No community has the resources necessary to cope with every potential emergency alone. So when state and local homeland security authorities formulate strategies for responding to terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and other calamitous incidents, they must cooperate across jurisdictional lines and plan to share personnel, equipment, and other assets.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has recognized that regional cooperation among first responders is essential. It has encouraged states to develop specific regional action plans as part of the security strategy documents they must submit in order to draw federal homeland security funds. But federal officials have been vague about what regional cooperation plans should entail; they have not supplied states with any sort of template to follow. Fortunately, some states have made great strides on their own, and their experience may hold useful lessons for others.
One of the leaders in regionally focused security planning has been Arizona, where Gov. Janet Napolitano released a comprehensive security agenda in April 2003. Action item No. 3 in her roadmap was to "establish formal protocols that facilitate multiagency coordination during critical incident response." Emergency management officials acted quickly on that order. In June 2003, the Arizona Fire Chiefs Association, which had already been considering a formal cooperative agreement, produced the nation's first detailed statewide mutual aid agreement for firefighters.
Sharing resources may sound like a simple matter. (In fact, informal understandings have long guided cooperation among local law enforcement authorities in Arizona.) But for firefighters, who operate heavy equipment that is very expensive, the chiefs' formal mutual aid agreement promises to head off some potentially sticky logistical issues.
The plan spares no detail. It divides the state into five regions, each with a 24-hour dispatch center; it establishes chains of command; it foresees the need for such things as liability and property damage insurance to cover equipment used beyond the territorial limits of a given political subdivision; and it spells out which state laws and policies will dictate the terms of financial reimbursement for services.
The planning process for mutual agreements like the Arizona Fire Chiefs' plan can yield a slew of side benefits. For example, the process may reveal legal obstacles where regulatory or statutory action is needed to help facilitate cooperation among jurisdictions. Planning also helps state and local authorities identify day-to-day operational resources, such as public health information systems, that also have valuable applications in crisis situations. Such "dual-use" potential should be taken into account in the budgeting process.
Napolitano's director of homeland security, Frank Navarrete, says "regionalization is the name of the game," in part because it is a way to get the most bang for every buck in the budget. "Everybody cannot afford to have identical pieces of equipment," he says.
That's particularly true of big-ticket items such as fire trucks. But planning for interdepartmental cooperation can also point out nuts-and-bolts issues such as the interoperability of communications and data systems. Longstanding mutual aid agreements between sister cities on either side of the Arizona-Mexico border helped lay the groundwork for a recently completed "border interoperability project." Newly installed equipment in the four Arizona counties along the border allows Mexican and U.S. firefighters, law enforcement officials, and medical teams to communicate on the same radio frequency. Meanwhile, Navarrete says Arizona authorities have been conducting regular exercises around the state, including weapons of mass destruction exercises near the border, in cooperation with their Mexican colleagues.
The end goal in mutual aid planning -- particularly since Sept. 11 -- is to ensure that all available resources can be efficiently brought to bear in a large-scale emergency. "What we've learned over the last two and one-half years is that when it comes to homeland security, no city or town can go it alone," says John Cohen, co-director of the Progressive Policy Institute's homeland security task force and a consultant who helped Arizona formulate some of its plans. Moreover, says Cohen, "if you're going to have extensive collaboration to deal with a threat, it's obviously much more effective if you've worked out the details of the working together before the emergency occurs."
Indeed, the need for regional planning in homeland security is now widely agreed upon. But without clear federal guidelines, it remains to be seen whether states will consistently implement mutual aid plans everywhere they are appropriate. The Department of Homeland Security should carefully assess the extent to which other states follow examples such as Arizona's. We may need to push harder to ensure that regional best practices are widely adopted.
