at what we're funding, very good intentions. what's the bottom line? nlts th unless that structure is hit, you're not going to see the savings. we're not doing enough for the projects to add up. you may get one or two here. you want to make big changes. way have to look at how to reduce the risk not through paying for it but building better and appropriately so that we reduce the costs on the front end. >> thank you. >> mr. o'malley. >> first of all, let me begin by complimenting you on your leadership and establishing a new partnership with the hispanic association of colleges and universities to develop course work for latino students to promote educational opportunities with fema in the field of emergency management. i thank you. you're setting a very, very positive example.

recognizing the budget constraints and everything that you've said in response to some of the other questions, i want to raise my concerns about the national security grant program, particularly as it pertains to the ports. already ports, security funding is down by 57% in this current fiscal year. and without a dedicated stream as has been stated, they would have to compete for funding wit transit cities, states and there's a possibility they would not get the attention that they need. and study after study has shown that any kind of a terror attack on the ports would be disastrous, not only to los angeles but to the entire

country. for example, a study called risk analysis in 2007 says that even if the harbor, referring to l.a. long beach were closed for only 15 days, the authors concluded that cost to the port would spiral to 150 million while the wider economic consequences would be in the billions. so this is something -- an area that we may not want to leave to chance and to state and local governments. having served in local governments, there's this belief and it could be argued that maritime security is really a federal issue, not a local or state issue. and the focus is always been from the perspective to deal with local -- state and local jurisdictions. so there's also the concern that state governments lack the personnel and the expertise to evaluate maritime risk or

determine how ports could be prioritized against other homeland security priorities. so in the event, a worst case scenario that it plays out and that ports do not receive the attention that they need through these grants do not get that money, given the importance of securing the ports of what would be the backup plan to make sure that they are protected against a terrorist attack? >> i'll make myself popular with a lot of folks when i say this. i keep hearing this that we can't trust state and local governments and ports and transit to work as a team. yet in a disaster, that's exactly what's going to have to

happen. but we can't trust and work as a team to come up with funding strategies. i can tell you that secretary n napolitano is going to make this a key. we look at the ports as our key transportation assets. the question is if we allocate the money based on each one of these groups, are we building national preparedness or are we doing things in a singular fashion that don't add up to national preparedness? and, again, i've seen a lot of arguments back and forth. i've seen a lot of money spent. i'm not sure the investment strategy always led to national preparedness. i'm not sure it's always going towards the things we're saying it's going to. i'm not going to single out and stha is one particular area. honestly, you saw the articlesment i have to deal with it.

we're buying ice machines. all right? and these programs. is that a national investment strategy? so my question is, if we don't trust states and local governments and ports and transits and citizen corps and everybody else to work together, yet in a disaster that failure will be exploited by terrorists, if giving the funding out individually is what has to happen because we can't work together, then i'm kind of concerned that by the question if we do work in a more leveraged central fashion by bringing people together to work these together, are we really building national preparedness or merely funded a grant program specific to that concern? but, again, it's troubling to me. i understand the pressure from everybody looking at they don't trust each other.

you just said it. they don't trust local officials. they don't trust the state to make it a priority. yet in a disaster, as a nation and a catastrophic event, if we're all getting our grants separately, we're all planning separately, we're all writing our programs separately yet we're all dependent upon each other to be successful, can we drive that through a grant process to make people work as a team and make the prioritizations? but i've been on the other side. and i know the arguments. i know people are looking to protect their interests and i'm not saying that there may not be a better way. but i'm very concerned when the first thing that comes out is we may not be a priority with the state. we may not get the attention we need. we may not be able to do what we were doing if the funding goes together. because we may not be able to articulate, compete, or get the issue across. yet, if that disaster occurs, and that port is damaged, who's going to respond? all the folks that got the separate pots of money that were planning separately, trying to

build a national capability. so i understand the concerns. and ranking member price, i know this is not something that goes over well. but you guys pay me. the public pays me to tell what you i think, not what people want to hear. and i have looked at this and looked at this and been on the bottom of the beginning of this process. and i keep coming back to we don't trust each other so we got to have our own separate pots of money. we cannot depend upon us to prioritize in a way that says these are the investment strategies of the nation. and we have to have the separate money. yet in a disaster we expect all this will come together magically and we'll work well as a nation. >> thank you. >> mr. carter? >> thank you, mr. chairman. i have a question that i'm trying to figure out the answer. dhs seeks to reform fema grant structurement i strongly support competition and procurement process in the direction that you take in the training grant programs concern me because in that it negates the significant investment that congress made in a national domestic preparedness

