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Release Date: January 3, 2007
For Immediate ReleaseOffice of the Press SecretaryContact: (202) 282-8010
Secretary Chertoff: Happy New Year, happy 2007. We all hope for a healthy and safe 2007. I also, of course, want to take a moment to observe again how the nation mourns the passing of Gerald Ford, and recognizes his service and his leadership.
As we begin 2007, this is a good opportunity to talk about interoperability, which is a major concern for homeland security. I'm joined today by George Foresman, the Under Secretary for Preparedness, and by Gerry Connolly, the chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. We had hoped Mayor Fenty could attend, but he had to express his regrets, he's going through the rather important matter of getting sworn in, and so of course he's got to attend to that. But I do welcome his support, as well as the support of his predecessor, Mayor Williams, who was very active in working with us on emergency preparedness.
What is interoperability? Well, simply put, it's the ability of first response agencies — whether they be fire, police or emergency medical services — to communicate with each other during an emergency or a disaster. This means having radios that can talk to each other. But it also means having established operating procedures for communication and clear lines of authority.
This is an issue in which we've been focused on for the last couple of years and, in fact, it's an issue which the 9/11 commissionentified in its final report as one of the priority "must dos" for all levels of government.
Interoperability, though, is more than just a matter of technology. People tend to think about it as, we've just got to find the right radio or the right communications device, and then everybody can talk to everybody else. But, in fact, true interoperability also involves matters of governance; policy making; standard operating procedures; such as knowing where you get your radios and who is entitled to talk to who; training, so that people know how to use the equipment; and exercising, so that we can evaluate where performance continues to need work.
And interoperability is a challenge not only within a particular city or even a single urban area or region, but often across multiple counties and even multiple states that are part of a single region for emergency purposes — such as that here in the national capital region.
Now, a lot of progress has been made since September 11th moving in the direction of achieving tactical command level interoperability in our major high threat urban areas. And over the past 18 months, building on some of this progress, DHS has assisted 75 of the largest urban metropolitan areas in developing and exercising their own tactical interoperable communications plans. Our interoperable communications technical assistance program has been instrumental in this process. I'm also pleased to say that we've provided almost $3 billion — that's billion with a "b" — to state and local governments to help them develop interoperable communications.
A great example of what a region can do with effective interoperable communications is right here in the national capital region. Today, as we speak, all first responders in the NCR — whether they're from Maryland, D.C. or Virginia — can communicate with each other either directly or through the use of bridging or gateway technology. What this means in real life is that firefighters and police can talk to each other not only within the same political jurisdiction, but across jurisdictions.
In addition, the National Capital region has a backup system of over 1,200 interoperable radios that are pre-positioned across the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia. These radios can be brought to a disaster scene within two hours or less. And the various entities in the region have also established a series of regional mutual aid agreements that allow first responders to operate on each other's radio channels. This region uses a common data platform that allows its communications centers and emergency operations centers to plug into the same system so they can all have greater situational awareness, a common operating picture, during a crisis or an event. In fact, this system was used just yesterday to provide seamless communication during the ceremonies that surrounded President Ford's funeral.
But in other parts of the country, although we've made progress, we are not yet where we need to be on the issue of interoperability. Now, about a month ago, we released the findings of our national baseline survey, which was the first-ever nationwide assessment of interoperability across our country. We engaged with more than 22,000 state and local law enforcement, fire response and emergency medical services agencies to develop this baseline.
We found that roughly two-thirds of the emergency response agencies across the nation reported that they do, in fact, use interoperable communications in varying degrees. Specifically, response agencies tend to be more developed in their use of technology. Interoperability at local levels tends to be more advanced than it is between the state and local agencies. And law enforcement, fire response and EMS agencies report similar levels of development in most areas of interoperability. So this baseline survey gave us kind of a snapshot on a national level of what the picture is with respect to interoperability.
But we needed to go a step further. And today we're taking that step by issuing reports to 75 urban and metropolitan areas with specific assessments of where they stand in relation to the goal of command level communications interoperability. I ordered that these scorecards be developed last May, and that they be completed by the end of the year, and we met this goal and delivered on that pledge.
Before I get into the overall findings, I want to briefly talk about what the process was, how we developed the scorecards and why we wanted to do it. Back as part of our 2005 Homeland Security Grant program we mandated that major urban areas develop tactical interoperable communications plans. These are basically plans for achieving command level interoperability within a single hour of an incident or emergency. Every one of the 75 urban and metropolitan areas did successfully develop plans for their regions, and those plans were then subjected to validation through full-scale exercise, and that's what's gone on through this past year.
We used these plans and additional validations, site visits and self assessments to drill down andentify exactly what the capabilities were for each individual urban and metropolitan area, to look to see what were the barriers to achieving full command level interoperability and to make some specific recommendations to each urban area or municipality about the way ahead.
Now let me say that the purpose of doing score cards is not to rank one urban area against another. In fact, although there will be a temptation, I'm sure, for some to do that, you really can't make that comparison. Every urban area and metropolitan area faces its own particular challenges, whether that's the geographic environment, or the number of municipalities, or the density of the population. And therefore, it's not really fair to compare one with another and say one did better than another one did, because they face unique challenges.
The purpose of the score cards is to help every community assess with objectivity the progress that they've made using their existing equipment, to assess the remaining obstacles to getting full interoperability and to create a common framework under which federal, state and local officials can work together over the next two years to get everybody to full command level interoperability in each of these 75 urban or metropolitan areas.
