tional League of Cities is very much in support of a national strategic plan.

Money should be made available for training and equipment, and transportation needs to be made available. Transportation for the teams you have all of these teams in Washington that are trained to come help our cities, but many of our USAR teams had to wait long hours on the runway literally with their equipment packed before a military transport could get there to lift them off and take them to Oklahoma City.

Quite frankly, our city has no confidence in military transport to get your teams out to our cities unless something changes here in Washington to get those military transports operating quicker.

We have learned that whether chemical or biological agents are used, whether the next strike is one involving cyberterrorism or whatever method of terrorism, our cities must be prepared for a variety of threats. Large scale evacuations may have to happen, public health emergencies may be involved if it's chemical or bio. Information flow and management is very critical. We need good communication. We need people trained to know how to detect explosives and how to know when they are getting involved with different types of chemical or bio agents.

I know our time constraints today, and so I'd like to go ahead and summarize by letting you hear what the National League of Cities and the 135,000 city members of the National League have as key recommendations for this committee today. We would like to see the development of a national domestic terrorism strategy with clear policies and comprehensive plans to coordinate the roles, responsibilities, and resources of your Federal agencies, and we would like to see training and equipment and resources provided by the Federal Government, especially bringing it out to us regionally, and we do believe in regional training.

Öklahoma City has interlocal agreements, and we have central Oklahoma that should be trained together, and we should all be responding and helping each other.

A policy needs to be made for sharing certain classified information on threats or potential threats of terrorism with local lawful agencies on a need-to-know basis. The Federal Government should include local governments in the Federal planning process and operations relative to issues and their jurisdictions and target scarce Federal resources in localities that have high public profile or private targets.

Designation of a lead Federal agency, something you all have talked about here today, that actually serves as the central coordinator and information clearinghouse on all available Federal programs and resources is critical. Madam Chairperson, we are most appreciative of the Federal Government's attempts to quell this confusion and to set up an area in an agency, the National Domestic Preparedness Office, the NDPO, with the Department of Justice, and although the National League of Cities commends the work of the NDPO thus far, the problem with this latest Federal effort is twofold.

First and foremost, many departments within other government agencies that have been named, the DOD, the FEMA, DHHS, and Justice Department, still maintain that their agency has the lead

in coordinating this effort, and this has fostered a Federal power struggle, and it's involving billions of dollars.

I will tell you my police chief-my fire chief, Gary Marrs, told me last week if we could have those billions of dollars out at the local level in the United States we would be doing well.

Secondly, I ask you, what good are any of NDPO's efforts if it cannot receive the funding it needs to implement its objectives? We at the NLC are looking at the objectives of the NDPO, and we want know will they be met clearly and in reality. What message is being sent to State and local first responders when the Federal Government cannot even coordinate their own efforts?

In closing, the National League of Cities hopes that our recommendations will aid in establishing a clear line of authority and help create clear lines of communication between Federal, State and local governments.

Again, the National League of Cities would like to thank you and the subcommittee for holding this hearing to talk about this subject today, and we look forward to working with you in this effort. Thank you very much.

Mrs. FOWLER. Thank you, Councilwoman Simank.

I'd like now to go to Chief Eversole, and then we will have the questions. Chief.

Mr. EVERSOLE. Madam Chairwoman and members of Congress, it's a pleasure and an honor to be here. You sit and you try to think how do you solve all of those problems in 5 minutes, and I certainly don't pretend to know how to do that, but I would like to make a few comments, and you have my written testimony, and I would like to just make some comments.

First of all, earlier I heard a question of who's in charge, and I always say of what? I don't want to direct traffic. That's someone else's job. Certainly everyone should have a place and everybody should know their place and everybody should be in place. The bottom line out there is that local emergency responders do it every day and they do it well.

Now, I would like to speak for just a minute about programs which support local responders. Certainly Nunn-Lugar was a good move, and the Antiterrorism Act was a good move, and the efforts that were made by the National Fire Academy were a good move, and OJP's funding and programs were a good move, and the consortium training was a good move; but it seems that we don't know how to put everything together, and we've heard that here earlier. Just about everybody has said that.

