Press Briefing by Department of Homeland Security Officials on the Fiscal Year 2006 Infrastructure Protection Program

Release Date: September 25, 2006

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: 202-282-8010
September 25, 2006

Under Secretary Foresman:  Let me continue on and see if we can address the questions.  I want to introduce the team that we have with us today.  We have Robert Jamison, who is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Transportation Security Administration; and Tracy Henke, our Assistant Secretary for Grants and Training; Tom Dinnano, our Deputy Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection; and Tony Regalbuto, who is the Technical Advisor to the Director of Inspection and Compliance at the United States Coast Guard.

One of the things that we -- the Secretary had mentioned to you is that we are taking a different approach, an evolving approach in terms of our grant activities here at the department. And in that context, what is critically important to understand is the operational components who are working with the transit systems in communities across America, the ports in communities across America, are going to be working with them day-to-day on operational issues, and working with them day-to-day in the development of grant guidance and in the grant application packages and the review of the grant application packages.  This represents a major evolution.  

The second point that I want to stress is something that Secretary Chertoff said in terms of the stability of the process.  And this goes to the question in terms of the wide variances.  One of the things that we are beginning to see, particularly in light of the '06 grant process and the assessment process, is a much more stable environment when it comes to the assessment process.  We are not going to make wide or broad changes to our assessment methodology this year, but what we are doing is we're very much focusing with our urban areas, with our states, with our port operators and our transit operators, about better understanding the assets, the vulnerabilities, the consequences in these particular systems.

And we can talk about it in a little bit of greater detail, but what I would offer is, I, as someone who has been in this business since its inception, someone who has been a consumer of these grand programs, frankly, this represents the first year that Tracy and the G&T team, working across the operational components, have been able to bring a level of stability to what we do with our state and local partners.  Doesn't mean there won't be some changes in the future -- a good example being Houston, Texas.  You know, I always tell folks, the day before Hurricane Katrina, Houston, Texas produced 25 percent of the nation's petroleum products.  The day after Hurricane Katrina, they produced 47 percent of the nation's petroleum products because of everything that was knocked off line in Louisiana and elsewhere.  So we understand that there are events, there are situations that can change the risk environment of a particular community or a particular system.

Question:  You all said you want the timing to be faster next year.  What caused it to be late this year?  What can you say about perceptions that this comes five weeks before election time, that it might be political?  And then, turning to the Hill, coming up there's this proposal for $400 million for port security next year -- is that too much?  How much would be enough from Homeland's perspective, as this conference prepares to finish?

Under Secretary Foresman:  Spencer, let me address the second part of your question first.  This just represents the natural evolution, the natural maturity of the grant programs.  And it is too late in the year for these programs to be coming out under a perfect world, but this department was confronted with Hurricane Katrina, it was confronted with a major effort to engage our operational components in the development of the grant activities, and, frankly, we are where we are because it's simply a byproduct of the process.  It has nothing to do with what's going on on the national level from an election standpoint.

In terms of what is the right price tag, as Secretary Chertoff said, there are a phenomenal amount of needs out there.  We had more than $555 million worth of requests for this port security grant cycle alone, and we only had about $167 million that we had available to ourselves.  

So one of the things, as a byproduct of this grant process, is the fact that we are asking ports, we're asking transit systems to tell us what your needs are.  So we're not trying to determine needs based on a Ouji board.  We're determining needs based on accurate, authoritative information that's provided to us by the owners and the operators of these critical systems.

Question:  Could you go into more detail about the New York port grant being such a jump?  In general, what type of systems are -- and what projects -- without breaching any security, could you talk about this?

Under Secretary Foresman:  Tracy, do you want to talk a little about it?

Assistant Secretary Henke:  Of course.  Tracy Henke, Assistant Secretary for the Office of Grants and Training.  New York, this year, has a variety of projects.  And as the Under Secretary pointed out early on, those products, or those activities can include a wide variety of things.  So, for instance, for New York, and the New York-New Jersey port area this year, we're looking at everything from CCTV surveillance systems; we're looking at activities related to TWIC and the implementation of TWIC.  We're looking at

-- TWIC is Transportation Worker Identification Credential -- TWIC.  Sorry about that.  We're looking at a variety of parameter security activities.  So things related also to communication, interoperability; once again, things that will make -- things that New York, New Jersey -- the port area of New York and New Jersey believe are important to help them from prevention and a detection standpoint.

Question:  If I could just ask a quick follow-up -- I know with the urban grants that the department frowned upon paying for overtime and things like that.  Did you also -- in this process, was that something else they didn't want to pay for?

