Remarks by Secretary Michael Chertoff at the National League of Cities Congressional City Conference

Release Date: 03/14/06 00:00:00

Washington, D.C.
National League of Cities
Congressional City Conference
March 14, 2006

SECRETARY CHERTOFF:  Thank you.  Thank you for that very warm welcome.  It's good to be here with the National League of Cities.  I've also had an opportunity to see some old friends that I've gotten to work with during this first year of my tenure as Secretary of Homeland Security.  

I want to thank Jim Hunt, the president of the National League of Cities, and Don Borut, the Executive Director for a warm welcome.  Pat McClure who is on our Homeland Security Advisory Committee, the mayor of Charlotte, invited me down to see a way in which a really top notch, modern city integrates all of its emergency response and law enforcement in a single team effort.  And I think that's a good kicking off point for talking to you about what I want to discuss today, which is the way in which we can further our partnership with cities all over the country along the whole range of challenges we face in promoting our homeland security.

And, of course, homeland security, as you all know, is part of a spectrum.  Prevention is number one.  If we can prevent a problem, that's the best outcome.  And some problems we can prevent, some you can't, like hurricanes.

Protection.  If we can protect against a problem when it hits, if we can minimize the vulnerability, that's a good act.  

And finally, response and recovery.  When we can't prevent something and when our protection doesn't render us invulnerable, then we've got to be able to respond and recover in a way that mitigates the damage.

And that's the challenge of homeland security.  The challenge of the whole spectrum of dealing with all hazards, whether they be man-made hazards or natural hazards.

We live in a time when I think the challenges that we face seem perhaps greater than any we've ever faced in our history.  Modern weapons, modern science, although modern science is a great tool, has also given us modern weapons.  

And modern weapons give even individual terrorists a tremendous amount of leverage in wreaking damage and havoc in our society.  If you go back and look at London on July 7th and you see how a handful of individuals basically creating explosives in a bathtub, could go and disrupt one of the world's great metropolitan transit systems.

We have to consider hazards at our ports, at our airports, at our land borders.  So we've got a whole range of new challenges with much more powerful weapons that can be used against us.  And yet at the same time, nature once again proved to us last year that she can unleash a fury that overtakes virtually anything human beings can do themselves short of dropping a hydrogen bomb.  

And when you look back on Hurricane Katrina, you consider 90,000 square miles impacted by a single storm, which, by the way, was not the most powerful storm we've ever had in the Atlantic.  The most powerful storm I think was Wilma, which came later last year.

But 90,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of Great Britain.  770,000 people displaced, and many more temporarily evacuated.  That is a movement of population that exceeds any we've had in American history except for the dust bowl.  But the dust bowl took place over decades, and this was really a matter of days.

118 million cubic yards of debris.  That's more than Hurricane Andrew and 9/11 combined.  Eleven times as many homes destroyed as Hurricane Andrew, more than twice the amount of debris as generated in the four Florida hurricanes of 2004.

When you look at these statistics, you recognize that on top of the terrorism challenges which have become so real to us in the wake of September 11th, we still have to contend with nature, which maybe once ever hundred years will come along and deal us a blow, a catastrophic blow, the likes of which we haven't seen before.

So I want to talk to you a little bit today about addressing some of the challenges with you that we face in our communities and our cities all across the country.

Natural hazards, natural disasters and catastrophic events, and also another challenge, which I think is not the same type of challenge, but in its own way, is also really straining and stressing our municipal and local communities, and that's the challenge of illegal migration.

Well, let's talk a little bit about catastrophic events.  Hurricane season is approaching.  It's less than 90 days away.  I don't know what it has in store for us, but I know that we lived through three successive storms in the last year that really broke all records.  

In addition to Katrina with its massive dislocation, huge amount of impact on the city of New Orleans, which as you know is still laboring under the damage, very substantial damage caused by the break in the levies, in addition to that, we had Rita.  

Rita, although it could have been worse, caused an enormous evacuation in Texas.  At one point, millions of people were on the move.  And that enormously stressed not only the cities that were the location of the evacuation, but as important, all the cities that received the evacuation.  

