Nick Lampson: “Primarily, this bill will establish $1 billion in grant programs for cities, counties, towns, boroughs, tribes, and…”

“Primarily, this bill will establish $1 billion in grant programs for cities, counties, towns, boroughs, tribes, and other municipalities and regional authorities to develop local emergency response plans that would do a large number of different things, such as to develop strategic response plans that provide for a clearly defined and unified response to terrorist attacks or other catastrophes; to coordinate the activities and procedures of various emergency response units; to define the relationship, roles, responsibilities, jurisdictions, and command structures and communication protocols of emergency response units; to coordinate response procedures with similar emergency response units and neighboring units of local government as well as with State and Federal agencies. That is a critical point right there. One of our agencies got shut down in my congressional district just last week because of a lack of cooperation, a lack of questions about whose jurisdiction or whose real ground is this that we need to be responding to.”