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• DHS Awards $399 Million in Grants to Secure the Nation’s Critical Infrastructure

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Press Briefing by Secretary for Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and Under Secretary for Preparedness George Foresman

Release Date: September 25, 2006

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

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, good afternoon, everybody, and welcome.  I hope you all were able to navigate the little infrastructure project that's taking place outside the building.  We're just trying to pave the driveway to make it easier for you all to get up here.

As we fast approach the end of fiscal year 2006 -- which ends on September 30th -- we are making the final set of awards as part of our Infrastructure Protection Program -- grant program for 2006.  It's a little less than $400 million in grants, including Port Security Grants, Transit Grants -- which include rail, intercity bus, intracity mass transit and ferries -- Buffer Zone Protection Grants and Chemical Protection Grants.  A few of these have previously been announced, but the remaining major ones are being announced today, and they reflect a further very substantial investment by the federal government in raising security in all of the major elements of our infrastructure in cities and states across the country.

Let me take a few moments to explain what our philosophy has been in doing these grants.  First and foremost, to the extent the law permits, we use risk as the basis for giving money out.  And risk is a combination of what the threat is, what the vulnerability is and what the consequences would be of a successful attack. 

We use risk as a way of looking at the entire menu of potential beneficiaries from our grant program.  So, for example, when we look at ports we take a hundred ports that the Coast Guard has identified as the most significant, in terms of traffic, volume, population in the surrounding area, and critical infrastructure. And what we've done is we have broken them into tiers based upon the level of risk in the port.  The top tier ports, for example, in the country are Houston, L.A.-Long Beach and New York-New Jersey.  That's alphabetical; that's not ranking the three of them in comparison with each other.  We then take the top tier ports, we put a significant amount of the total money available against those top tier ports.  We then have a second tier of ports, we put a significant amount of money against the second tier, and we work down to the third and fourth tier.

The point here is to make a determination at the outset of where the greatest risk is and make sure that the most significant amount of resource is dedicated to those areas which have the greatest risk.

But, of course, risk is not the entire story.  What's also important is what is the need that is being satisfied, or what is the program that is being funded through the grants we're making.  Because these grant programs are very much project oriented, where what we're interested in doing is funding particular projects that advance the kind of performance standards and security measures that add real value in reducing risk.  This is not a block grant program; it is not an entitlement program.  We don't expect that year in and year out the amount of money is going to be the same in the way it would be, for example, with respect to Medicaid or Social Security.

Rather, what we're trying to do is fund multi-year projects based on how they best achieve our security goals, and, again, making money available on a basis that approximates what the highest risk/lowest risk array is.  That explains, for example, why you're going to see, as you evaluate our grant programs, that there is going to be a little bit of up and down each year, it's not going to be the same amount every year.  That reflects the fact that if in one particular year we decide to focus on some very important programs in one city that are multi-year programs we would not expect to fully fund those programs a second year.  The full funding occurs the first year and then we expect the funding to be expended during the course of two, maybe two and a half years thereafter, as the project is built out.

What I'm trying to convey here is we should not look at infrastructure protection funding as if it's a horse race, where every year we look at the winners and losers in terms of the purse that they take home.  If you want to do a horse race, go to Pimlico.  What we're about here is trying to identify projects that add the best value, and then make sure those projects are funded and then move to the next set of projects the next year, so that we continue to raise the level of security across all of the infrastructure, from sea to sea and from the norther border to the southern border.

Having laid out kind of our basic framework, let me talk a little bit about a couple of the major programs that we are announcing today.  The first is our ports program, our Port Security Grant Program.  We had $168 million available, appropriated by Congress in 2006 to fund this program.  And this was, as compared to over half a billion dollars of funding requested, came in from the ports.  So that will suggest to you that we had to obviously turn down many more applications than we funded because the demand was much greater than the supply of money.

By way of perspective, though, I can tell you that in the entire period of time, from 2002 to 2006, $874 million has been provided for port security funding.  And that is over and apart from the literally billions of dollars we have put into port security through the funding that we've given to the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection.  What I want to emphasize here is that port security funding that goes directly to the ports is only one component of a larger array of resources that we put into protecting our maritime domain.  A lot of the is the billions of dollars that goes into the Coast Guard funding -- which Coast Guard has the principal obligation to protect our ports -- and then of course, Customs and Border Protection, which is principally focused on examining and inspecting and scanning the cargo that comes into the ports.