You see, one of the lessons I think we have learned from last year's hurricanes is, we've got to look at the challenge of the catastrophic event, not only at the point where the catastrophe hits, but in all the areas around that point that are going to receive the collateral or cascading effects of that catastrophe.

When we have a major event, whether it be a terrorism event or a natural disaster, that causes a lot of people to move out of a particular area, they're going to go someplace.  And a lot of them are going to go to your cities or your towns, and you're going to have to be able to deal with that challenge.  

So one dramatic change we've made in the wake last year's hurricanes and in anticipation of this hurricane season and whatever else is coming in the course of this coming year, is we're looking now at planning not only for managing the emergency in the location where the emergency occurs, but managing the emergency all over the country.

We're working with the Red Cross now to make sure we can identify their shelters in advance, to make sure we can put people in those shelters so we can start to register people and get them their FEMA benefits as soon as possible.

We're building a contract that will give us the capacity through a contractor to deal with many more times the registrations by telephone than we were able to deal with last year.  We’re looking to have a surge capacity of 200,000 registrations a day.

We're looking to work with state and localities to give them more flexibility in terms of debris removal, so that when you are faced with the aftermath of a powerful catastrophe or a powerful disaster, we give you a better range of options in terms of cleaning up your streets and getting back to work, a range of options that may include the Army Corps of Engineers, but also will encourage you to use your local contractors, because they are often more responsive, cheaper, and they start to give some of the economic energy back to local merchants and local contractors, which is a very important element in rebuilding cities.

We're looking at creating better communications packages we can bring to you when you're afflicted in the course of an emergency.  Another great lesson last year is, nothing works if you don't know what's happening.  

If you don't have real situational awareness, and the real ability to communicate about the situation, the best decisions in the world are not going to get made, because you're not going to know what the facts are.

Part of that is making sure we all share a common operating picture, but part of it is making sure we simply have the hardware that works when a storm or some other catastrophe blows down all the wireless towers, destroys all the communication centers, and leaves us with satellite phones that are only an imperfect means of communication.

So here again, we're working on a June 1 deadline, getting much more robust communications packages that we can put into the field, put in the operations centers, using our airplanes and our Coast Guard cutters as relays so we can work around problems with wireless systems that go down, and even putting reconnaissance teams into the field that can help us get real eyes on the ground in terms of what is happening real time, so we don't have to rely upon the media to tell us what is actually happening in a major catastrophe.

But there's more that we have to do than simply create these kinds of capabilities, which are the basic capabilities.  We've also got to talk about planning.  Because one great lesson that I take away from last year's hurricanes is, the better the plan, the better the reaction.  

That's not to say that any plan survives first contact with the enemy, as the military says.  But what it is to say is the better the plan and the better the training and the exercising, the better we are at adapting ourselves when the situation starts to change.

One of the things that we did right after Hurricane Katrina was respond to the President's mandate that we go out to 50 states and 75 major urban areas and sit down and start to look at evacuation and emergency plans to see where things were being adequately covered, where there were shortfalls, what we can do to help localities plug gaps, what capabilities localities and states have, and what capabilities we need to bring to the table.

This is a very, very high priority for us.  Our new preparedness directorate, the whole function of which is to work with you to help you get prepared by tying planning, grant making, training and exercising in a single, comprehensive package.  That new preparedness directorate has made as job number one the process of getting this evacuation and emergency plan evaluation underway.

Our first deadline was February 10th when we asked every state to come back with a self-evaluation on all the critical elements of evacuation and emergency planning.  I'm pleased to say we met that deadline.  The states did respond.  We saw some greens, we saw some yellows, we saw some reds.  

We are now in the process of being in the states, working with the states and with local leaders, to validate those plans, to look at the shortfalls, to discuss what the capabilities are that we need to be able to supply in case there's an emergency.

We've also brought the Department of Defense much more closely into the process of planning, precisely because when there is a shortfall of capability, we need to be able to deploy as quickly as possible, either through the National Guard or through some other resource, those unique capabilities that only the military can bring in a time of extreme emergency.

