Black administrators stress cooperation, leadership in times of crisis

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Posted 11:15PM on Sunday, April 7, 2002

PORTLAND, OREGON - Taking personal control of a crisis is an essential step toward bringing things under control as quickly as possible, New York Secretary of State Randy Daniels told a convention of black public administrators Sunday. Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, ``The smartest thing that Mayor Giuliani and Gov. Pataki did was they took personal control of the crisis,'' he said. ``The political leadership has to do this. There was no doubt who was in control in New York Rudy Giuliani was in control.'' Daniels took part in a public policy forum at the weeklong annual convention of the National Forum for Black Public Administrators. ``The governor's edict was to give Mayor Giuliani whatever he needed. And within hours of the attack he designated ... the principal liaisons of the City of New York to cut through the bureaucratic red tape that exists through this emergency service and that emergency service,'' Daniels said. Daniels said it is impossible to plan for something like the Sept. 11 attacks, and that with 12,000 firemen and 40,000 policemen, the city was better prepared than most. But he said even that was not enough. He said the first day the city had no idea how many people were in the trade towers. ``We weren't getting the injured in the hospitals in the numbers we had expected,'' he said. ``And that's when we decided to order 10,000 body bags.'' He said the economic impact on New York was $7 billion with 150,000 jobs gone overnight and reconstruction costs estimated at $20 billion. He said the federal government will not provide that, and that federal help is being centered in the Ground Zero area. ``We must not be complacent. This is not over. This country will be challenged by terror and we have to face it,'' Daniels said. Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said his city, too, was hard-hit financially when the border with Canada was temporarily closed. He said that normally trade valued at $1.4 billion a day crosses the border, and that his city, too, had to pay nearly $5 million in overtime for extra security. He called on the mayors and city managers at the conference to join to pressure the federal government ``to make us whole. They are mandating things we cannot do.'' Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin said her city shared financial hardships. She said Atlanta has spent an extra $46,000 a week since Sept. 11 to pay private security to protect the water system. ``This was not calculated into the rate structure,'' she said, adding that security-related overtime from Sept. 11 to the end of the year came to about $5 million, most of it at the airport. At the time of the attacks, she said, Atlanta's police department had some 500 vacancies and could not fill the void. ``One of the lessons that we have learned is that we have to have a full force and that we have to do whatever it takes to get to a full force of police, fire and emergency services.'' She said that a dampening of the convention industry after the attacks caused Georgia to lose 90,000 jobs in a short time. Oakland, Calif., Mayor Jerry Brown said that ``there is so much power now that is distributed throughout the world, and we may always have the latest weapons but our old weapons of just a few years ago are now in the hands of people who are now our adversaries.'' He said terrorists with grievances always will be drawn to acting against the United States as long as America has most of the power. In preparing to combat it, he said, ``the federal government has to be the driver. They have the resources, they've got the CIA and the FBI the Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the money.'' He said that will decentralize and minimize local power.