What we did is with the help and guidance of the Coast Guard we basically identified a hundred seaports where significant risk is present.  We looked at things like cargo volume and the value of the cargo, the population of the surrounding area, the critical infrastructure that's located in a particular footprint of an individual port, and the economic impact that would be felt -- regionally and even nationally -- if a port were to be incapacitated through an attack.

Then we laid out a series of needs that we thought were important to have individual ports focus upon, security needs that we wanted them to address with their individual project funding requests.  One of our focuses was the possibility of a Cole-style attack.  As you'll recall in the year 2000, the USS Cole was attacked with explosives, an improvised explosive device that was placed in a small boat that was brought alongside the vessel.  This is the kind of attack that was recently identified as a potential threat in testimony before Congress by a representative of New York City.

So we asked the ports to look at measures that might be taken to protect against improvised explosive devices, either brought by sea or by land, that could devastate a port.  And we evaluated the value of the particular proposals that we were funding based upon how well they addressed this kind of very specific security concern that we are focused upon.

Finally, in evaluating individual proposals -- and, again, always against that initial array of risk that we use as our basic template -- we wanted to make sure that we were not duplicating efforts taken in other areas.  A number of the ports, for example, came up with proposals to put into effect various kinds of sensor systems that would give them a radar picture of the entire maritime domain, kind of a seaward facing radar system that would allow them to have a picture of all the vessels that are operating in the vicinity of the harbor.

While that's certainly a worthwhile goal, that happens to be the mission carried out by the Coast Guard, and many of the ports actually do have a system that accomplishes that mission that is operated and maintained by the Coast Guard, and which the Coast Guard and the Navy use as part of the perimeter protection of our ports.  So we didn't want to duplicate that by building a second system that would be run on a municipal basis -- in much the same way that we would not, for example, pay for a city to set its own air defense system, when we have the U.S. Air Force that's tasked with carrying out that mission.

So with that basic framework in mind, we did award a significant amount of money -- $168 million -- to the ports.  The first tier, Houston received $11,600,000, which totals their four-year funding to slightly over $76 million; L.A.-Long Beach received a little over $12 million, which totals their funding over the four years to over $91 million; and New York-New Jersey received $25,700,000, which totals their four-year funding to $77 million.

Because this reflects multi-year money, of course, a lot of this money is still in the pipeline and we expect to see the fruits of this investment not only this coming year, but in the years to come.

The second large category I'll talk about is transit security.  And, again, this covers intercity and intracity rail; it covers intercity bus and it covers ferries, as well.  We had $135 million that were distributed in transit security grants.  Again, the major grants went to -- a regional grant to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the tri-state area.  It was a little under $54 million, which over the four-year period brings us to about $150 million in grants for transit security to that region.  The National Capital Region around the District of Columbia received a little over $14 million, which brings their total to $38 million.  And San Francisco received $11 million, which brings its four-year total to $27 million.

Apart from these major infrastructure programs, we had money given out to numerous locations for perimeter grants, BZPP grants, Chemical Buffer Grants; there was money given for promoting security in our trucking industry, as well as for Amtrak, totaling up to almost $400 million.

Now, we're of course only a week away from the new fiscal year, and Congress has before it an appropriations bill which will provide additional funding for grants.  Looking back over the last four years, we've taken a deep breath and we've tried to learn some lessons about things that have worked and haven't worked since the beginning of these programs back in the period of 2002.

One of the lessons I think that's emerged is not only must we insist upon risk-based funding, where the law allows us to do it, but we have to get the funding guidance out as early as possible to the localities in the states so that they can work with us at an earlier point in the process to shape their project requests in a way that will maximize the value of the funding that they want to get.

One of the complaints I have heard over the last year is that as we've put the guidance out comparatively late in the year, it has put cities in the position of having to present a proposal not necessarily knowing whether the proposal is one that is the optimal proposal from our standpoint. And then they either get a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down.  What probably makes more sense is to get that guidance out early, to get their proposal in early, and then to have an opportunity to do at least one round of dialogue, where we can point them to things in the proposal that are good and things that are not so good, and allow them to reshape the proposal so that they can maximize the value of what they're requesting -- and that, of course, maximizes the amount of money out of the risked-based pool.

