PSWN preparing to shut down

The Public Safety Wireless Network is in immediate danger of ceasing operation because of a loss of funding from the Department of Justice. PSWN has the funds to operate until mid-July and then must begin shutting things down.

The DOJ should have been providing PSWN with $7.5 million from the fiscal year 2003 budget, but the Omnibus Appropriations Bill passed in late February excluded PSWN. In fact, the conference report on the appropriations bill contained language that specifically prohibited the DOJ from funding PSWN as it had in the past. It stated that the program was to be funded by the Office of Justice Programs, a separate portion of DOJ.

But when the Justice Department went to the OJP, it said it didn’t have any money.

“There was sort of this standoff at Justice,” Robert E. Lee Jr., PSWN program manager, said. “But Justice was trying to find an answer because the Office of Management and Budget wanted PSWN funded.”

PSWN was started in 1996 to promote effective public safety communications and to foster interoperability among local, state, federal and tribal communications systems. It is jointly sponsored by the DOJ and the Department of the Treasury. The Treasury Department has already provided its portion of PSWN’s funding for fiscal year 2003. That money is what PSWN expects will take it through the next six weeks.

“But after that, we’ll begin shutting things down, which would include our two Web sites, the 800 number, our ability to continue studies or send out publications; and certainly we wouldn’t have any more symposiums after that,” Lee said.

The program is slated to move into the Department of Homeland Security beginning Oct. 1. But it cannot continue to operate without funding for 2003.

“2004 is OK, and if that’s going to come from Homeland Security, that’s fine, but the program can’t continue through the rest of fiscal year ’03,” said Barbara Hummel, principal at Axiom Communications Group, the public relations firm that represents PSWN.

According to Lee, the program would have to be restarted in October, which would be “an absolute waste of taxpayers’ money.”

It remains to be seen whether the exclusion of PSWN from the Appropriations Bill was an oversight or intentional.

“It seems like there is either an intent to close PSWN or a miscommunication between the OMB and Congress,” Lee said. “We don’t know which, and no one has given us an explanation on how that language was placed in the conference report.”

Lee said that if someone had the intent to close PSWN, that person or organization should take responsibility for that decision.

If PSWN’s lack of funding is intentional, industry analysts can only conjecture at why it would be cut.

“I don’t know any particular reason, other than somebody might have looked at it as something that could be put off or deferred to get some trimming in the budget,” said Jack Daniel, owner of the Jack Daniel Co. “And it was probably innocent — nobody knew what it was and they were just striking things out of the budget at the last minute.”

Lee wonders if it might have to do with the term interoperability.

“On the Hill, this word ‘interoperability’ now has become so common that some people might begin to think there’s redundancy and start looking for targets associated with the term,” he said. “But that goes against the logic of evaluating whatever it is you want to shut down before you go doing it.”

Other government programs that address interoperability include the Advanced Generation for the Interoperability for Law Enforcement program and the Community Oriented Policing Services.

“AGILE primarily advocates one solution and up until a few years ago, didn’t do much outreach. But it began to do it despite the fact that PSWN already existed. ACU-1000 is their solution,” Lee said. “[Other programs] certainly don’t have the outreach capabilities or the publications to back up their work, which PSWN has already demonstrated.”

PSWN brought people together, according to Daniel.

“To me they were more a facilitator than anything else. I don’t think they are redundant because there are governmental groups working on their issues, and then there are private groups and public safety groups that are working on their issues. But PSWN is one forum that brought them all together,” Daniel said.

PSWN representatives had assumed that the DOJ would solve the problem after they found out in February that their program was excluded.

“One way it could be fixed would be if the appropriations committee told Justice it was OK to spend the money from wherever they could find it,” Lee said. “Or for them to give an additional appropriation just to fund this as a supplemental.”

If PSWN were to close, Daniel said it would be missed, but he was confident that because of the federal money allocated for interoperability, people would “come together.”

Lee is not so sure, “The public safety community would lose a valuable resource that they’ve come to depend on over the past seven years.”

Recent achievements

• Launched an interactive Web site to highlight interoperability progress and solutions.

• Published guides on the roles of local, state and federal governments in achieving interoperable wireless public safety communications.

• Contributed to the FCC decision to allocate 50 MHz of spectrum in the 4.9 GHz band for public safety broadband applications.

• Urged FEMA to provide First Responder Grant monies to buy local public safety communications equipment and enhance interoperability.

• Participated in charter development and formation of the Public SAFEty COMmunications Interoperability Project, a Bush Administration initiative to improve federal interoperability.

• Published Answering the Call: Communications Lessons Learned from the Pentagon Attack, showing that local public safety responders had almost no difficulty establishing interoperable communications on scene, thanks largely to a formal Incident Command System and 20 years’ experience with interoperable solutions.

Future plans

• Assessing and making recommendations about the interoperability difficulties faced by the New York City area Metropolitan Transit Authority Police Department.

• Studying the interoperability capabilities and needs of special services public safety personnel (e.g., power plant protection services, water authorities, and private fire protection districts).

• Developing an after-action report on communications interoperability during the Washington, D.C., Sniper Task Force investigation.

• Creating a video to showcase technical solutions developed by the PSWN Program to help radio managers design interoperability solutions and make the case for funding.

• Producing a guide to Project 25 for the public safety community.

• Developing a primer for government chief information officers (CIO) to introduce them to wireless communications and highlight the differences between radio communications and other information technology systems.