Remarks by Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge to the U.S. Conference of Mayors

Release Date: 01/19/05 00:00:00

U.S. Conference of Mayors
Washington, DC
January 19, 2005

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.  Thank you very, very much.  Don, thank you for that very, very kind and very generous introduction.  Thank you very much for your very warm reception.  I'm certainly very pleased, the remaining 10, 12, 14 days as I serve as Secretary to have the opportunity to reappear and continue the conversation with some of the best allies that the Department has in working to prevent and detect a terrorist attack as well as preparing to respond and recover from one if it occurs and that's with the Conference of Mayors.  And so, I'm grateful for the invitation and very, very pleased to be with you.  

Don, I want to thank you for your work on our Homeland Security Advisory Council, particularly the work that you did on that task force, as we try to untie the Gordian knot.  I know we've talked a little bit later on -- that still has kept substantial dollars from flowing to the states and to the cities and ultimately, to the first responders and I do want to share a couple of thoughts on that.  I think the task force showed us the way ahead and now, we just have to take up the recommendations of that state and local task force on Homeland Security funding and move ahead with it.  

Good to see Mayor O'Neill, a great friend.  Thank you for the opportunity to work with you so closely and the many good things we did together.  We had some good times.  We were flying over that port in Long Beach.  I know many of you have those added responsibilities when you have a major maritime facility within your community.   And it's an added burden in one sense; it's an added economic stimulus in the other and I think it probably demonstrates that you can have physical security and economic security separate and apart from one another.  You need economic security to be physically secure and you need physical security in order to assure your economic future.  So, that was a great visual lesson flying over that area.

I see my friend Mayor Menino is here.  Mayor Menino, you did a great job in strengthening security in your city during the Democratic National Convention and you've done a great job in securing your city for all the other events that have been hosted there.  I'm just going to tell you, you're not going to be able to do a good job securing Tom Brady from the Steelers pass rush on Sunday night.  I just want you to know that. I had to say that.  You know I did.  Mayor Daly is just wishing his Bears were there.

I also want to thank Mayor Daly publicly as well.  We've done quite a bit of work together and I've had the opportunity, again, to meet with so many of you and to see how you've used, in a very appropriate and a very progressive way, some of the federal dollars that you have been charged to take and to implement measures that make your communities more secure.  I had a chance to visit the new operations center in Chicago, state of the art.  Speaking to what a lot of you have done, in addition to Mayor Daly, is you take those funds and you build an infrastructure that will not only help your cities respond to a terrorist event, but also help your cities and the surrounding areas respond to a natural event, a horrible criminal event, a major accident.  

I just had a brief conversation with Mayor Young, Bob Young from Augusta.  That horrible chemical spill, the experience that -- the surrounding communities were affected here just in the past month or so.  And he related that there was -- a good news story in such a horrible, horrible event is that they were trained on a lot of the equipment, they were able to secure it through federal dollars, was rushed to the scene to mitigate the damage and the loss there.

So, we've done a lot together.  As Don has pointed out, we certainly have a lot more work to do, but I think the foundation is strong and I will assure you that I will remind my successor of one of my favorite slogans that we used internally, one of my favorite mottos, that the homeland is secure when the hometowns are secure.  And you can't secure the homeland unless you continue to work with the mayors and the first responders.  So, I thank you again for the opportunity to share these thoughts with you.  As you know, tomorrow, we celebrate the inauguration of President Bush.  In his first address, he said, and I quote, “America has never been united by blood or birth or soil.  We are bound by ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds, lift us above our interests, and teach us what it means to be citizens.”

All of you represent diverse cities of different sizes, unique locations, and often times, different and specific needs.  Yet you, we, all of us are united by something even greater than the communities we serve.  We are bound by the ideals of one great country and we all share the tremendous responsibility to protect it.

It is very clear to me -- we said this from the day we opened the doors at Homeland Security -- that protecting the homeland must be a national effort.  It can not be simply and exclusively a federal one.  You can not secure the country from inside the Beltway.  Hopefully, you can find and provide the leadership, the dollars, set standards, help you build the infrastructure, but we need to partner.  We've developed a good, strong partnership now and I'm very optimistic of the ability to strengthen that partnership in the months and the years ahead.  

The attacks of September 11th brought forth a unity, a purpose and a strength in our country that I think terrorists underestimated.  Since 9/11, mayors have become a symbol of that strength to the citizens you represent and three years later, mayors continue in their communities to be the most reassuring voice for citizens across this country when it comes to steps taken to combat international terrorism.

