For fiscal year 2010, the Department of Homeland Security allocated $48 million for the Interoperable Emergency Communications Grant Program for planning, training, exercises and equipment to states and local governments to help firefighters and emergency responders talk to each other during a crisis.
However, this was also roughly the same amount awarded in 2009, so President Barack Obama can’t claim to have dramatically increased funding for that. At least not in this year’s budget.
In July 2009, the Science and Technology Directorate began multiband radio pilot programs, which will allow local, state and federal participants to evaluate multiband radio technology, which enables emergency responders to communicate with partner agencies, regardless of the radio band on which they operate. But this pilot was funded with a grant initiated under the Bush administration.
In other initiatives undertaken in the 2009 fiscal year, the Department of Homeland Security deployed the RealEyes Project, which provides live streaming video to emergency responders in the field; and Homeland Security began testing and evaluating a project that will enable first responders to integrate video, cellular and satellite communications and reroute data around congested network paths to maintain communications in an emergency.
As for Obama’s promise to support a more rapid turnover of broadcast spectrum to first responders, that issue was specifically addressed in a Dec. 8, 2009, conference report attached to the omnibus appropriations bill.
According to the conference report, “The 9/11 Commission identified the need to increase the assignment of spectrum for first responders in its July 2004 report. The conferees are disappointed that the Federal Government has yet to address this critical need. The FCC is directed to work expeditiously to conduct a successful auction of the D Block spectrum so that first responders have an interoperable communications network.”
With this direction, Congress appears to have set this one in motion. And so we move this one to In the Works.