DHS Money Shifts; Emergency Responders Disappointed
Reductions and reallocation of Dept. of Homeland Security (DHS) grant money have left some urban areas unhappy. But a Dept. official said the amounts make sense -- and won’t be the only consideration in how much is spent on communications upgrades in those cities. Budget cuts and a new methodology produced a shift in grant awards to Chicago, L.A., small cities and rural areas, while N.Y.C., D.C., and several previously well-funded border states had significant reductions from previous years. While public safety groups push for better first-response technology and increased interoperability spending - and congressional consensus is forming around the need for those improvements -- high-risk urban areas will be forced to do more with less this year.
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Total nationwide spending on interoperability fell last year to $769.1 million, from about $1.18 billion in 2004. Coupled with a drop in total awards to $740 million from $854.7 million in 2005, this suggests reduced allocations for interop improvements in the coming year. A recent DHS report found that spending on equipment, the largest portion of interop spending, has slowly declined, while the percentage of funds spent on “other” interop categories like plan and protocol development and training courses has risen rapidly, from nothing in 2003, to 10% in 2004 and 16% in 2005. The biggest drops in interop spending last year were in large, urban or border/coastal states where spending was among the highest in the first 2 years of grants; with some exceptions, that continued this year.
The grants reflect a new “analytical formula” that balances risk with need and the effectiveness of states’ allocation plans, rather than some agenda or “motivation,” said DHS Asst. Secy.-Coordination & Preparedness Tracy Henke. The whole country needs to be taken into account, but risk is still the main consideration in the formula, she said, so N.Y.C. still gets 18% of the UASI (urban) funding. This jars with the comments of figures like Rep. King (R-N.Y.) who said Thurs. that the Administration had “declared war” on N.Y., echoing others from N.Y., D.C. and Phoenix, where grant funding was cut.
Henke called interop “a mission-critical capability,” and said DHS still gives it highest priority in its allocation review (which will take place in late summer this year, 60 days after states officially receive their grant awards). DHS head Michael Chertoff will hold a panel within the next month for functional requirements for state-level interop standards. Henke said there are many reasons interop spending may have gone down in 2005, including the possibility that states are funding it themselves.
Some states are -- but some urban areas could use more funding, said Paul Fahey, chmn., regulatory and legislative affairs committee for the National Emergency Numbers Assn. (NENA), as well as its Mass. chapter exec. dir. Fahey said while states like his own have relied largely on state-level funding to upgrade networks, he was “a little disappointed to see that there seems to be a shift away from urban areas” that are still in need of interop improvements and are obviously at the highest risk of attack. “That doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense,” he said. Though Fahey was excited about “a growing consensus” in Congress about the need for increased funding on interop and next generation issues, he said the flow of money has been “pretty limited.” NENA certainly doesn’t want to “federalize” the emergency response system, he said, because it “comes down to the person answering the call,” but he said state performance on allocating funding to communications technology has been “sporadic,” and will only get worse as high-risk areas see their funding cut.
Atlanta, Chicago and L.A. saw big increases in funding this year, countering suspicion of a rural bias in grant awards. Small cities like Louisville and Newark had noticeable gains as well. Interop spending in the D.C. region had been up every year through 2005, yielding a major subway communications upgrade, improved law enforcement data sharing and an operational first-responder network on which every user can communication with direct or patched communications. N.Y.C. adopted longer-term deployments of its grant money, with a SAFECOM-compliant wireless IP voice and data network slated for the next few years.