Now I want to be clear about this.  There is no interest in supplanting civilian authority or mayors and governors with military commanders.  This is designed to be activity that is in support of state and local responders.  Our fundamental core principle in the national response plan has been, is, and will remain that emergency operations are best managed at the lowest possible level of government.

This is not because we are trying to shirk responsibilities, because we recognize that you are best situated to know your population, to know your traffic management, to know your geography and to know your needs.  

But I also know, and I think you also know, that there are times that you get overwhelmed.  And that's when we do have to be prepared to be able to support you.  

But we don't want to just come in and do it our way.  We want to come in and do it with you as partners so we can do it your way, so we can understand exactly where we add value, so we can be respectful of the importance of, the Constitutional importance of local and state primacy, but that so we can be effective in responding and even anticipating your needs when necessary.

I actually have a lot of confidence that we're going to be able to do this much better this year than we were able to do in prior years.  One of the things that we're going to try and do to jumpstart this process is push more of our planning and preparedness into regional fora, so that you are closer to the people who are doing the planning and the preparedness activity.  

Using our FEMA regions as a kind of headquarters or core cells, we're going to be adding preparedness people, and we're going to be bringing some military planners in, so we can build comprehensive plans with mayors and governors close to the ground in the various FEMA regions that we have, and of course in the National Capital region, which has certain special requirements and certain special characteristics.

And one of the things I know you'll be pleased to hear is that the person who's going to be leading this effort is George Foresman, our new Under Secretary for Preparedness, someone who has long roots in the local homeland security and emergency management community, who served both Governor Gilmore and Governor Warner of Virginia as a senior Homeland Security official, who comes to the table when I meet with him, always taking your perspective and asking, you know, what is it that we need to do to make sure our stakeholders, our state and local officials are fully involved at every step of the process?  

In fact, on Friday, I met with a number of representatives of organizations of state and local responders, emergency managers, police officials, as we talked about how we are going to implement our lessons learned from Katrina, to make sure that all of our implementation is done in lockstep with state and local partners really understand how we need to adapt all of our plans to the particular challenges of all of the very many regions and localities in this country.

I also want to ask you to work with me to challenge our populous, our public, to do what they need to do in order to get prepared.  I think you all know that the common doctrine in emergency response is, people need to have 48 to 72 hours of supplies on hand, because they may not be able to count on emergency responders getting to them within that period of time.

And there's no question, if you look at any of the catastrophes we've had, those who were prepared or did have food and water and medicine and a radio and lights, did do better if they had to wait 48 hours for a rescue or for help to arrive.  

Those who had a plan, who knew where they should meet if they were separated, families, you know, scattered all over the place, who knew where they would go if the had to evacuate, and they knew where their -- you know, they had relatives waiting, and they knew how to get to the relatives.  Those people did better than those who simply hadn't planned and then had to wait for a rescue.

In fact, I will not only suggest that it's in everybody's self-interest to do this kind of planning and preparedness, but that it is a civic obligation.  We all know, and we certainly saw it dramatized --

(Applause.)

We all know, and we certainly saw it dramatized last year, that there are many people who can't help themselves.  There are those who are infirm, who were in hospices or nursing homes and hospitals.  And for those people, of course, I must say, those who operate those hospitals, those who operate those homes, have a legal and moral responsibility to take care of the people who are committed to their care and in their trust.

(Applause.)

Then there are those who are able-bodied, who have cars, who have money, and who choose not to evacuate.  Those people not only hurt themselves, but they hurt those who don't have cars who are too poor to help themselves.  Because what they do is they distract responders who otherwise could focus on those who can't help themselves, and they divert them to missions to help those who could help themselves.  

And that's why I say it's a moral responsibility.  If you can get yourself out of harm's way, when you do that, you're not only helping yourself and your family, you're helping the person who can't get themself out of harm's way.

If we can get people who are able to evacuate and have the means to do it, to do that job, then we can go take our resources and move those who don't have the means to evacuate and who don't have the money to evacuate.

So I think we've got to challenge people to bear in mind their responsibility to their fellow citizens when they make these decisions.