So in order to carry out that objective, this year we are going to announce the allocations and the grant guidance in the first quarter of the fiscal year -- that is to say, by the end of the calendar year.  That will be substantially in advance of what we've done in prior years and will allow cities and states to work with us during the second quarter to refine their proposals, and then we can get the money to them much more quickly than we've been able to do in the past.

All this is driving to a system for giving grants that is transparent, that does have some clear standards, which then allows us to hold jurisdictions accountable, and that give them the ability to shape their proposals in a way that will suit what we've set forth as standards, but will also make it easy for them to deal with their pressing security needs.

I'm going to ask Under Secretary Foresman to add a few words.

Under Secretary Foresman:  Thank you, Mr. Secretary.  Good afternoon.  Secretary Chertoff provided an overview of the overall objectives that we're seeking to achieve with our infrastructure protection grants this year.  And I would like to add a bit of detail in a couple of areas.

First, from a process standpoint.  Our infrastructure protection grants this year represent a major evolution in terms of our process.  The involvement of our operational components here in the Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard, Transportation Security Administration, as well as our other federal interagency partners such as the Federal Railway Administration, Maritime Administration and others in setting the priorities.

And I will tell you that it has provided valuable insight to the work that we've done.  For instance, the United States Coast Guard has worked hand-in-hand with local port operators to provide an additional level of detail in terms of vulnerability of our ports.  We better understand those vulnerabilities in our ports, and are better able to assess the proposals that are before us.

In addition, when you look across our other transit security programs, our intercity and our intracity rail, they represent, as the Secretary said earlier, an intuitive understanding, as well as an analytic understanding about the necessity of ensuring that we are addressing against the full range of risks from improvised explosive devices.

Secondarily on priorities, the Secretary has indicated that our goal has been to assess proposals against the local, state and national priorities.  And this is one thing that we very much want to underscore:  If everything is a priority, then nothing is a priority.  And we wanted to make sure that the dollars that are being expended at the local level in the ports, in the transit systems, on ferries, represent those priorities that they have identified, and those priorities are very much in consonance with our national goals and our overall national objectives.

Third, what will this funding provide, in terms of increased capability across America?  Well, for instance, let me run through the list of the types of things across the Port Security Program, the Transit Security Program, including inter- and intracity rail; bus; as well as ferry.  It's going to provide better equipment to be able to detect explosives; equipment to be able to detect chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons; canine assets, intrusion detection, both in the context of land and water -- we have to understand if these critical systems are being accessed improperly, and these intrusion detection devices will be critical to that; small patrol boats for harbors so that the work of the United States Coast Guard can be supplemented by that of state and local authorities in providing protection in the nation's ports; video surveillance equipment; access control and credentialing technology; gates and barriers -- both in the context of permanent gates and barriers as well as floating gates and barriers and ports, and fencing around critical facilities; communications equipment; GPS tracking equipment; and some of the newer things this year include operator protection to make sure, just as the nation's airlines' pilots are protected in the cockpit, we want to make sure that the operators of our critical infrastructure and our critical transportation systems are as well protected on their operating platforms; and kill-switch technology -- if we do have an unforeseen set of circumstances where an individual is able to take control of a ferry, a transit system, or a bus, that we're able to disable and stop that system before further harm can be done; and, of course, the three core competencies that we always look for:  planning, training and exercising.

Fourth, and probably critically important, these dollars are part of nearly $18 billion awarded to state and local entities over the past four years.  They should not be viewed in the context of a single year or a single program, just as the Secretary has said.  The guidance for these programs, just like the guidance from our Urban Area Security Initiative program and our state homeland security programs promote an integrated approach.

Let me give you two examples.  Houston, Texas:  In 2005, Houston, Texas received $35 million for port security.  This year, they requested $12.8 million.  And this year, they were funded for $11.6 million.  And over the course, as the Secretary has said, they have received nearly $91 million.  But what's important to note is that the $11.6 million that they receive this year, they will be able to partner with the nearly $35 million that they have received in Urban Area Security Initiative funds just in the Houston area alone.