consortium. this new direction would create duplicated programs rather than bolstering the existing programs. i've been told that current backlog in first responder training through the existing program is over 20,000. how does this newly proposed structure for training partnership grants and your request for $60 million to seek to address this backlog and how does it better meet the demaendz of our first responders? and in considering this, in awarding the funds to this new program, participants have to go through curriculum approval as well as undergo significant costs and time investments which to stand up nut program. will this create a lag in the available training opportunities that we have in place at this time? >> i'm going to have to give you the full report in writing. a lot of your questions get technical. here's the philosophical

question. how many homeland security institutes can we afford? and are the programs they're offering, again going back to national add preparedness, do we need and are they interchangeable with other programs? and so part of this was coming back and going we fund a lot of centers of excellence. there are so many centers of excellence out there, i'm not sure what excellence is anymore. i'm not berating anybody? how do we make sure that we're investing in institutions that get the return on the investment that based upon as a nation we need and that we have the ability to measure what each one of these institutions do and compare it to other ones. and so this was our attempt to come back and go we recognize congress' authority to specifically say these are things we want to do. there's been a lot of growth here. how do we sustain it, make it more competitive and put more emphasis on is this identifying the training we need for the various disciplines? >> i get your arguments.

that's why i want to respond in writing. >> you have to evaluate more importantly the question would have to be is somebody making the evaluations of how these centers are meeting the criteria and if i understand this program, the $60 million is to allow others to create new centers of excellence if you want to call it that way. and how do you cut the bad ones and create the new ones? how do you know the new guys are going to do better than the people failing in their mission if they are failing? i certainly have one of the centers in my state and i'll put it up against anything as far as we were doing it before fema came there and we were doing it since. i feel very confident that the center we have at texas a&m university is meeting the criteria and then some. i would like that evaluation to be looked at and wonder why we're spending other money until we evaluated the old places.

>> i think the aggies will do well. they've been a leader in our storm shelter program, everything nearing design of that. so i think that there are those programs that are such prestige and established programs this is not going to be as dramatic as they think. but we do need to look at are we targeting the right types of training we need based upon what the skill sets are? i'll give you an example. there's a lot of folks my age and my profession that are leaving these professions soon. are we at the capability to train all the new folks coming up? think about all the training we've done in the last ten years. and we're going to have to make sure that we have the institutions at the higher level

and also the disciplines to continue to train that. this is not an attempt to take those facilities and institution that's have done a great job but it's really to kind of come back and go are we identifying what the priorities are? are we investing in the training? are we identifying need for training? look at cyber security. so we know there may be areas where we need to develop. we also got to make sure what we've been investing in is giving us that return and it's looking at what are the needs? as the next generations come up and we look at our national preparedness and say we're doing good in this area but we still have lots of needs in these areas. are we getting the funding in the right institutions engaged? >> i agree with that concept. thank you, mr. chairman. i think my time is up. >> thank you. mr. dan? [ inaudible ] mr. dent, could you turn on your microphone on, please? >> yeah, as i mentioned, november fema submitted the subscription to the president as required by policy director eight. in it you describe the various components and how they'll various components and how they interact to build, sustain and deliver core capabilities in order to achieve the national

preparedness goal. the report describes how these components help us understand risk and form a current and future budget year planning and decisions and inform resource allocation plans and aid and understand the progress of the nation. some of these components already exist as i understand it. and some will have to be developed. what are some of the existing programs that will be incorporated in the national preparedness system and what gaps do you see out there? >> well, the most significant one which was a requirement congress had to develop a recovery framework for catastrophic disasters is we rolled out the national recovery framework which with the evolution of the president's directive to develop these frame works, we were able to take that and actually move it in and roll it out as one of the first frame

works of that. we also have the national response framework which is undergoing review and updating. and then we have preparedness, mitigation, prevention frame works to build as part of that. so we have been working very hard to -- through both the inner agencies and partners. we just placed on our website several of these documents for review for our partners to interact and provide us comments that we can adjudicate. so we're on target to meet the goals that the president has laid out for us including the national preparedness report which is in concurrence which is another product that i owe congress that will be coming forward. so these are moving and they are again building upon the national response framework, the national disaster recovery framework and then building three additional frame works to support the overall national preparedness plan. >> how do you see this -- this system informing your budget decisions and resource allocations? >> well, it probably best to give an example. we tried talking about

