David Price: “I certainly hope so. That's good, Mr. Chairman. I am very pleased to hear that. Let me go ahead and say something about…”

“I certainly hope so. That's good, Mr. Chairman. I am very pleased to hear that. Let me go ahead and say something about my colleague's intent, because there is a major deficiency in this bill, and we need to address this, although it's extremely hard to address without the presence of viable offsets. State and local grants in this legislation are 55 percent below the enacted 2011 level. They are 70 percent below the enacted 2010 level. Moreover, these State and local grants are block granted. Individual programs, such as State grants and urban area grants and port grants and transit and rail grants, could be cut even farther because at the Secretary's discretion she is going to have to choose within this block grant as to what kind of money goes to individual programs. At the full committee markup of this bill, Congressman LaTourette and I offered a very similar amendment to what Mrs. Lowey has put forward to restore funding to these programs. Now, we're not talking about lavish funding here. By no means would the funding be lavish. In fact, it would simply be equal to the already reduced fiscal year 2011 levels; but we, unfortunately, were not allowed to move forward with the offset that I earlier discussed which had to do with correcting the mislabeling, we believe, of emergency funds. In any case, we are faced with the threat of terrorism looming larger and massive cuts to first responders and to State and local preparedness.…”