Assistant Secretary Henke:  Sellers are not an eligible activity under the Port Secretary Grant program, or these other programs.

Question:  What kind of peer review process do you use for administering the grants and addressing the concerns over what the UASI grants --

Under Secretary Foresman:  We use a two-phased process; once in the context of the Port Secretary grants.  When those were initially prepared, they were scored initially by the captain of the ports -- those individuals who work with the state and local officials, the Port Authority officials, the private sector operators on a day-to-day basis.  Then, subsequently, there was a second level of peer review at the national level that consisted of staff from our Grants and Training shop, folks from the United States Coast Guard, Infrastructure Protection.  So it was a federal interagency peer review process.

Question:  I think originally New York, their funding was slashed about 40 percent about $83 million back in June, now they're getting $25 million.  Can you talk about the difference in numbers there, and is that enough money for a place like New York, where it's number one, the highest risk there is?

Under Secretary Foresman:  Well, there are three things that we have to deal with with New York.  One, New York is a megacity, and we intuitively understand that.  We understand that it's at the top of our risk list as it comes to a community, as it comes to its port operations.  And at the end of the day, as the Secretary said, there's never enough money to do all of the things that you want to do.  And what we're attempting to do with these dollars is to provide them in a reasonable fashion to mitigate risk on a national scale by addressing the specific risk levels at individual ports.

Going back to the earlier question, one of the things that    -- and I touched on it earlier -- that is different this year about the port security review process is the fact that the captains of the ports had been working with the state and local officials, the Port Authority officials, to do an additional level of detailed review and risk analysis in the ports.  So we understand at a much more granular level of detail what are the risks associated not only to the New York metropolitan area in the context of an incident in that port, but also what are the potential impacts from a national perspective.

So I would just say the data gets better and better every year, and with it, we are able to be a little more focused in terms of how we apply the dollars.

Question:  Long Beach is the biggest port, right?  I think New York-New Jersey is number two.  Can you explain how you make decisions about risk and size, and I know you've got a lot of chemicals in Houston -- can we expect, long-term, is Houston probably going to surpass New York?

Under Secretary Foresman:  Well, it's hard to say because a lot of it comes back to the variable nature.  And I gave you the Houston example of where they dramatically changed last year in terms of our understanding of their risk because so much in the Louisiana Petroleum Complex -- the refinery process had gone off-line after Katrina.  And I think what I would offer is that it's probably going to take a year or two from a cycle standpoint to get a real good handle on three things:  One, in some type of measured ability, how much have we increased capability -- because as the Secretary said, a lot of these dollars are dollars that are still being spent, so we haven't seen the full measure of their risk reduction.

The second piece of it is, frankly, ports are going to get to a saturation point where there's only a certain amount of work that they can do at any given time.  LA-Long Beach is a good example, in $90 million of expenditures over three years.  We're going to be doing some initiatives with them this year.  In addition to doing that main port business of bringing containers and resources into the country, you add on all of the security  stuff -- I mean, they've got to be able to balance it on their own.

And then the third piece of it is, frankly, we're going to have to continue to look at the full range of things, and you saw in the fourth tier, there is a level of risk associated with those fourth tier of activities, and at some point, we're going to not necessarily stop doing work in tier one or tier two, but we're going to gradually, over a period of five or 10 years, get to a point where we've bought down -- we've hit the return on investment, if you will, in tier one and two, and we need to spend a little additional effort on tier three and four, and there may even be a list in the future beyond 101 ports.

But, again, this is the big challenge that we face in the department.  We allocate money at the federal level on an annual basis, but we've got to look at the protection of America on a multiyear basis.  And it creates a challenge for us.

Question:  I think all of us would appreciate comparative numbers for fiscal '05 for all the programs, and I only see them on the port and on the --

Under Secretary Foresman:  Let me give those to you, Laura.  

Question:  Port by port, city by city, state by state?

Under Secretary Foresman:  Port by port --

Question:  I guess not port by port, but like New York City, what their mass transit systems were.  

Under Secretary Foresman:  What we will do is we'll work with you off-line, because we've got plenty of folks here who brought data with them, and we'll work with you on the specific, but do you want in the major program areas?  

All right, let's do the inner-city bus -- the bus lines:  Fiscal --FY '05, $9,657,138; FY '06, $9,503,000.

The trucking program:  FY '05, $4,828,564; FY '06, $4,801,500.

Port:  FY '05, $141,969,968; FY '06, $168,052,395.

