and how they function, adding, “There’s always a hesitation, a delay, and long discussion. It doesn’t really feel good. It seems she isn’t fit for the job anymore, if she ever was.”

The complaints come as San Francisco’s emergency management apparatus faces mounting pressure from federal funding cuts and citywide layoffs. The department — unlike others in the city — has almost no vacant positions to eliminate.

When tens of thousands of residents lost power on a Saturday in December, Carroll was at a hair salon, internal communications reveal — and her first message to the department’s response thread came roughly an hour and 20 minutes after coordination began.

Current and former employees say leadership failures and staffing reductions are undermining the department’s ability to coordinate the city’s emergency response. More than half a dozen current and former staffers came forward to The Standard under the condition of anonymity.

“We’re really genuinely worried about the state of the city if a big disaster happens,” one said, “whether it’s a cyber attack or a huge earthquake that could happen any day now. It’s pretty horrible.”

While it’s unclear how many have signed the petition, news of the document has spread widely among emergency personnel, with staffers across multiple divisions saying their peers are all discussing it. Flyers were left on the floors of various rooms of the department with a QR code linking to the petition.

“Over the course of her tenure, it has become increasingly clear that Ms. Carroll lacks the essential knowledge and operational understanding of critical public safety functions,” the petition states. Those functions include 911 dispatch, the disbursement of Bay Area homeland security grants, and emergency medical services. “These are not peripheral areas of our mission, they are core services, and the absence of informed leadership places the public at unnecessary risk.”

Jackie Thornhill, a spokesperson for the Department of Emergency Management, denied the claims.

“DEM leadership, including Director Carroll, are in constant communication with staff from all divisions and work 24/7/365 to lead the Department through San Francisco’s everyday and not so everyday emergencies,” Thornhill said. “We staffed up dispatch and are responding to 911 calls faster than we have in years, and DEM continues to coordinate all major emergency activations.”

Carroll was appointed to the position (opens in new tab) by London Breed in 2018 after serving at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. Her last reported salary, in 2024, was $327,000, according to Transparent California. Carroll is also a member of the board leading the Big City Emergency Management Association, which advocates for the interests of emergency departments across the nation.

Concerns around Carroll’s competency bubbled to the surface among widespread dissatisfaction over this year’s impending City Hall layoffs. 

San Francisco’s $643 million budget deficit has led Lurie to send out 127 pink slips across city agencies, including DEM. The department was already in a troubled financial position after President Donald Trump cut federal counterterrorism dollars (opens in new tab) disbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which DEM sends across the Bay Area. 

While other city departments fended off Lurie’s layoffs by eliminating vacant positions, DEM has long maintained a 1% job vacancy rate, Thornhill said, leaving few alternatives when faced with budget reductions. 

Among those layoffs were personnel in the department’s emergency watch center, described by the city (opens in new tab) as a central information hub for emergency communications and notifications. The watch center is essentially the government’s disaster watchdog, monitoring emergency requests and escalating issues when they reach the level of a disaster. 

As The Standard’s politics newsletter, Power Play, reported, the staff of four full-time employees has been reduced to two. That it is too few when trying to provide the backbone of emergency response, staffers say. The watch center is supposed to be operational 24/7, and while it never reached the goal of full coverage, the staff shortage has reduced working hours to 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., then later to one eight-hour shift. On-call staff cover off hours, though they do not monitor emergencies at the same level.

“We’re not as aware of what’s going on in the city because of these gaps,” one staffer said.

“When the next big disaster emergency happens, everyone will wonder” why the city’s emergency response would face slowdowns, one staffer alleged. “The board of supervisors, even the mayor — are they OK with a fatality? Is that what it takes to recognize [this is] critical?”

Thornhill countered that some cities have no watch center at all and that the center provides an additional layer of monitoring to emergency situations. 

One of the most concerning examples of Carroll’s incompetency, staffers say, arose during the PG&E blackout in December. Despite her years heading the department, Carroll didn’t know how to access a needed conference room and set up an emergency operations center to coordinate the city’s response. She did not know which staff from across the city should be included. On a vital multi-department call on the afternoon of the outage, roughly 30 people initially attended out of a total of 80 who were invited. Coordinating city departments is one of DEM’s key responsibilities.

Lurie himself called out the lack of some key personnel. 

One staffer recalled him saying at the meeting, “This is important; every department should be here.’’ The Standard reviewed digital records of the call’s attendance to verify the claim and spoke with others who verified the mayor’s concern.

The mayor’s spokesperson, Charles Lutvak, said Lurie’s comment at the meeting did not stand out as significant in the crisis response. City government ultimately stepped up to ensure San Franciscans got what they needed in a crisis, he said. Some people who were absent from the call were optional attendees. 

Department staffers view Carroll’s performance differently.

“When the extended power outage happened, she was running around with her head cut off,” one said. 

WhatsApp messages obtained by The Standard through a public records request show that Carroll’s first response in a leadership chat coordinating response to the outage came roughly an hour and 20 minutes after the team began. The watch center flagged 15,000 San Francisco households losing power. 

“I am down the street on Haight getting my hair cut,” Carroll wrote to the leadership team. “As soon as I am done I will swing over to Turk to monitor and assess what we may need to do.”

An hour later, the outage had spread to 129,000 PG&E customers. The texts show that Carroll delegated responsibilities for establishing emergency provisions for neighborhoods. She led efforts to speak directly with PG&E leadership and the mayor’s office and advised staff on how to convey the severity of the incident to the media. 

Thornhill said the message thread doesn’t represent all of Carroll’s actions during the blackout and that she led the initial incident management calls that coordinated between the mayor’s office and public safety departments. Thornhill added that PG&E outages affecting more than 1,000 customers are routine, occurring every few months, and that the severity of the incident did not become apparent until later.

Separately, some are concerned about the department’s ability to process federal funding after Carroll laid off a division’s chief financial officer.

The Trump administration has slow-rolled FEMA emergency grant funding, which was initially aimed at counterterrorism but later used more broadly to address disasters. Since the duties of the laid-off CFO who disburses those funds still need to be performed, Carroll asked two staffers in a lower job classification to take on those responsibilities. Some are concerned that those low-level analysts are not qualified to perform such a task, which requires additional training.

“There’s a lot of mistrust in the organization on the whole because of Mary Ellen’s behavior,” one staffer said. Between the layoffs and allegations, “it creates a lot of mistrust, and instead of doing the work, people are trying to figure out what’s going on around here.”