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, which it 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 L.A., the “urban area” is defined much more broadly, Kirk said.
Kirk alleges that Chicago’s narrower urban area is in large part responsible for low marks Homeland Security gave the region when it recently graded interoperability, or the capacity for first responders like firefighters and police officers from suburbs and the city to communicate with one another.
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.