Inner-city rail, the AMTRAK:  '05, $6,373,730; FY '06, $7,242,855.

Transit, which includes the ferry, the intra-city rail, as well as the intra-city bus:  FY '05, $134,144,237; FY '06, $135,998,093.

And finally, in BZPP, both chemical and regular:  FY '05 BZPP -- and understand that this was two years worth of money aggregated together -- $91,315,793.  This year in BZPP, $47,965,000.

And then, finally, this is the first year for the Chemical Buffer Zone Protection Plan Program, and that's funded at $25 million.  

Question:  Okay.  The other tier areas I wanted to explore were the Truck Association getting the money for the trucking.  And I'm wondering why it's going to a lobby group as opposed to the actual trucking companies, like you did with the buses, for last year and I'm assuming this year, as well?

Under Secretary Foresman:  Robert, do you want to talk a little about how we're working with ATA?

Deputy Assistant Secretary Jamison:  Sure.  I'm Robert Jamison, Deputy Assistant Secretary of TSA.  As you know, that is a congressional authorization to ATA for this program.  So the program consists of mainly a highway watch program where we use a lot of training to get out and use eyes and ears program.  But it's congressionally directed that it go to ATA.  

Question:  Thanks.  And my third thing was, Under Secretary, since you rattled off all the money --

Under Secretary Foresman:  I believe that's four, but that's okay.  You're on number four, I think.  

Question:  Well, all right, four, then.  On the BZPP, why is the money going down -- if it's $91.3 million, and I understand that included chemical security -- I mean, still if you add the chemical security, that's only --

Under Secretary Foresman:  The $91 million was two years worth of funding.  It was '05 and '04 together.  Both of those -- we got the BZPP late in -- it may have been in a supplemental in '04 -- we can double-check on that -- but that was combined with the '05 when they pushed it out the door.

Question:  What was the decision to split the chemical security out from them this year?

Under Secretary Foresman:  It was just a separate appropriation in terms of Congress providing it to us.  

Question:  Can I ask some questions about the bus program?  And this is not limited just to this year, but why are they not in tiers, like some of the other grant programs?

Under Secretary Foresman:  Pete, let me take the first shot at this, and then I'll ask Robert to step into it.  When we look at the information and intelligence that is available to us, for instance, as it relates to ports, as it relates to our intra-city rail, there are certain things that jump off at us.  Obviously, improvised explosive devices -- we've got a lot concerns about tunnels and tunnel complexes; we've got a lot of concerns based on a wide range of information about perimeter violations and that type of thing.

In the context of the bus threat in the broadest of terms, it doesn't lend itself to that level of detail and that level of analytical review.  And with the tiers, as a good example, without getting into the classified information, the port tiers  -- there are very definitive breaks between tier one and tier two, tier two and tier three, based on population density, a variety of other factors.  We just don't see that.

And, Robert, do you want to touch a little about how we're working on the bus piece?

Deputy Assistant Secretary Jamison:  Sure.  Actually, the bus program, as well as the rail program are in two tiers for intra-city bus.  So we try to focus a lot on high risk and high consequence.  So just as we pushed a lot of money into tier one, larger rail properties, we did the same thing for bus for tier one properties.  So there's $15 million designated to tier one properties.  Much the way the Secretary explained, we're continuing to work with those properties to determine how they're going to spend that funding.

But we broke them down into tier two levels, as well -- broader population of properties, competitive amount of funding  -- there were $6 million available for bus properties, as well as $7 million available for tier two rail properties.  That was a competitive program so we could work to take the best project that best addressed risk and consequence, and drove down that risk through what they proposed to do.

Question:  The Secretary talked about changing the review process for grants for the coming year.  Could you elaborate a little bit more on what the changes will be and how that will work?

Under Secretary Foresman:  Well, there are a couple of things, and the Secretary has had a series of conversations with both Ms. Henke and myself, and he's talked about three things that we need to make sure that we do.  One is, when we get those application packages out, Tracy and her team have had a phenomenal amount of interplay with these local communities as they've gone about using UASI funds -- in the case of the states, the State Homeland Security Grant Program.  

And what he's looking for is to make sure that we just simply don't put the grant guidance out, and that the next time we have the interaction with them is when they've sent it in, that it may not be fully compliant with national priorities, or fully compliant from a technical standpoint -- so that there is that level of give-and-take, back and forth, the nurturement, if you will, as we go along through the process.