Our second example is Atlanta, Georgia.  In 2005, they received $3.3 million in transit funds.  This year, they requested $2.3 million, and this year they will receive $2.1 million.  In addition, as a UASI city, Atlanta received $18.6 million in 2006, meaning that they have a wide range of resources in the context of their transit security programs, their port security programs, their Urban Area Security Initiatives and their state homeland security grant programs to provide towards their overall objectives and needs.

And, fifth and finally, let me close with this.  For all of our reporters here today, transparency is critically important, and the Secretary has made it clear to myself, to Assistant Secretary Tracy Henke and to our component operators that we are going to provide you a full and transparent view of what is going on in the grant process.  So accordingly, today, we will be prepared to address, one-on-one, specific questions about areas of the country who have received funds this year, in terms of the amount received this year, the amount requested, the amount received in previous years, and other dollars that are available to them for their homeland security activities.

Thank you.

Secretary Chertoff:  By the way, George and I decided we'd try to inject a little element of confusion today by wearing basically the same tie.  (Laughter.)

With that, we'll take a few questions.

Question:  Mr. Secretary, as you know, there was such a furor in May, when the grants, the UASI grants for New York and Washington were announced, and those cities felt like that they'd received a pretty substantial cut regarding -- from last year.  This year, the port grant for New York City, for example, has been quadrupled.  Is there any kind of cause and effect there?

Secretary Chertoff:  No.  In fact, one of the things -- I'm glad you asked the question, Laura, because one of the things that I want to emphasize is to separate our risk rankings from the way we necessarily project fund.

New York was ranked number one in risk with respect to the urban grants and is ranked number one with respect to the port grants.  The difference in the actual award depends on a number of considerations.  It depends upon the total amount of money that's available.  It also depends upon the particular projects sought to be funded.  The variations from year to year depend upon, for example, whether in a particular year there are really good projects that they're seeking to fund as opposed to a year in which the projects may frankly be less valuable.

So it doesn't reflect any change in the way we rank risk -- the risk is ranked the same with respect to all of these grant programs.  It reflects differences in either the particular projects for which funding is sought; what is already in the pipeline, in terms of projects, because, for example, Houston got $35 million last year, they've obviously got a lot of projects in the pipeline.  Not surprisingly, they asked for much less this year and, therefore, they got less this year.

It's that combination of risk plus the value of the particular project that gives you the variation in money from year to year.

Question:  Well, yes, but, I mean, people -- can you just say is there any kind of effort on your part to supplant or to appease cities that felt like they got the shaft three months ago?

Secretary Chertoff:  No, because, you see, what we're trying to do is move away from looking at grants as if it's, you know, every year it's a horse race and let's see who wins each race for each grant, because, as I said, if you want a horse race, you go to Pimlico.

If you look at this as a multi-year program -- and in the face of the infrastructure grants, it's multi-year money -- in fact, it would be extraordinary to see everybody getting the same amount of money every year, because what that would tell you is we were applying a mechanical cookie-cutter, instead of doing an individual project evaluation.

So that's why I've made a point of saying the risk does remain the same across all of the grants.  New York is in the highest risk category for infrastructure protection and ports, as it is for the Urban Area Security Initiative -- that's true of Los Angeles and Long Beach, as well.  What differs year to year are the particular projects that the communities are seeking to fund.  And also, when we fund multi-year projects, you'd expect that if we pay, for example, the full cost of building a fence over a period of three years, in year one you wouldn't expect us to pay the full cost again in year two and the full cost again in year three.

So it reflects the ebb and flow of funding for multi-year security programs.

Question:  Mr. Secretary, you talked about the change in the process of working with cities to help them come up with a better way of negotiating the grant-making process.  Does this apply to all of the grants, or just these type announced today, the ports and the intercity bus?

Secretary Chertoff:  No, we're going to do this this coming fiscal year for all the grants.  We're going to -- by getting the information about eligible funds and grant guidance out in the first quarter -- that is to say, by the end of this calendar year -- we'll be able to move that process of evaluating projects way up in the funding cycle, and that means we'll have an opportunity to do one turnaround.