Mayors continue to be at the front lines working to carry out our Homeland Security mission.  It's in our mission statement, but it's also in your heart and on your mind to preserve our freedoms, to protect America, to secure the homeland.  Our collective responsibility is to prevent, prepare for, and respond to a terrorist attack or any other emergency that may come our way.  Our job is to be as prepared, as ready as possible.  

Mayors have always held the responsibility to protect their cities as their number-one priority and after 9/11, there was an added dimension to the safety and security of that responsibility, an added dimension of a different kind of threat that you had to help combat.

Our goal at the department has been to forge partnerships with you and get you what you need as quickly as possible to protect your citizens and your way of life.  Now these partnerships are stronger than any that we've had in the past, as Don pointed out, and I'd like to think the partnerships are based not always on agreement.  We come from different perspectives, different jurisdictions.  It's not important that we always agree.  It's important that we always get down to see if we can -- sit down to see if we can resolve those agreements.

We have a mutual goal.  It's in our collective interest as a country to continue to sit down and identify ways that we can mutually get to our mutual goal, to our mutual satisfaction.  These partnerships are based on mutual cooperation, collaboration, and, I say is very important, mutual respect.

We have a great example of that type of collaboration right here with Mayor Williams in Washington, D.C.  He and his team are doing an extraordinary job helping the federal government, as well as the other agencies and political jurisdictions within the national capital region prepare for the events surrounding the inaugural.

I will tell you that at our joint field office that we've set up to oversee the inaugural security program, there are over 100 agencies from the federal, state, and the local government working together and I had a chance to visit with some of them and talk to some of the federal and the state and the local people, particularly Mayor Williams' people, and his law enforcement communities connected with the state and federal, particularly the federal.  

His operation centers are connected.  The video surveillance that they have at appropriate venues is shared.  Again, a terrific model where everyone is involved, working together, coordinating, sharing information, sharing equipment, and sharing people.  The same is true of protecting our country, but again, we have accomplished a great deal, much of it because of you, to make America safer and more secure.  

Most recently, we announced our National Response Plan.  This new roadmap for response and recovery efforts is the first unified national response plan of its kind and it embodies our nation's commitment to the concept of one team, with one purpose: the security of our nation.  And I'd like to think that the road we took within the Department of Homeland Security to draft, to edit, to modify and finally, to complete the National Response Plan highlights the kind of unity and particularly, the kind of partnership required to protect the homeland.

From the very start, from day one, before we put pen to paper, everyone had a seat at the table: governors and mayors, law enforcement officers and firefighters, emergency managers and public health officials.  Great credit is due and thanks to be given to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, your staff, and all of you who participated and collaborated on this very significant achievement.

The idea is fairly easy to express.  It's not always easy to execute.  If we're in this together, if we're going to have a National Response Plan, didn't it make sense to put all the parties responsible for the protection of this country at the same table so that the plan we designed was something, again, of mutual design, that we better understood each other's roles and responsibilities and at the end of the day, it's something we not only had our fingerprints on, but we accepted?  

It's critically important over the next year, with your leadership and that of governors, that we implement this plan in emergency operation centers and state operation centers all around the country.  But it worked because all of you partnered with us.  You've also helped your states draft their statewide strategies.  You've helped adopt mutual aid agreements that share resources and you've worked with us to make sure the funding process provides the dollars to buy the tools the first responders need.

I want to give you a call to action, make a request, and that's to build on the work that Don and his committee did when we put together the task force dealing with Homeland Security funding.  Money has been a constant point of contention and of refrain and understandably so.  There is no disagreement that we need additional dollars to our state and local communities.  There's no disagreement there.

The problem is that we already have accumulated, because of the '02 -- fiscal year '02, fiscal year '03 and '04, about $4.6 billion that has yet to be distributed to you.  Now, I expect that you all want it, you could all use it, there's a need for it.  So, here we are.  The federal government has authorized and appropriated these dollars and unfortunately, those dollars can not be accessed, given a particular provision or law that was passed in the early 90s because you need -- those dollars could only be used to reimburse communities and reimburse states.

That's obviously pretty difficult to do when you've got a cash flow problem.  As mayors, when the economy is sluggish, you don't generate the kind of revenue that you want.  And so, Don and his team said "There's certain specific things that we can do at the state and local level to push these dollars back to the states and to the cities."

And so, I just encourage you to take a look at that report, sit down and work either with your state legislators, your local counsels, and your governors to do whatever you need to do and the report gives you some suggestions to break that logjam.