Now, the bottom line, again, is very simply this. You are Washington, and you are the ones that are supposed to put it together, and it just doesn't seem to happen. There is so much confusion and competition between Federal agencies that they are sometimes more interested in what they are doing than what's getting done on the general end of it.

When we look at Federal agency response, they have created the NDPO or at least semicreated it, or wherever. It sits in limbo, and we told Attorney General Janet Reno that we needed one-stop shopping.

If you're confused and asking questions, how do you think we feel? I work for a boss who has one simple rule. He looks at me

in the worst times and says, make this work; and it's very difficult to make it work when you're really not sure where to go. So they came up with this concept of NDPO, and I think that it's a good concept, but I certainly think that it needs to get going.

The Federal Government is way too slow for me. I work in a world that demands excellence. 3 to 5 minutes you expect me in front of your house, doing the job, not 6 months, 18 months, 2 years from now. That certainly wouldn't be acceptable to you if I told you I'm sorry, it's Wednesday, we don't do fires on Wednesday. We'll be there next week. Take two aspirins. We'll see you in the morning. None of those things work. You want excellence from us, and we have to deliver that.

We look at the RAID teams. Nobody asked us about the RAID teams. We were told, by the way, here's $50 million. We're going to spend this. Now, maybe that's going to work real well, and I am most willing to give that a try. I had an opportunity during the Democratic national convention to work with the Illinois National Guard, and they did an exceptionally fine job for us; and maybe it will work well, but now we're thinking about creating 44, or whatever that magic number is, light teams.

I'm the kind of guy that before I buy a car, I want to go out, kick the tires and drive it around the block; and we're buying things that we don't even know are going to work. Let's get it on the road and see if it works, and if it works, then we get more. That seems to me like a reasonable thing to do in management.

We have CBIRF, we have the FBI's emergency response team, we have all these people that are very confusing. I don't want somebody in there tugging and pulling on the device, saying, oh, it's my mine, it's yours, it's mine, it's yours. I need to get the job done.

Now, government it seems to keep inventing the wheel and they tell me it's round. I know the wheel is round. I don't want to hear that anymore. I want you to tell me how it can go faster and last longer, and apparently the government doesn't know how to do that for me. They fail me on the local level.

I have got a lot of really good people, I mean people who really care and seem like they want to make this program work. Apparently, none of the telephones connect between Federal agencies. They must not be able to talk to each other on a computer or either never meet in a crowd or a tavern to have a beer and talk things over because they don't know what each other is doing. It's a secret. I went to one meeting, I was told about secret underwear, and I said, excuse me? Oh, yeah, we got secret chemical underwear. We can't tell you about it. OK.

We have a situation where today we have Federal agencies who made a decision about how they were going to certify chemical masks, and OSHA says if you're going to wear a mask in the civilian world, it has to be NIOSH certified, and NIOSH says we don't have a provision to certify for chemical or biological warfare.

So if the bell rings in my fire house and I send somebody out, I'm in violation of NIOSH regulations. Who figured that out in the government? And I don't want to hear it takes 18 months to straighten it out, because if you call me today you're going to be going out and looking for the BRT coming down the street, that's

the big red truck; and you're going to look for that truck and you are not going to wait for 18 months. You're going to want 3 minutes. Where are these guys? And we need that equipment and we need those answers and we need them today, not tomorrow, not 6 months from now. We need them today.

We've had five NDC threats in our city. We have successfully handled all five hoaxes. We think we have a good system. We work closely with the local FBI. We work closely with the lab. We have a way to handle it. Understand this: We go out and do it every day, and we handle some relatively bad situations. What we need to do is to enhance what we already have and we know works well.

I have an army. I have 1.3 million firefighters all over this country. We need to make them better, better, not create new things. I don't want to hear about you making that round wheel, folks. Show me how to make my wheel go faster and better.

That's how you talk about-sir, you asked a question, Mr. Congressman, about are we getting our money's worth. No, I'm not getting my money's worth.