generalities. you end up saying we're going to do this, this and this. let's take urban search and rescue. we know that in the types of mess we face with the building collapses, bomb blasts, tornadoes and other things that response is key. how long does it take to get a team there? just having a team responding doesn't change an outcome. we start with what is the outcome we're trying to change. injured people do not have time. so we start with this idea that -- and across the nation, looking at where communities are, concentrations of populations. we look at the urban areas. that's where everybody is at. and we also look at travel times. do we have enough teams? where are they at? should we make a priority in funding for more teams, sustaining teams or training of those teams? now until you know how many teams and what area you're covering and what your response times are, you don't know if you have enough, how do you maintain them? but once we are able to do our threat and hazard reduction and

say this should be the response time across the country. this is how many teams would be required in these events. and this is current capability. we may say, you know what? we're pretty good in search and rescue teams. maybe we ought to put more emphasis on the prevention side. until you know what that number is, and you stha is what we need as a nation respond to these types of events, you're not really able to say where you're at. so just one example will define how long it will take to get someone there. how much capacity is necessary? this is again why it's very difficult to do this by jurisdiction by jurisdiction. what if you get the outliar? are we not going to respond because we didn't have enough stuff or have a plan? so we're looking at very large events and going there's very basic things that have to be done in the first 72 hours, the first weeks, the first months to be successful. and then going back and going how much of that have we built? how much more we need to build. again, we're not necessarily looking at this is going to require that we're going to spend our way out of. this a lot of time it's looking at the private sector, looking at volunteers, looking at what

the military provides and the fact that congress gave us the authority for secretary of defense to call out the reserves now and duel status kplanders to support uniform coordinated efforts. what are we planning against? what is our target? and where should we be investing to get to that? >> that's a very comprehensive answer. i thank you for that. also on ppd 8. that also on ppd 8. i want to focus on that all of nation approach to disaster preparedness. what specifically, you know, what will have to change to fully develop integration between federal government and state and local government? >> stop looking state, local and federal. start looking at a team. we focus so much on what the federal government is going to do, we step all over our local and state partners. i have to point this out.

in all of these disasters in the last year and a half, the initial response is not even the first responders. it was neighbor helping neighbor. and then the local responders, the mutual aid and the governors and national guard. we were able to almost exclusively focus on recovery because we have built so much capacity since 9/11 that we really shifted the capabilities to the local government and state government works faster and is easier and better to maintain. who feeds us every day in our communities? it's not government, it's the private sector. we look at the private sector as something you deal with later enstid of going why can't we work together and duplicate what everybody does best? >> how do you incorporate private sector to this? >> you bring them to the table and give them a seat and make them part of the team.

they're part of the team. if you get a grocery store opened if, you get a hardware store open, you can get a drugstore open, they can meet needs. we focus where they're not. but if we try to duplicate that in large scale disasters, we don't help anybody. >> thank you. >> thank you. we're going to try to get a second round here before we have our next panel. in order to do that, i'd like to do an abbreviated, maybe no more than three minutes so everyone can have a chance to ask a second round for the second panel comes up. let me go back, administrator to the removal issue that we talked and i asked about earlier. i guess one of the main questions that after meeting with a lot of my constituents after april 27th tornadoes and what happened with the contracting with the debris

removal and with the corps, i would come back to you and ask, are you concerned with the costs to the taxpayers of cleanup when you mission assign the task to the corps? with limited funds, how can you with limited funds, how can you justify the disparity in cost between the reported costs charged by the corps of engineers and the lower cost that's communities have incurred signing their own contracts for removal? have you provided written criteria and checklists of work that mayors know what they're receiving from the corps and what they can show to other contractors if they choose to do a private option for the work? >> mr. chairman, first thing's first. we did something in alabama we had never done previously. and that was we looked at the debris mission as a housing mission. we normally would not go in and take debris wholesale off a private property and lots. we weren't going to do

businesses but in the homes. since this was relatively new to us, we looked to the corps to help manage that. because previously, under the most of the debris management rules, local jurisdictions would not have been able to go on private property and remove a lot of that debris. it would have been almost a case by case basis. so we were looking at one thing. we knew that housing was going to be our biggest issue. the faster we got debris off those lots, the quicker people could rebuild. it was a new approach. it had not been done before. we had the authorities under staff for that. and we used the corps to help manage that. did it cost more? yes, sir. and we learned from that? yes, sir. are we looking at how to reduce that cost in the future? absolutely. but we put a premium on speed of that because our primary concern in that disaster, as you knew, was we had so many homes destroyed that we didn't think the way we have traditionally done debris was fast enough. we wanted to do something faster and it was new. we utilized the corps to help us manage that.

