On the message and order, referred on November 17, 2021 Docket #1167, authorizing the City of Boston to accept and expend the amount of Thirteen Million Five Hundred Twenty Thousand Dollars ($13,520,000.00) in the form of a grant for the Federal FY21 Urban Areas Security Initiative, awarded by the United States Department of Homeland Security, passed through the MA Executive Office of Public Safety & Security, to be administered by the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management. The fund will continue to support planning, exercises, trainings and operations that build regional capacities to help prevent, respond to and recover from threats or acts of terrorism, including Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosive incidents, the committee submitted a report recommending the order ought to pass.
1167 Certainly. Docket 1167 message in order authorizing the city of Boston to accept and expend an amount of $13,520,000 in the form of a grant for the federal FBI 21 Urban Areas Security Initiative awarded by the United States Department of Homeland Security Executive Office of Public Safety and Security to be administered by the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management. The fund will continue to support planning exercises, training operations that build regional capacity to help prevent, respond to and recover from threats or acts of terrorism, including chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive, explosive incidents. Thank you, Madam Clerk. The Chair recognizes Councilor Campbell, Chair of Public Safety and Criminal Justice. Councilor Campbell, you have the floor. I thank you, Madam President. The Committee on Public Safety and Criminal Justice held a hearing this past Monday. We actually held it on three dockets. We'll talk about the other two later in the agenda. But for now, I'll just talk about docket 1167. We heard from the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management Chief Charmaine Benford, who testified on behalf of the administration. Docket 1167 is a grant from the Urban Areas Security Initiative. It is administered by OEM. The grant will fund continued support for planning, exercises, trainings and operations that build regional capacities to help prevent, respond and recover from threats or acts of terrorism, including chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive incidents. Chief Benford explained that this grant provides infrastructure support for OEM and the city's primary public safety disciplines in being able to maintain, of course, a readiness posture for safety and security threats. It is awarded to a region and this region includes Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Quincy Revere, Somerville and Winthrop, for which the city of Boston serves as the fiduciary. It's managed by FEMA within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The funds and the application are submitted by the state through AIOPS. And then, of course, it comes back to the city of Boston to actually dish out and allocate these funds. OEM collaborates with various regional partners to allocate these funds using a risk based methodology. This is going to be a little long. I apologize. The eight specific mission areas of the grant include several safety and security, which the breakdowns were sent to. All councilors, of course, who can review those. But $1 million for that critical infrastructure and protection. $2 million. Intelligence and information sharing. $3.1 million. Interoperable communications $2.2 million. Chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive detect. Detection and response. 1.6 million public health and emergency services $430,000, which also includes planning and community preparedness at 1.2 million. And lastly, cyber security at 1.2 million. There are further breakdowns in this. I sent this all to various councilors, some documents before the hearing, some documents during the hearing, and some documents that we received this morning from the various departments. A significant portion of these funds come from the Program Administration Fund and allow for much of this to serve some human capital. There were significant and I want to acknowledge that there were some concerns about the grants effect with respect to compliance of the surveillance, the new surveillance oversight ordinance and the funding of risk. And Chief Benford explained that the grant will, of course, be in compliance with that new ordinance that was passed by the Council. All of the new councilors and of course, the new mayor will have to ensure that happens, particularly with the procurement of any new additional technology. I also note that there were several questions that we forwarded to the BRIC and we did get some responses to those. Councilor Arroyo. I will just say more detail than we've received in the past, which I really appreciated in such a short timeframe. I also will stress that because this is a regional grant, some of this, of course, is within the control of other municipalities. So what they procure, for example, for their security, their safety may be different from what the city of Boston procures. And obviously they do not have the ordnance that Boston has. So there are different provisions that are in play. But here in the city of Boston, we got more information about what some of this regional technology will be. Some of it includes critical infrastructure monitoring system maintenance, which is referred to as Sims. This is an existing camera network that is a regional project. This will also include gunshot detection system, which is also a regional project. There is a license plate reader program that is not actually include Boston and includes some of the other regions. So it's not a project that DPD participates in. So this is some of the major technology that will be funded by this, and