By Michael Green, USCM Intern
February 6, 2006

Under the backdrop of continuing funding cuts and changes to key First Responder programs, the Homeland Security Task Force met with new officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security during the Winter Meeting.

Co-Chairs Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley and Sugar Land (TX) Mayor David Wallace began the meeting by reviewing recent funding cuts of approximately $500 million this year, major changes to the funding formula which now accounts more for risk and threat, and the Conference’s 2005 National Action Plan that calls for a number of key changes to the nation’s emergency preparedness system.

Chet Lunner, the new Acting Director of State and Local Government Coordination, is committed to a strong working partnership between the Department of Homeland Security and the local municipalities. Lunner wants to create a communication network to give state and local governments timely, actionable, unclassified information. He also supports regionally based approaches toward emergency management, creating centers throughout areas that have pre-positioned resources in place before they are needed. This has been a major priority for the Conference under the leadership of Wallace.

Tracy Henke, the new Executive Director of Grants and Training for DHS, said that her objective is to identify gaps and shortcomings and fix them through the use of training, exercise and grant money. She then explained with the current budget cuts, DHS must balance competing priorities through allocating funds by risk and need.

During the discussion, a number of mayors expressed concern with the continued dependency on states for allocating federal money which continues to cause delays. In addition, several mayors expressed serious concern with short deadlines set under the new Urban Area Security Grant (UASI) program, which with the states in the middle will make it very difficult to develop detailed plans.

O’Malley continued to express concern regarding the ongoing budget cuts and what he believes is a lack of clear goals being set for national and local preparedness.

Conference Transportation and Communications Standing Committee Vice Chair for Transportation Security, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, talked about the critical transportation infrastructure. He said the protection of bus and rail, freight rail hazardous shipments and yards, roads, waterways and airports are critical to homeland defense. Nickels said security cameras, bomb detecting devices, and other deterring items are essential to the protection of critical transportation infrastructure, and the federal government needs to fund these type of programs, a flexible funding program that allows municipalities to use the funds as they see fit.

Edmund “Kip” Hawley, the Assistant Secretary of the Transportation Security Administration, spoke briefly. He told the Task Force that he would have a hard time disagreeing with the Conference’s transportation security priorities. He emphasized communication between agencies, companies and different levels of government. He said training is critical to emergency preparedness. He also said that we live in a new world and we just have not figured how to gel all the moving parts yet.

Valarie Long, International Vice President of the Service Employees International Union, urged mayors to focus on the 1.1 million private security officers in the nation who guard much of the privately-owned infrastructure and office buildings. She said that the private security field is low-paying, has high turn-over, and minimal training standards. Long advocated helping private security officers learn skills necessary to become effective first responders.

Jeff Gaynor, Director of the Critical Infrastructure Task Force at DHS discussed a recent report which found that while it is critical to protect infrastructure, the nation must also create resilient nodes that can rebound or handle devastating events.