Sylvester Turner: “I want to say I think we have all seen the pitfalls tonight of these formula-based funding formulas that divide this…”

“I want to say I think we have all seen the pitfalls tonight of these formula-based funding formulas that divide this House along regional, urban, and rural lines. I want to mention something that the gentleman from Kentucky (Chairman Rogers) mentioned early in this debate, and that is that there is a better way to do this, and it is contained in legislation that the gentleman from California (Chairman Cox) and I have cosponsored that came out of the Select Committee on Homeland Security unanimously, that went through the Committee on Energy and Commerce, the Committee on Transportation and the Committee on the Judiciary. It also is reaffirmed by the language the gentleman from Kentucky (Chairman Rogers) placed in this bill. And that is to say that we ought to have one grant fund that is distributed to establish and to fund what we call the essential capabilities that every State, every community, and every region needs to prepare and defend against a terrorist attack. That process of establishing essential capabilities would end the debate we are having tonight. The essential capabilities would be determined based on the threat and vulnerability information that this Congress already has required in the Homeland Security Act that the Homeland Security Department prepared. If we did that, we would have a road map. Tonight we are flying by the seat of our pants.”