Objective look at homeland security

The Portland Water District last week received a $115,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to assess the potential terrorism vulnerabilities of the water supply of Maine’s largest city. EPA Administrator Christine Whitman her very own self came to Maine to fork it over.

The news story on this lucky break for this chosen group of Maine citizens contained many interesting observations by the generous Ms. Whitman and grateful local officials. The source of the city’s water, Sebago Lake, is very large (a trillion gallons, they say), the intake pipe is way at the bottom and the output from the PWD plant is constantly monitored for contaminants, all of which make an attempt to poison Portland’s water hole likely to fail. The greater peril is at the plant itself, but any evildoer planning on breaking in and tampering with the product first would have to get around the barbed wire, strong locks and surveillance cameras recently installed against such an eventuality.

At this point, the alert reader – you, perhaps – no doubt is thinking: “Hold the emergency telecommunications device, chummy. Does not the information in the preceding paragraph indicate that the potential terrorism vulnerabilities already have been assessed? Could we not put the referenced news story in one of those fancy binders used by government studies, consider it a job well and fully done, and save ourselves a cool 115 grand?”

The answer to your first question is yes. The answer to the second is that you may be an alert reader, but are totally out of it as to the nature of government studies. They are never done (it’s somewhere in the Constitution, I’m pretty sure) until an enormous amount of money has been spent to turn the concise and clear into the long-winded and impenetrable.

The state of Maine this week released such a study. “A Strategic Plan for Maine Homeland Security” runs 22 pages; it reads like a million. Having spent some time the last few days reading the strategic plans for homeland security for several other states, I recognized some traits of the genre.

You can’t have a strategic plan without a vision statement. The more rural, remote and irrelevant your state is, the more you envision yourself as

al-Qaida’s next target. Maine’s special way of life is like a bull’s-eye – Iowa goes even further by claiming that an attack on a Heartland hog farm would be more psychologically damaging to the nation than the attacks of last Sept. 11. Iowans are like that – uppity.

Your vision statement needs an action plan and your action plan needs objectives. Maine has nine, each with sub-objectives, each of those with sub-sub-objectives. Take such words as identify, assess, prepare, upgrade, integrate, secure, strengthen and align, attach them to every aspect of human society imaginable and you can see why this is such a daunting task. Especially when, as the document warns, a couple of the objectives are “ahead of the optimum path” which, apparently, could cause the others to get discouraged and not try as hard. The last thing we need in dangerous times like these are objectives with ants in their pants.

The bottom line is that all of these objectives and their offspring will be fully implemented by May 2005 – in less than three short years, Maine will be so safe it’ll make mother’s milk seem like a sack of broken glass and rusty nails. Provided Maine understands there’s no such thing as being truly safe.

This plan came into being as a result of that big homeland security conference back in May. The one where 80 select Maine citizens were invited, but the public at large was not and the news media were at first barred, then admitted to hear the keynote address, then admitted to the whole thing and then criticized for not being very interested. Two of my favorite items on the plan’s turgid to-do list are those that call for a high level of public involvement and support, and for the media to be “part of the solution.”

(It was during this conference, incidentally, that several speakers chastised the public for being complacent on the issue of homeland security. This newspaper responded with an editorial opinion that the problem wasn’t one of public complacency, but of state officials treating this crucial issue as it treats such issues as sprawl or tax reform: just one more thing to study or conference over but not to actually do anything about. We continue to hold that opinion.)

I also like the part at the back that lists suggestions made at the conference that were voted down. Who’s the joker who wanted lobster served at all homeland security conferences? And who are the seven who agreed?

In rejecting a motion that the conference not re-invent the wheel, was the majority saying it should?

But the best thing in the plan is the diagnostic matrix. It’s the document’s only graphic and it’s a dandy. There’s a vertical axis for objective priority, a horizontal one for accomplishment stage, a grid for research, development, implementation and production, labels for process, content, context and judgment. Within a graceful swoosh that indicates the zone of efficacious resource allocation, there are dots indicating the status of each of the nine objectives. And, sure enough, a couple of them are threatening to break out of the development sector, the natural habitat of government study objectives, and are racing heedlessly into the uncharted territory of implementation. These are dangerous times, indeed.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.