Finally, I also want to say, although I've talked about evacuation, we have to be sensible in our own planning about what we ask people to do.  In a hurricane when you have a flood or you have a major windstorm, evacuation makes a lot of sense.  

But sometimes evacuation doesn't make sense.  There are certain kinds of hazards where sheltering in place or staying home may make sense.  

We've heard a lot of talk about avian flu.  Clearly, bird flu is now spreading among birds and even domestic poultry in many parts of the world.  I think every day you open the paper, you see this out there.

I don't know what is going to happen in this country, but I can say with some reasonable degree of confidence that there's a pretty good likelihood at some point we're going to get at least a wild bird in this country that has an avian flu infection.  We may even get domestic birds that are infected.

Now the good news is, we have dealt with this challenge before.  The Department of Agriculture from time to time deals with major animal outbreaks, whether it be bird flu, maybe not H5N1, but some other kind of bird flu, or mad cow or something of that sort.  USDA has protocols.  Your states have protocols.  We know how to deal with these things.  We do not have to panic, and we should not panic.  

But we need to be prepared.  We need to have a plan.  We need to know that if an event were to occur, even in a domestic poultry flock or in a number of wild birds, we would have to have answers about what people should do and what people shouldn't do, how people can take reasonable precautions to protect themselves, but also to assure people that they need not stop eating chicken, for example, if it's cooked properly.

And I'm going to ask you in this regard to pay special attention to making sure your public health officials and your homeland security advisors and your emergency responders are tightly connected in planning for this.  Because this is truly an area where the consequences may very well be as much driven by our response as by the actual onset of a bird flu.

If, of course, it were to become a human-to-human transmission, and I emphasize that we haven't seen that kind of serious situation occur yet.  It may never occur.  But if it were to happen, there would be even more pressure to make sure we were properly planned and properly exercised to deal with the problem in a way that's effective but that doesn't wind up doing a lot of collateral damage.

And so I'm going to ask you to continue to stay tuned to Secretary Leavitt, who is going around the country talking about the public health issues, to Secretary Johanns, who's talking about what we have to do from an agricultural standpoint, and to my department, as we talk about all the other things we have to consider in terms of our critical infrastructure, our public safety, our ability to continue to provide essential services, all of which would become challenges if we faced an epidemic or even a pandemic.

Finally, let me turn to a third challenge.  And that has to do with illegal migration.  For some of you, of course, this is something that's very much on the forefront of your mind, because if you're in Phoenix or Tucson or San Diego or Laredo, you are seeing this as a problem that people are talking about from day to day.

But it's actually now an issue for everybody all over the country, in Iowa, in my home state of New Jersey, in Virginia.  People are beginning to see the effects of migration, and they're asking themselves, how do we deal with this challenge?

Well, I will tell you that this has been a problem that has been building for 20 years.  I remember in the early eighties, and the early nineties, going down to the border.  I was, you know, a prosecutor in New York and New Jersey, but they took us down to the border, and even then, there were tremendous challenges with the illegal migrants.

Now, of course, we overlay on top of that concern about national security threats, about whether terrorists could come across our borders, either sneaking through ports of entry or coming in between the borders.

We are determined, and this President is determined to tackle this problem and turn it around.  And I'm going to tell you how we're doing it.  First, for the first time, we have integrated our approach, looking not only at putting more boots on the ground, but looking at technology, fencing, and what do we do with people once we catch them.

Because up until recently, we haven't had the resources or the ability to turn everybody that we apprehend back across the border or send them back to their home country.  We've had to release a number, a large number on bail, and of course they never come back.  That's demoralizing, and it's wrong.

So we are turning all those things around.  We are putting more border patrol on the border.  Fifteen hundred this past year, 1,500 in the President's 2000 budget, which will get us up to almost 14,000, almost a 50 percent increase in the last few years.

We are finally completing the San Diego border fence, which languished for years in litigation and which I was able to get jumpstarted under new legislation that gave me the ability to cut through a lot of legal maneuvering and get us to start to build that fence.