But let me be clear.  There is an incumbent responsibility on the part of the local communities to understand the national priorities, to know their local priorities, and to make sure that their grant proposals address those priorities.  So it is more of a collaborative partnership as we go forward.

The second piece is that we are bringing the stakeholder groups in -- a wide range of stakeholder groups on all of our grant programs over the course of the next several weeks, as we get ready to get the '07 guidance out the door.  One of the things is to make sure that we learn the lessons from UASI, the State Homeland Security Grant Program, our Transit Grant Programs, and simply take the wise counsel of those stakeholders who have to implement these programs and adjust them where necessary.

Now, let me be clear; we're not simply going to say, okay, put in an application and tell us what you want, you're going to get your money.  I mean, it's going to be a disciplined process.  But we need to make sure that we build the guidelines associated with the grant programs based on the feedback from the users.  I used to be a user, and we need to make the grant programs as flexible and as consistent as possible.  

I was up in New York City a couple weeks ago, and they've got to implement a UASI program; they've got to implement port security; they've got to implement transit security.  There needs to be a degree of consistency between all of those programs to make it easier for New York City as they go about melding those various things.

And then, third, and finally I think is the speed piece of it.  We want to move quickly, but we also want to move deliberately.  And in that context, the Secretary has been very clear -- we're going to engage the stakeholders, but we're not going to sit around and spend a whole lot of time.

The one really positive point that we're going to find out of this -- Tracy and the team at G&T have done a phenomenal job in teeing up the grant programs, and frankly, we're about 80 percent of where we need to be for '07.  We're going to have to do about 20 percent modification and then, shortly after Congress has finished its work on the budget this year and we get a budget bill in place, we will be in a position to very quickly and rapidly work with folks.  And that also means there may be some recipients of funds this year who are simply going to say, in the context of transit security, gosh, you know, I've got a slug of money that's in the system and we're doing a project, I can't take on anymore work load -- and you may see a group of communities that got less funding this year or did not get any funding this year that may, in fact, get funding next year.

Question:  In terms of the nuts and bolts, is there anything that's changed in terms of -- you'll speak more with the localities and the end users, but is there a different process?  Is it a new sort of peer review panel or is it gone, or --

Under Secretary Foresman:  Well, that's part of what the stakeholders are going to tell us -- how do we do the review process so that we feel like there's the right level of incentivization for cost beneficial projects, but at the same time not simply bifurcating the discipline that has -- the fiscal discipline.  Because at the same time we've got to get these grants out quickly, a year from now, Congress and the Inspector General and the General Accounting Office are going to say, what did you do with the grant funds.  So we want to make sure that we find that optimal balance there.

Question:  For clarification, so by the end of the first quarter you're going to have guidance for all of the Homeland Security grant programs, or just --

Under Secretary Foresman:  Our goal is for all of them.

Question:  Memphis got a pretty big -- last year, $6.5 million.  And now it's gotten zero.  Does that mean that their project was a one-year deal, or was this recognition that it was no longer the best place to put money?

Under Secretary Foresman:  No, it's a combination of things.  What I will ask them to do is we'll go through the detailed numbers with you, but I'm not sure right off the top of my head what Memphis's request was this year.  Erin is in the back of the room, one of our --

Question:  Transit?

Under Secretary Foresman:  No, port.  But we'll get that before you before you get out of here, and give you the details.

Question:  To follow up on the -- both Memphis and Tampa had received money last year on ports.  Both of them got nothing this year.  Both of them were also on the UASI list of the gang of 11 or 13 it was -- may not qualify for UASI money next year.  When the Secretary was up there he talked about how he wants to make sure that the risk analysis is stable, that we don't have cities all over the map, you know, where one year it's nothing, the next year it's a lot.  Does this indicate that Memphis and Tampa and cities that are more in this situation no longer face a credible threat?

Under Secretary Foresman:  No, it doesn't mean that.  And what I would offer is we're going to have more to talk about in terms of the grants programs in the next several weeks, and the specifics on how we're going to approach them next year and the stability in the system.

Question:  Would you say that those cities are victim to an unstable program right now, or an analysis right now?  Or are they going to --

Under Secretary Foresman:  No, I don't think they're victims of anything.  And I go back to what the Secretary said -- these should be viewed as investments that we're making in the nation's security.  We're going to continue to assess the risk in all of the communities across America.  We want to create a level of stability.  And I think as we go forward over the next couple of weeks the Secretary is going to continue to provide guidance to us so that we create that stability.  And we'll get you all back together to give you an overview of how we're going to approach the 2007 series and get that stability in there.

 END           3:40 P.M. EDT

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