And now we divide the score card findings into three elements. The first is governance. This really asks the question, how mature is an urban or metropolitan area’s strategic plan in terms of getting interoperable communications.
What do I mean by a strategic plan? I mean things like, how do we agree on how we spend the money, what are the major policy decisions that have to be made about, for example, using 10 code for communications as opposed to plain English. These are the kinds of strategic policy-making decisions that have to be made by the command leadership, the political leadership of regions or jurisdictions.
The second element is standard operating procedures. This is the nitty gritty operational detail that an urban and metropolitan area has to have in place to be able to use the equipment effectively. It needs things like what — where do you get the radios, how do you train on the radios, who actually holds the radios, who communicates with whom. These are specific and operational in focus.
And the final category we've looked at is usage, which is the capability and the ability to use the various communications equipment that is located within a particular urban or metropolitan area. This is what measures the quality of the equipment and the training on the equipment, which is the basis for all communication.
Each of these three elements is a necessary ingredient of getting interoperable communications. So when we look at today's results, you've got to look at each of these elements as part of a total package, and not as separate and distinct items to be evaluated in isolation.
So what are the findings? Overall, the scorecard findings show that urban and metropolitan areas have made significant progress improving their interoperable communications capabilities. And that particularly is measured against where we were five years ago at the time of the September 11 attacks.
The findings also willentify some real gaps in areas for continued advancement. Among the key findings are the following: There are now policies in place for interoperable communications and plans for all the 75 urban and metropolitan areas. But regular testing and exercising continue to be necessary in order to effectively link the various individual systems within a particular region to allow communications between multi jurisdictional responders.
And finally, although cooperation is very strong among the first responders themselves, the leadership and strategic plan at a political or policy-making level is a little bit uneven and needs addition improvement.
Now, I will talk about a few urban areas, but I do this, again, not to suggest that you can compare one with another, but just to give you some set of a wide range of examples that we've seen as we've evaluated communities of all different sizes. Four urban areas achieved advance in all the three elements I've described, which is governance, procedures, and usage of equipment. Those four were the Nation Capital Region, the region in San Diego, the Twin Cities region in Minnesota, and the region around Columbus, Ohio.
Three urban or metropolitan areas are still in early stage in one category of the three, at least, and those would be the Cook County, Chicago urban metropolitan area, the Cleveland metropolitan area, and the Baton Rouge metropolitan area.
And let me pause here to emphasize we're talking about regional evaluations. I do that because as part of our RapidCom initiative, which was focused on 10 cities themselves, we actually did achieve, a couple of years ago, a reasonably good degree of interoperability in cities, for example, like Chicago.
So what you see in this snapshot is not an evaluation of Chicago as a stand alone, because as a stand alone, Chicago actually does have good interoperability, but rather the region in which Chicago is located, the region of Cook County, which includes 128 municipalities in addition to Chicago.
And so what you see when you look at the scorecard for that urban area is there is gapping as one tries to merge or integrate all of those surrounding communities with Chicago in a county-wide or region-wide approach to interoperability.
And that's where governance becomes so critically important. If you would look at the city Chicago itself, it has interoperable communications. In fact, I've been out there, and they do an excellent job harnessing technology and getting a terrific — common operating picture for the city itself. Cook County also has done an awful lot among its communities to establish interoperability. But what the scorecardentified was, these two entities, the city and the county, needed to come together and work more effectively as a unified whole to build interoperability across the entire region.
Now, these score card findings were reviewed by five panels of subject matter experts in state and local safety operations, as well as communications technology experts, including former fire chiefs and police chiefs. These are professional experts, and they work for some of the experts that we employ in our SAFECOM office and our wireless management office to make sure we were bringing the best skill set to doing these evaluations. State and urban areas had an opportunity to review the scorecards and to provide comments.
So where do we go from here? Well, the scorecard findings are designed to give us, and more important, to give local communities a decision about where they need to work in order to get to advanced agent interoperability among all the elements we've described. And while we're not going to punish people or reward people in terms of grant funding based on the findings, we do expect the grant recipients will use this scorecard information to target their investment justifications to their interoperable communications capability.
What this means is we are determined to get this job done over the next two years. And what I mean by "done" is advanced level interoperability across all three elements for every single one of these 75 urban and metropolitan areas. We are well on the way to getting it done, but we're not completed yet.
In order to make this effort work, we're going to need to provide the money, and we will provide the money; we're going to need to have accountability, and we're going to demand accountability; and we're going to have to have metrics that enable us to measure performance. And that's precisely what this scorecard allows us to do, build a set of metrics we can track and follow to make sure we get this job done.
Let me also say that we have some longer-term issues in interoperability we have to talk about. For years the communications sector has wrestled with technology standards under the P-25 suite of standards that would give communities a set of specific requirements that they can insist upon as they buy their next generation of equipment. We ought to get the job — I encourage the industry people who are working on this project to get this job done this year, so that new acquisitions can be undertaken with an understanding of what is going to be the generally accepted industry standard for P25 interoperability over the next several years.
But we also have to recognize that even when we get those standards done, there's going to have to be a transition period where communities migrate to this new set of standards. Fortunately, we have technology that allows us to bridge the gap between the current technology and the new technology that we are looking forward to having ratified by the industry. And that's going to mean that communities won't have to simply junk their entire investment, but we will work with them to give them a path to migrate, over time, so they have interoperability immediately and can build towards next generation systems.
The short — bottom line here is that interoperability is a priority for DHS; it's a priority for the President; it's a priority for Congress. For the reasons that were made abundantly clear in the September 11 Commission Report, we are — there's nothing that's more important than getting this job of communications do