WASHINGTON-House Democrats are preparing a bill that would give first responders access to spectrum to help with interoperable communications.
“Democrats will fight to ensure that first responders will have the equipment they need to respond to terrorist attacks. We will ensure that first responders have the communications gear to be able to talk to one another during a crisis,” said Rep. Jim Turner (D-Texas), ranking member of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security.
Turner hopes to introduce his bill before Congress recesses for its August break.
Other Democrats also expressed concerns about the continuing lack of first-responder interoperable communications during a hearing Thursday afternoon by the House Select Committee on Homeland Security.
In his written statement, Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.), chairman of the National Governors Association Homeland-Security Task Force, mentioned the public-safety radio incompatibility problem.
“You have all heard the anecdotes that are beginning to circulate of communities side-by-side that purchase incompatible radio equipment and cannot talk with each other when responding to multi-jurisdictional emergencies,” said Romney.
Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Penn.) took issue with Romney’s remarks and launched into a tirade about the powerful broadcasting lobby.
Weldon has been working for years to get more spectrum for public-safety interoperable communications. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 allocated 24 megahertz of spectrum in the 700 MHz band (on TV channels 60-69) to public safety, but broadcasters were given a loophole that allows them to stay in the band.
Broadcasters must leave the band by Dec. 31, 2006, or when 85 percent of the homes in their viewing areas are capable of receiving digital broadcasts, whichever is later.
Weldon has introduced legislation to take away the loophole and require broadcasters to vacate the band by 2007.
Unfortunately, Weldon and his supporters have run headlong into the broadcast lobbying association. Weldon’s frustration was obvious at the hearing when he came down hard on Romney and Jamie Metzl, senior fellow and coordinator for homeland-security programs at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“The fire service is older than America, and now nobel laureates are going to come in and tell the fire chief how to keep his community safe,” railed Weldon. “Maybe it is because our nobel laureates don’t want to take on the networks about public-safety spectrum.”
Metzl was at the hearing to present a study that was released late last month that said first responders need $98.4 billion to meet current needs.
The report was created by a blue-ribbon panel, which also identified that the funding process was too complicated.
“Funding for emergency responders has been sidetracked and stalled due to a politicized appropriations process, slowness in the distribution of the funds by federal agencies, and bureaucratic red tape at all levels of government,” said the CFR Task Force.
The Republicans on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security are also working on legislation, but it is not expected to be as targeted toward the needs of first responders for interoperable communications. Instead the GOP bill will focus on making the homeland-security grant process easier, which was the main focus of the hearing.
“There has been an over 1,000-percent increase in first-responder funding since Sept. 11, 2001. However, the current grant process was established before that tragic day, and it has become clear that it fails to efficiently distribute federal funds in a timely fashion where they are most needed. Careful scrutiny of this complex process suggests that the grant disbursement process was established to handle a stream, not a flood, of new revenue,” said Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security.
“The first-responder grant program is broken,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.).
“Washington must do its part to fix the broken pipeline, which carries money to the states to enhance their statewide efforts. We must also do a better a job of providing states and localities the information they need to allocate those resources efficiently to those areas facing the greatest risk of attack,” said Cox. “Perhaps the most important point is that these funds can no longer be distributed based on political formulas.”
Currently, homeland-security first-responder grants are allocated by a formula that allows California to receive $5 per person while Wyoming receives $35 per person.
There is hope that the bill passed out of the House will be meshed with the Homeland Security Grant Enhancement Act passed by the Senate Government Affairs Committee last month.
“I’m looking forward to working with Rep. Cox on legislation to address our homeland-security grant process. The current system is too cumbersome and takes time away from what our first responders want to be doing-protecting our communities,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.
Collins said her bill will “promote equipment interoperability.”
In addition to interoperable communications, there needs to be coordination, a point that Collins said her bill will help.
This legislation will make our communities safer “by promoting the same kind of coordination among federal agencies that we require from our states and communities, and by requiring those agencies to facilitate, not frustrate, the funding of first-responder needs,” said Collins.
