Five area congressmen who represent suburban districts have complained to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that an assessment giving the region low marks for preparations to deal with a terrorist attack left out large areas of the suburbs.
Earlier this month, local officials were stung by an assessment of emergency communications systems nationwide that showed a lack of progress in Chicago. The report placed the region, defined as Chicago and Cook County only, near the bottom of a list of 75 communities.
The crux of the report addresses the ability of multiple emergency agencies–big-city police and fire, as well as suburban and county departments–to talk to each other on shared radio frequencies in the event of a major disaster or terrorist attack.
U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk, who conceived and drafted the letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, said Wednesday that the Homeland Security Department must expand its definition of Chicago’s urban area to include outlying suburbs and the collar counties.
“It appears the definition we use leaves out key suburban areas, and this is not the way other large American cities have coordinated their planning,” he said.
Under the department’s definition, Chicago’s urban area includes the city and Cook County. While the definition takes in more than 120 suburban jurisdictions, it does not include huge swaths of the metropolitan area that are in DuPage, Lake and Will Counties.
In New York, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles, the “urban area” is defined much more broadly, Kirk said.
Kirk said Chicago’s narrower urban area is in large part responsible for low marks homeland security gave the region when it graded interoperability, or the capacity for first responders like firefighters and police officers from suburbs and the city to communicate with one another.
“The critical issue raised by the report is a lack of political consensus to build interoperability, and they specifically referenced this definition,” he said.
Homeland security officials see the issue differently. The report suggested problems in cooperation between Chicago agencies and Cook County agencies. Expanding the consideration to more of the suburban area would not improve the view of how Chicago and Cook County governments communicate, officials said.
Department officials said they had not seen the letter but would be sure to respond to the congressmen’s concerns, said Russ Konacke, a department spokesman.
Department officials reiterated earlier statements that the assessment was not intended to be a pass-or-fail judgement. The goal was to spur local discussion about how to better develop and coordinate communication services, Konacke said.
“To the extent that it energizes communities to come together and take a second look at this … this is a good thing,” he said.
Kirk said that an expanded definition of Chicago’s urban area would send more resources to suburbs and outlying areas to buy equipment and provide training that would enhance the ability of first responders to communicate with one another.
“This would add to the funding of suburban areas. Whether it would increase the overall homeland security funding [for the region] is an issue for the incoming Congress,” he said.
But immediately after the report was released, federal officials said the urban area definition was made only for the purposes of the review assessment.
“We had to break these metro areas into manageable area for review purposes,” said George Foresman, the department’s undersecretary for preparedness. “Anything we do with Chicago and Cook County is relatively instructive of the region as a whole.”
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