this will probably about be about 10.2% of the budget in terms of the BRIC. There are several positions that will be funded by the BRIC, and we know that this came up before with a previous grant of $850,000 that the council decided to hold because we didn't get as much transparency in responses to those questions. This, I think, is a little different here. We got specifics around what they will be funding these for. Analyst positions. I know that folks have questions about, well, what will they be analyzing? That's going to be a question for the new council, the new mayor to have to go through. They obviously have not been hired yet. And I would implore the council and the new mayor to do just that, to follow this, to continue, of course, to follow BRIC, to encourage greater transparency from the agency, and in addition to greater transparency, greater accountability and greater partnership, hopefully with the Council. I will just add, because the funding for the BRIC was folded into this regional grant, which is over $13 million. I am going to recommend that it be passed and that we pass it as a council because it includes so many regions and so many necessary equipment items and various infrastructure supplies that every department, every municipality absolutely needs. And also I will just add some of this infrastructure and supplies go to support our efforts with respect to COVID, which we know is still, of course, devastating of the Commonwealth. And I'll just add one more point. I just want to thank the councilors who actually attended thank you to councilors Brayden, Murphy, Arroyo and Flynn for joining the hearing and following up. Thank you to Sean Tall, who is over here for getting us responses really quickly. And thank you to Chief Benford, who, as he said, prides himself on transparency with respect to O&M. He was incredible at the hearing. He did not have all the answers, but he worked really quick with air to get as many responses as we could. So I'm recommending passage, but of course, asking that capacity issue. God bless you. The council colleagues as well as the new mayor continue. I think the advocacy of this body, continued advocacy of this committee in ensuring that certain departments connected to public safety in the city of Boston are transparent, are continuing to do the work, of course , of rooting out racial disparities, which we all see still exist in our response and our public safety response. So thank you for allowing me to go on a little bit long. Thank you, Madam President. Thank you so much. Councilor Campbell seeks acceptance of the committee report and passage of Docket 11 six. Thank God this is the last. Of. These red. Lights. Thank you so much. The chair recognizes Councilor Royal Council role. You have the. Floor. Thank you, Madam President. Thank you to chair of Public Safety Catholic Campbell for a very good summation. I'll be voting yes on this, but I do so with reservations, largely based on the the so the truth is, this is much more information than we received on that grant. It is not very close. And I'm assuming the reason for that is the size of the number here. And my vote yes for this is largely for the reasons that you detail. There's regional partners here. There's there's other communities involved in this. And what I will say, which is sort of just a notice for for the for for both Boston reasons intelligence center for the administration I think also for the council is that most of their answers were we're going to comply with the, uh, surveillance oversight that we passed and check back us, back up with us in August of 2022 when we put together our report. And I think it's important that we just because I was kind of stunned at the amount or the lack of amount of say in where these funds go that OEM had given other the administrator their more of a pass through. They they ask for the grant they get the grant but they couldn't detail exactly what was going to be done with the grant, who was going to be doing what with the grant, whether or not, for instance, these analysts are going to be using the gang database, are going to be focused more on regional counterintelligence for terrorism or things of that nature. And so I look forward to in August of 2022, going through this and making sure that we do this, because I believe this is the annual grant and this is something that we will have the ability to ensure compliance moving forward with, with our ordinances, with the things that we have dictated we would like to see from a transparency, uh, for transparency sake moving forward because, because of the surveillance oversight, we should have more say in terms of what that information that they're doing and what they are doing with these dollars, because this is not a small amount of money and so we'll be voting for it. But with the, uh, just with the notice for everybody who's still going to be here, anybody who's joining that, we still have work to do on ensuring that they, that this is money that is being used properly, that is being used in a way that is the most positive for our community. So thank you, Madam President. Thank you, Madam Chair, for for your leadership. Thank you so much. Does anyone else want to speak on this? Okay, great. Councilor Campbell seeks acceptance of the committee report and passage of Docket 1167. All those in favor, please indicate by saying I may oppose. The ayes have it. The docket 1167 has passed. Thank you so much, Madam Clerk. Let's take the next four dockets together. Docket 1168, 1169, 1170 and 1171. Great. Thank you. Docket 1168. Message in order. Authorize the city of Boston to accept. And an amount of 2,000,007 $70,874 in the form of a grant for the f y 22 Title three C Award by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services passed to the Master Executive Office of Elder appears to be administered by the H