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By MICHAEL MARTZ
Richmond Times Dispatch (Virginia)
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Hurricane season is near, but a storm already is brewing over the fate of the country’s emergency management agency.
The Bush administration, including a former Virginia homeland security adviser, made its pitch yesterday to keep the Federal Emergency Management Agency within a homeland security bureaucracy that is still young.
But a key Republican congressman thinks the agency’s director needs a direct line to the president and the ability to make decisions on his own - without going through the homeland security command.
“He needs to be able to call the president and call the president directly,” said Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., vice chairman of both the homeland security and armed services committees. “The agency has to be able to make decisions.”
Weldon voiced his opinion in an interview with The Times-Dispatch after his speech yesterday to the Homeland & Global Security Summit, a three-day meeting between policymakers and people in the business of homeland security.
Earlier, two high-ranking officials in the Department of Homeland Security argued that FEMA should remain within the department as one of the many federal agencies that play roles in making the country safer from terrorism and responding to disasters such as hurricanes.
“We are building the agency,” said Michael P. Jackson, deputy secretary of homeland security. “We are linking the parts that need to be put together.”
The topic is likely to come up again today when a high-ranking Virginia congressman and a former FEMA director speak on the summit’s final day. Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, R-11th, has voiced concern about the agency’s submersion in the homeland security department. James Lee Witt, a former FEMA director under President Bill Clinton, already has called for its independence.
George W. Foresman, who was assistant for commonwealth preparedness under Gov. Mark R. Warner, said moving the agency now would undo the progress made in recent months to make federal agencies work together more effectively.
Foresman, now the administration’s undersecretary for preparedness, said federal, state and local agencies “are planning according to the same standards” for the first time in the more than 20 years he has worked in emergency management.
At the same time, he said he is “phenomenally disappointed” at the failure to fully coordinate emergency training exercises at the different levels of government. “We haven’t got a good, comprehensive, integrated exercise program.”
Foresman said the federal government also is working to improve plans for emergency evacuations to avoid the mistakes made after Hurricane Katrina left New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in shambles last August. The homeland security department is about three-fourths done in surveying emergency evacuation plans for the states and 75 largest metropolitan areas.
He also tried to reassure small, rural areas that they won’t be neglected in funding for homeland security and emergency needs, even though the priority is on high-threat urban areas, such as Northern Virginia. “Nobody’s going to be left behind,” he said.
Ports, including those in Hampton Roads, could be the next big winners in federal spending on security, according to Weldon, a former fire chief and mayor for a community that is part of Philadelphia’s ports.