Wallace Stickney

Wallace Elmer Stickney (November 24, 1934 – June 27, 2019) was an American civil servant, most prominently as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)[1] under President George H. W.

[3] In 1965 Stickney was unanimously chosen as the first professional town engineer for Salem and also served on the Southern Rockingham Regional Planning Commission.

In 1985 he was named as the first commissioner of the newly organized New Hampshire Department of Transportation, where he played a key role in the ending a three-decade battle over the completion of Interstate 93 through Franconia Notch State Park with the construction of the Franconia Notch Parkway, a narrow, speed-controlled 8-mile scenic parkway that required a special amendment to the standards applied across the rest of the U.S. interstate system.

Stickney faced considerable resistance in his efforts to transform FEMA from a secretive organization obsessed with doomsday preparations into an agency actually capable of responding to natural disasters.

According to Stickney, his efforts "...met with the full resistance of the security industry, as well as what might even be called a 'Security Cult' -- people who believed strongly in what they'd been doing for ten years and longer.