Here's what I want to avoid having happen.  I don't want to have a community put together a proposal that they think hits the target, in terms of what we're looking for, and it turns out they miss the target and then they wind up getting basically zero credit for that particular proposal.  That smacks a little bit of what some people complained about is making it like a test.  The idea is to give them an opportunity to make a proposal, but then to have an ability to get back to them and say, hey, look, these parts of the proposal don't make sense for the following reason; these parts do.  And that enables them to reorder their proposals and their priorities to maximize what they ought to be getting, given what their risk is.

Question:  Will hopefully this decrease this misunderstanding and anger that, for example, Washington and New York officials felt this year?  Is that the goal?

Secretary Chertoff:  I hope it will increase understanding, and I hope by having more back and forth and more interactive discussion during the process -- because we'll have a little bit more time -- people may -- you're never going to make everybody happy.  There's always going to be some disappointment, because everybody sees their own needs and obviously wants to fully fund what they think is important.  But at least with this discussion, we can ensure that nobody feels that they misunderstood or they haven't had a fair opportunity to lay out the best case for what their requirements are in a fashion that gives us enough time to get the money out.

Pete.

Question:  Mr. Secretary, can I ask you about the way the money breaks down among these different programs -- $778 million to date, for example, for ports; $13 million to date for intercity rail transport.  Is that about the right ratio, do you think, or does it reflect more the fact that there's only so much you can do with rail, and do you sense there's more you can do with ports?

Secretary Chertoff:  Well, first let me say, Pete, that I think in the last couple of budgets we sent up, including this budget, I requested that Congress fund infrastructure protection programs as a whole and not break it down into individual categories such as ports or rail.  So that's really been a congressional decision. 

I'd say apart from that, even within the area where we do have discretion, part of what we're looking for, of course, is a project that makes a difference.  And part of what is important in a proposal is a demonstration that the proposal is going to achieve positive results in security.

So if you have an area of infrastructure where the proposals that are coming in don't really yield much in the way of positive results, or can't show a real positive benefit, sure, that's going to wind up impacting the funding.  But in general what we want to do is we want to open the door to proposals that give us the kinds of capabilities across the board, obviously tailored to the particular circumstances.  What works in the air domain doesn't necessarily work in the subway.  But we do want to make sure that we're adequately covering all of those, recognizing the difference in architecture for each of the systems we're trying to protect.

Question:  So, having said that, is $13 million to date for rail security -- would you like to spend a lot more but Congress won't let you, or does that reflect that there's only so much that you can do?

Secretary Chertoff:  I think rail security this year was $110 million, not $13 million.  I mean --

Question:  Thirteen billion, rather.  No, $13 million to date.

Under Secretary Foresman:  He's talking about the Amtrak, I believe.  

Secretary Chertoff:  If you're talking about -- Amtrak is $13 million.

Question:  Right, it was Amtrak I'm talking about.

Secretary Chertoff:  I would say this:  Obviously the more discretion we get across infrastructure, the more flexibility we have to make sure that we tailor the exact distribution of money in a way that best matches risk.  Where Congress divides it into categories, we're obviously going to have to follow the lanes in the road that Congress sets out.

Question:  I realize you weren't here during some of the early years when the first grants first went out, but can you explain why some of these figures appear to jump around so much and tell me whether you'd like to see a smoother arc?  Like a city like Wilmington, which got $5 million in '03 gets zero in '06; Louisville, zero in '03, $530,000 in '05.  It seems like there's some real spikes.  And does that -- is that a shortcoming of the program, as it's been administered?

Secretary Chertoff:  Let me, again, divide this into two categories.  At some level, of course, differences that relate to differences in the particular proposals that are made are to be expected.  We wouldn't expect a completely smooth number every year.

On the other hand, we did look back and we looked at the question of where we ranked cities by risk over a period of time.  And there, frankly, there shouldn't be a tremendous change year to year.  I mean, there might be a marginal change, depending on facts and circumstances, but the idea that you're going to have a radical reshuffling of risk every year strikes me as intuitively incorrect.