>> there are numerous communities in alabama right now that are waiting for reimbursement. are there ways to somehow simplify the process while still allowing for oversight of the funds? if you could briefly answer that and then if anything else you want to add for the record, then we'll proceed that way. >> mr. chairman, it's always case by case. we're trying to move as fast as we can. again, i want to get my money in the communities to get them going. i will go back and see -- again, if your staff can pass on specifics where we are getting hung up so i can say why is this? we're looking at within the authority of the stafford act, what steps we take streamline to process to maintain accountability but increase speed of recovery. >> thank you. and we will happy to work with you on that to get that information. >> i want to return to your national preparedness grant proposal and make very clear

that i share your point of view, your desire for a more efficient, more targeted, more risk-based way of making these grants available, of allocating these funds. now in the state program, we do have an allocation formula which aims at a certain minimum level of preparedness across these jurisdictions. and that, too, is a legitimate objective. but you're suggesting that a fair amount of special pleading might be going on here. some special pleading might have a good warrant. and others might not. there are objectives we need to make sure are going to be addressed. so i want to ask you how you proceed here. and of course, you can elaborate this for the record. but just in terms of these two major pots of money, will there be an initial determination of

do the usual formulas apply especially in the state grant case? and then let me add one other quick question to the mix. you're trying to deal here with the backlog and with the difficulty of getting some of this money out the door. and your way of doing that is that you're going to require grantees to complete project within a shorter designated period of performance. so what is going to be the practical effect of that? are you going to be by shortening this time frame, are you going to be in effect eliminating certain capital projects, certain longer term projects such as tunnel hardening? there, too, you might want to give us a more detailed answer for the record. but my main concern here in this open setting is just to get a sense of how this is going to work. how your agency is going to proceed to take these formerly

dis -- disparate funding streams and administer them as one. >> well, let me work backwards. on the $8 billion that is outstanding that has not been drawn down? disaster grants, i'm not saying we're not going to be granting more extensions. we looked at what was eligible for funding, had inconsistencies, were able to go back and provide additional eligibility so they could get those funds drawndown based on expending bhafs ewhat was eligi that scope of work. making sure people knew where they were at, what the time lines were on those grants. this is based upon their request

for more flexibility. we were able to go back and the secretary authorized us to provide that flexibility so they had the ability to get those grants drawn down quicker on that work. but no extensions. >> thank you, mr. chairman. fema moved along with their flood map modernization efforts, there have been some complaints. i'm sure you're well aware of the process and the cost, localities to try to meet the standards especially for the levees. and this is a big deal, again, obviously with the flooding and on the missouri there. can you tell us what some of the complaints are and the accreditation and the cost part of it and tell me any

suggestions you have that are -- you discussed within the agency about ways to improve the levee and creditation process and lighten the financial burden for these small -- some of them are being asked to do studies that cost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. and they simply, if you got a town of 200 people, they don't have the money. how do you address that? >> well, currently under our roles, we would only recognize a levee certified by the u.s. army corps of engineers set. we would not recognize anything else. so when we did our mapping, we zero out anything that was there if it was not an accredited levee. in many cases, they may not be accredited but serve communities against floods. we never gave them any value in our mapping. we are at the direction and request of many folks here on the hill in rule-making process to adjust our rules to incorporate levees as built versus those that are accredited. we received thousands of comments in that rule making

process that we're adjudicating. it's our goal when we publish this rule, recognize levees as bument and the level of protection they offer, even if it's not optimal in happening out those communities. do you raise one point, though. where communities are demonstrating that they are certified and don't have the funds and this is, as you know, this is not a huge -- this is a huge problem. it goes back to part of our challenge for this is managing risk, and where is our investment strategy in mapping this and determining the risk and where do we fund our improvements. we'll get a better idea of mapping the levees as they are there. not necessarily being accredited levees and see what that problem looks like. that may give us a better idea of where we need to invest. some may find that the protection there is already adequate and it doesn't significantly change things to move to an accredited levee. others may find this a very significant difference and that is more targeted on where they need to invest. >> the problem is they have to do the study to find out. they don't have the money to do

the studies. >> yes, sir. that's why if we go with the levee as built, we'll take it as it is. not having it credited and then you can map and look at what the risk is. in some cases it may not have enough elevation. in some cases it may be because of design. all those would be factored in and we would look at the risk then versus having to bring it up to an accredited level. >> look forward to working with you. thank you. >> los angeles is one of the most vulnerable cities for an earthquake. in the 2010 red cross report, 7.2 magnitude earthquake were to strike l.a., approximately 564,000 people would need to be sheltered, and additional 2.5 million would require food and water. and unfortunately the l.a. metro area has only 341 shelter facilities with only 84,000 beds. you were talking earlier about