I want to see money coming to the people that are at the very tip of the arrow, and I want to see enough money come that you know that when you call they are going to show up with that big red truck and they are going to do the job, that our police officers can do the job, that our EMS people can do the job, that your local responders are going to do it in 3 to 5 minutes, they're going to be there doing it. If we have a chance to save our communities, it's going to be in that first few minutes, in that first hour.

And I applaud all the work that's been done by the DOD; I applaud all the work that's been done by government agencies. The bottom line is if I have to wait 3 or 4 hours, then send me a lot of body bags because that's what's going to be left.

I think that we need to emphasize about the enhancement of existing local forces. I have heard a lot of nice things here today about local responders. They need to be made better, more professional, more capable because if they don't handle it, it's truly going to be a disaster.

Thank you. I'm open for any questions.

Mrs. FOWLER. Thank you.

I want to thank both Chief Eversole and Councilwoman Simank. Both have presented very interesting testimonies, and raised questions that are the reason we are having these hearings. Hopefully, as a result of the hearing today and others we are going to be having, we can come up with some answers. Solutions that won't take 18 months to get the effect. Chief, I agree with you. I think the problem is now, not down the road, and we need to get you those

resources.

I just have a couple of questions. This one is for both of you. As you look at all the different Federal agencies involved, and as we've said, right now there doesn't seem to be one that's really coordinating and in charge, designating one that's not getting the resources or authority it needs.

Which, in your opinion, of the different Federal agencies involved in antiterrorism activities is the best suited to organize and to rationalize and pull together all of these Federal preparedness programs? I mean, which one would you think from the dealings you

have had, would be the one that we most need to pull this together? Do you want to address that, first, and then I will go to the councilwoman. Either one, who wants to answer first?

Mr. EVERSOLE. Go ahead.

Ms. SIMANK. Thank you, Chief, and by the way I need to know if he needs a job.

This is a tough question. If you I keep hearing you all ask for which agency, who should it be, tell us which agency. It's a hard question. I will tell you what I have learned in Oklahoma City. Number one, of course rescue and recovery is what we did, but you are dealing with a crime scene. This is a crime scene. Do not forget that. After everything that we went through in Oklahoma City was over, we are still facing trials. McVeigh is going to possibly be brought to the State of Oklahoma and tried by our district attorney in Oklahoma County. If we had not had good law enforcement collecting the evidence, we would not have had a conviction.

The lives that were lost in the bombing of Oklahoma City left over 3,000 relatives and family members. Those people demand justice after a terroristic attack. They want to see that people are caught, that they are held responsible by the laws of this great Nation for their acts and their deeds that they have done by harming innocent people and lives.

So I don't have your answer, but it seems to me that we are going to have to have some sort of combination of rescue and recovery and law enforcement working together. I have not one agency to give you, Madam Chairman.

Mrs. FOWLER. We know there's not an easy answer today, but I'm just questioning, as you've worked through this and you've given us some good points. Thank you.

Chief Eversole.

Mr. EVERSOLE. Again, you asked for a simple answer to a very difficult question. We asked for one-stop shopping, and I was one of the people who was rather blunt with Janet Reno about that. From that came the NDPO. It seems at that time, and it still seems, like a pretty good way for us to go. The design of that was to have Federal agency people there and also State and local people in that agency who can work together to find an answer for very complicated questions.

See, I really don't care who answers my questions, Madam Chairman. I want the right answer. How the Federal Government does that is your business as long as I get the answer.

But I think what's really important are there are two things that are important. One, whoever you give that to, you better give them a big whip and a chair so they can crack that whip and make everybody jump in line because I find the competition between Federal agencies intolerable and certainly demeaning to the locals.

The second thing is that they need to have a strong oversight, and I know that they are planning on doing a State and local advisory group. I don't want to be told how to do my job. We know how to do it, and we prove it day after day after day after day. My fire department goes out the door 1,120 times a day. I handle 43 hazmat jobs a month in the city of Chicago. We do that all over this country. I happen to be one of the big funny animals, OK; but there are fire departments all over this country that every day pro