So one of the things we put a lot of emphasis on this year -- which is one of the reasons why it took a little bit more time to get the guidance out than we might have liked -- is to be really be comfortable with the risk rankings and to have a sense that the rankings were close to being what we wanted them to be going forward.  Now, we did get some input this year and we'll probably make some minor modifications for next year.  But the expectation is that starting next year our risk rankings are going to be relatively stable.

What's good about this is, first of all, it makes sense, and that's always a helpful thing when you're designing a program.  Second, it's predictable, it will give cities a confidence level that they know what their risk is year to year, and not that they're going into a giant lottery every year and they don't know where they're going to come out.  And, third, it's going to give us the opportunity to spend the time during the year focused on working with them on particular proposals as opposed to reinventing the risk ranking.

So I think what you're seeing over a period of years is, in a lot of respects, a refinement of the grant-making process from the very first cycle, when it was brand new and we were still new at evaluating risk and we didn't have any clear standards about what was homeland security spending.  So there were criticisms about people buying gymnasiums and leather jackets.  We've moved away from that systematically year by year, to a point now when we do have a relatively stable risk ranking, clearly defined capabilities that we are going to expect people are going to be funding, and then a process that is more transparent and quicker, which helps everybody get the money into the hands of the local and state officials.

Question:  I was going to say, to follow up, in the case of a city like Houston, were they essentially instructed to aim a little bit lower because they got such a big grant, or was that their intuitive read of the situation?

Secretary Chertoff:  No one was instructed -- people are given instruction about the kinds of capabilities that we are looking for, and that's what we've put out as our National Preparedness Goal.  We didn't tell anybody to highball or lowball.

But, again, here's where common sense plays a role.  If you've gotten multi-year funding for a number of major projects that are going to enhance security, common sense tells you that the next year you're not going to expect to be getting the same amount of money because you'll have addressed a lot of very significant needs and you're going to need a couple of years to actually make those projects work.  What we don't want to do is stick a lot of money in the pipeline and have it sit there for a couple of years, because the purpose here is to move everybody's level of security up as rapidly as we can and as efficiently as we can.

Question:  Chairman King suggested that you personally recognized that New York City did in fact get somewhat underfunded in the UASI process and that this new round of funding and a couple of others is your personal recognition and attempt to redress that.  And I believe what he said is you're moving in the right direction.  Is he wrong?

Secretary Chertoff:  I'm going to give you the answer I gave before, which is, my personal involvement in this was to make sure that it was disciplined, common sense-based and transparent.

I will say that I felt that the way in which we explained what we did with the urban area grants was not what it should have been.  It took me a while to make it clear to people that actually, if you looked at the amount of money that the New York metropolitan area got, including New Jersey -- which was a little less than a quarter of the total money -- that was essentially what it had been in the prior years.

But what I think it did underscore for me is the importance of making sure that what we do is not merely explained in terms of a lot of talk about process and peer review and stuff like that; but that it's actually explained in ways that are intelligible, because we do have a system here that makes a lot of sense, that does look at what the high risks are and that does set out a clear set of the kinds of things we want communities to address and then measures the money against that risk and against how closely the communities can meet the requirements that we set forth.

And once you understand that, I think it -- what it does is, it gives a sense of clarity to what we do that I think dispels a lot of the unhappiness over not just this past year, but, frankly, prior years, because if you go back and look at the press on almost every year of grants, there's been a lot of uncertainty and questions about whether it makes any sense.  And what we are driving to, and next year ought to culminate in, is a system that, first and foremost, makes sense in terms of what everybody agrees are the high risks and the security needs, and not one that makes everybody happy, because in my job I can't make everybody happy, there's never enough money to make everybody happy, because a dollar that goes to one community will always mean a dollar that doesn't go to another community -- but something that seems fair and sensible, which I think is what we do have an obligation to give the American people.

Question:  So, basically, you've explained it better for the Chairman and he's now happier?

Secretary Chertoff:  I don't think it's a question of my explaining it better to the Chairman.  I've explained I think to everybody -- chairmen and ranking members of all the relevant committees, appropriators -- what our philosophy here is.  And I think that as we continue to move forward in giving these grants out, the transparency and the common sense nature of what we do is ultimately what carries the day.  It's not a question of whether I'm persuasive or unpersuasive; the thing has to ultimately speak for itself.

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This page was last modified on September 25, 2006