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Sunday, October 10, 2004
Homeland security: Where's the vision?
Neal Peirce
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There's little question the Bush administration has shown a lot more gusto for waging war in Iraq than the nitty-gritty of homeland security in America's cities and towns.
Even though there was danger that terrorists might strike quickly again following 9/11, the White House moved with little vigor to start emergency funding to better equip and train the local police, fire and medical first responders who would be on the front lines in another attack on U.S. soil.
Even now (as Democratic nominee John Kerry keeps asserting) the administration is shutting down most of the Clinton-era COPS program to help localities hire police officers even as it funds new local security forces in Iraq.
Still, President Bush argues correctly that his administration has spent billions on homeland security, including assistance to states and localities (in matter of fact, $8 billion authorized up to now).
And the administration, to its credit, has started to listen to domestic complaints. The Department of Homeland Security was bombarded by outraged local government officials about how slowly homeland security monies were being passed through to them by state governments. So last spring Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge created a task force of federal officials, governors, mayors and county executives to analyze the problem. Their chief conclusion: State and local buying regulations and procurement rules -- all well-intentioned protections against waste, fraud and abuse -- have too often dammed up the flow of monies.
Plus, according to a Homeland Security Department inspector general's report, a number of state officials have preferred "to go slow to get it right'' in preparing their state homeland defense plans and releasing funds -- a practice that understandably annoys the local governments.
Recent reports indicate funding flows are speeding up some and the department has moved expeditiously on such issues as compatible communications systems in high-risk cities. But the fact is there are huge holes in the nation's homeland security plan that local governments have every right to be concerned about -- unguarded port facilities, unsecured chemical plants, unprotected trains and subways, first responders unvaccinated against potential biological warfare attacks, and thousands of police, fire and medical personnel still using incompatible communications equipment.
Is Kerry right -- would a new national administration, shifting funding priorities, make faster progress on all those fronts? The fact is that no one really knows.
What is clear, says Pat McGinnis, president of the Washington-based Council for Excellence in Government, is that the National Strategy for Homeland Security, first published in 2002, is in big need of updating, to frame far more clearly roles and responsibilities at all levels -- federal, state and local. And not just the feds, but state and local officials, business leaders and citizens need to be involved in the process, she insists.
The council conferred with experts and held seven major town meetings around the country and sponsored nationwide polls of citizens and of first responders to reach its homeland security recommendations (which Secretary Ridge commended on their release). The big common need that emerged: improved communications.
The big point is that different government agencies, neighboring governments, businesses and the media all need to be in the loop to create effective local and regional plans to respond to emergencies and attacks. And that effort -- state-backed but ideally implemented in metro regions -- needs to be followed by collaborative decision-making protocols to identify who is responsible for what under different scenarios. Plus practice drills to add reality. It's bound to be a challenge, involving government and private sector players who've historically defended their turf against each other, not together.
But there's a second big communications gap today: citizens. The polling, says McGinnis, showed ``they're pretty much clueless'' about where they would go in an emergency, or what they should do. Only 19 percent, for example, indicated they had any familiarity with their communities' preparedness plans.
To get critical information into people's hands, McGinnis suggests approaching them through ``communities of trust'' -- employers, faith organizations, schools their children attend.
But homeland security's potential life-and-death stakes are so high, she says, that it may be time to develop some hard measurements of overall community and citizen preparedness. Her council has started to draft scorecards that could be applied region by region, indeed to compare regions. Real grades or numbers could gauge, for example, communications interoperability, how effectively agencies are linked, how often practice drills occur, how regularly communications systems get tested. And based on actual polling, the scorecards could assess citizen readiness in case of serious emergency.
Could such an ambitious homeland security agenda -- unprecedented coordination in our states and regions, with tough scorekeeping to push our communities and citizens to greater preparedness -- really work?
My thought is perhaps -- but only with exceedingly smart and unifying national leadership. Which provides yet another reason that our choice Nov. 2 is so critical.
Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.
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