One of the other recommendations that Don and his team put on the table for us, which we thought was a very appropriate one, was to give the cities and the states a year to break that maze of regulations and laws and local ordinances.  You go back and access more quickly that 4 billion-plus dollars.

So, that particular provision that restricts access to that based on your ability to simply be reimbursed has been waived for the '05 funding.  So, the dollars will be streamed into your communities, I believe, much more quickly this year than it has in previous years.  So, we've got a window here of about a year.  That provision that you need, that the dollars can only be issued based on a reimbursement principle, has been waived for a year.

And I'm just going to encourage you, at the beginning of this year, to do whatever is necessary so you can access in excess of $4 billion that we're ready to deliver to you.  And I think if you follow the task force recommendations, you can see that much of it will be sent out to you rather quickly once you do.

I also want to thank you, again, as an organization and sometimes as individuals, in support of many of the other broader national initiatives that we've taken to secure the country.  Those of you who have a maritime facility in your communities have certainly been strong proponents and supporters of the Container Security Initiative, where we actually start inspecting containers and the manifest on foreign shores.  

Those of you who have border communities have been generally very supportive of US-VISIT and you've done a great deal of work with us to strengthen our border and port security while we, obviously, want to facilitate a legitimate flow of goods and services and people.

You've helped us with our Homeland Security Information Network.  You know, I think this is one of the most significant information-sharing initiatives of the new department, internet-based to the major cities and to all of the states and their Homeland Security advisors.

Again, we still are not to the point where we've got that information flow as consistent as it needs to be, but again, in a short period of time, within a year-and-a-half, working with the FBI, we've sent out nearly 200 bulletins and advisories.  We have some of the major cities actually linked to our Homeland Security operations center and again, that's a continual effort that we will not only sustain, but build upon in the years ahead within our department.

We thank you for your work on the National Infrastructure Protection Plan.  We still have identified literally -- I think there was an article that said our list is about 80 or 90,000 long and we understand that.  We understand that you take a look at your cities and your communities and see a variety of targets, large and small.  

We have to prioritize within that long, lengthy list and we'll be working with you and your security professionals in the months and the years ahead as we prioritize that critical infrastructure, particularly in the area of chemical, telecommunications, energy, nuclear.  There's certain things that just jump right out at us that we need to work and make secure -- as secure as possible.  These are the priorities and we'll be working with you on that.

We appreciate your support of the interoperability standards that we have created.  We have more work to do.  We now have an office of interoperability and comparability.  We know what happened after -- on 9/11.  Nozzles couldn't be hooked up unless there was an adaptor, different oxygen tanks couldn't be hooked up because of slight differences in the manufacturing.  

So, we just have to make sure that we continue to work together to identify the priorities that your first responders have so that the equipment that they use to communicate or to save lives, the community can -- communication equipment, protection equipment is interoperable and comparable. So, in the era of mutual aid when you rush to each other's aid as families do, as friends do, as cities do, there will be no obstacle to the integration of not only the equipment, but the men and women who rush to help one another.

I would also like to thank you again for your commitment in the past two years to work very, very closely with our Office of Domestic Preparedness and the individuals that serve there: Sue Mencer, Ed Bettenhausen and Josh Filler.  You know, they believe in you, they believe in your mission, and believe that we have to continue to be as connected or even better connected in the years ahead than we've been over the past two years.

Almost 50 years ago, during a time of uncertainty about another war, the Cold War, another president spoke a sentence very familiar to all Americans.  John Kennedy said in his inaugural address, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."

President Kennedy understood then, as we understand today, the character of America.  We hold our freedom tightly, and we will not let anyone take it from us.  We have a tremendous responsibility, a shared responsibility to protect our great nation and uphold the ideals of liberty of which both President Kennedy and President Bush have spoken. United, we will prevail, and freedom, for generations to come, will continue to flourish.

On a personal note, to those mayors whose cities I've visited over the past two years with you, your police chiefs and your fire chiefs, I can't tell you how good it is, regardless of the political affiliation, to know that when we've sat down to discuss what your community needed or what you needed to help your first responders or to add additional levels of security, we were united in goal, we were united in our purpose.  

And frankly, I think we look back at the past few years and we've been united in achieving far more success than some people thought or could have imagined at the outset.  I encourage you, as I will encourage my successor, to remain -- to remind ourselves every single day that the homeland is secure when the hometown is secure. And I want to thank you for helping us, at least for the first two years, make great strides toward that goal.

Thank you very much.

###

This page was last modified on 01/19/05 00:00:00