In short order, we will be putting out a proposal to get an integrated, high tech approach to getting total visibility at the border, using some of the tools the military uses:  Satellites, UAVs, modern sensors, which will give our enhanced border patrol the ability to intercept people more quickly.

And finally, we are now on a path to ending catch-and-release and making it catch-and-return.  Every single person caught at the border who is here illegally, apprehended, detained and sent back to where they came from.  And I think when we get that, that's a big step.

(Applause.)

Now I don't want to underestimate the challenge here, but I want to give you some sense of how we're going about doing this.  Not only do I track this every week, but we, as we identify roadblocks to some of these issues, we send teams out to break down those roadblocks.  

And we have some significant challenges.  Our ability to detain family members, for example, was hampered by the lack of available space to detain whole families.  And very quickly after the illegal smugglers realized that we couldn't detain families because we didn't have the space, they started to actually rent children so they could take them across the border to create fake family groups to get the families released.  I mean, these criminal organizations are nothing if not very skilled at figuring out what the vulnerabilities are and working through them.

So we're going to beat them, because what we're going to is we're going to build a facility that can even hold families.

There are challenges because some countries won't take their illegal migrants back.  Many of them are cooperative, some are not.  I'm going to push those countries.  If necessary, I'm going to name and shame those countries.  If countries won't take their illegal migrants back --

(Applause.)

If countries won't take their illegal migrants back, they ought to pay a price.  

Finally, we've got to do something about worksite enforcement.  And I think there are two paths that we have to take at the same time, because we want to be fair, but we also want to be effective.

Fairness suggests we have to roll out our ability to allow employers to verify the legal status of their employees.  It's got to be easy.  If we make it difficult, then we're really putting stumbling blocks in the way of achieving our own goals.  

So there's a substantial amount of money in the President's budget for 2007 to allow us to roll out and expand what we call Basic Pilot, which is a computerized method of checking to see the legal status of workers.  When we get that built, we will be able to give employers a convenient and easy way to carry out their responsibility to make sure they are hiring people who are legal.  

But at the same time, having done that, we really have to hold them to it.  We have to build sanctions, and we have to build enforcement mechanisms that will really hold to account those who choose not to take the path of the law.

We are building dozens of additional enforcement teams to go out and do worksite enforcement.  We're working with Congress on enhanced sanctions that would be easier to administer and tougher, that would really work to create an incentive for legal compliance.

When we build this dual-track system, easier ways to check and comply with the law, and tougher sanctions for violating the law, we will then strike another significant blow for controlling this major problem which is illegal migration and illegal penetration of our borders.

(Applause.)

When I took this job a little over a year ago, I was a sitting federal judge.  I wasn't a judge for that long, about 18 months.  But people used to say to me, well, why would you want to give up a lifetime job in order to take this job?  And I didn't realize until a couple of weeks ago that really every year in this job is a lifetime.

(Laughter.)

So in essence, maybe I traded up.  I do have a difficult job.  But you have difficult jobs.  You know, I, like everybody else, I live in a city, I live in a town.  

I spent most of my life living in cities and towns.  And I know the toughest job is being a local official, because every single day when you're at the supermarket, if you're, you know, out walking the dog, people come up to you, and they have real problems to complain about, and they want it to be fixed right now.

So I have a very keen appreciation of the very big challenges you all face.  And I want to thank you for the fact that you've taken on what is often thankless role, which is to manage the kind of the tip of the spear in government, which is local government, municipal government and city government.

I want to make your job easier.  I want to work with you.  We have huge challenges in terms of security and response.  We are making progress.  I think we're better at planning.  There's a lot of things we have done together that frankly the public doesn't always notice.  But we also have a lot more to do.

I look forward in everything we do to continue to do it with you as stakeholders and partners, listening to you, empowering you, working with you, lending you our capabilities, but always remembering that the first, most significant level of government in terms of people's day-to-day lives, is the government that they touch locally.  

And our job always has to be to empower you and to assist you, never to get in your way, and never to shove you aside.

So with that, I look forward to working with you.  I thank you for inviting me to speak to you at this conference, and I look forward to a very productive year of getting ourselves prepared and doing the right thing.

Thank you.

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