Mr. ABRECHT. I raised that issue yesterday actually at the mee ing that we were discussing earlier, that we did want to achiev interoperability with the Library and the Supreme Court as a r sult of this.

Senator BENNETT. Right.

Mr. ABRECHT. And to the extent feasible with the Metropolita Police Force as well, who surround us on every side.

Senator BENNETT. It has been my experience that every polic department loves its own toys and they want to have their version I do not mean to refer to these things as "toys" because they ar clearly not. But that kind of mentality does sometimes get in th way, and somebody who is going to disturb activities on Capito Hill is not going to observe the niceties of, gee, I am now in th Supreme Court precinct, and now I am crossing over to the Librar of Congress, and the Capitol Police and, as you say, Chief Abrecht the Metropolitan Police as well.

So I am willing to support the funding for the increase in the technology and an increased level, but I wanted to put that cavea in your conversation.

Mr. ZIGLAR. Senator, if you will indulge me in a little anecdote from the impeachment trial. I had the good fortune to have known the Chief Justice for some 30 years, having clerked up at the Court when he was there and also worked with him at the Justice Department before then. During the course of the impeachment trial there were some pauses where he was sitting around and I was talking to him, and I raised this issue with him about compatibility of the technology between our police forces, and we chatted about it.

He is very much supportive of it, in fact to the point that he had his communications chief over there give me a call. So we are very much committed to the idea that we ought to be able to talk to each other through all this technology.

Well, let me close by thanking the committee and the entire Congress for the support that you have given the police, particularly during the last year when we suffered the tragic loss of Officers Chestnut and Gibson. The concern that was expressed by everyone I think gave great strength to those families, as well as to the entire Police Department.

On a happier note, I am also pleased to report that just within the last couple of weeks we have made a sizable distribution to those families from the Police Memorial Fund, which was made possible by the generous contributions from lots of people both up here and around the country.

So we thank you very much. We thank you for this opportunity, and my colleagues and I would be very happy to answer any questions you have.

Senator BENNETT. Thank you.

Y2K PROGRAM

I appreciate your comments about Y2K. It is my understanding that you still do not have your Y2K plan on paper, have not committed it to a formal document. Is that true?

Mr. ABRECHT. I do not think that is totally fair. I think we have done a tremendous amount of work with the GAO and we have

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submitted draft plans to them, and by the end of this month we will have a formal plan that they have agreed to.

Senator BENNETT. OK.

Mr. ZIGLAR. Senator, if I could comment on that.
Senator BENNETT. Sure.

Mr. ZIGLAR. I had a meeting separate from the Police Department with GAO to review the Police Department Y2K program. And while it is not on paper in the formal sense, GAO was quite comfortable with the progress that has been made there and the approach that has been taken, and brought a number of pieces of paper for me to review on that.

Senator BENNETT. Fine.

MANAGEMENT REVIEW

Now let us go to the management review and recommendations. You are having a retreat this week to talk about that. Who is responsible for implementing the recommendations? Will that be hammered out in the retreat, the specific names?

Mr. ZIGLAR. Yes, sir. In fact, Booz-Allen folks are coming. The people who actually worked on it are going to be spending Friday, I believe it is Friday morning with us. We will then iron out how exactly how we are going to approach it.

The House has asked for us to give some feedback on the report, our reaction to it, by March 31 and a final plan on the implementation strategy by April 30. So we are on a time line from the House side and, frankly, I am hoping that we will be ahead of that time line and in process before those deadlines.

Senator BENNETT. Tell us about your efforts to cross-service your accounting functions?

Mr. ZIGLAR. Do you want to?

Mr. ABRECHT. I will be glad to.

This is one of the three areas that we had asked for this evaluation to consider, because it is one of the areas where we knew we had difficulties. Our financial management system is very, very old. It runs on the Senate mainframe. It has serious problems. We have been looking for a solution to that problem.

One of the things that Booz-Allen recommended is that we ought to get some other agency to cross-service that function. So I had my director of financial management, through the Legislative Branch Financial Managers Council look for a cross-servicing option. The option that seems to be best suited to us is the General Accounting Office. They have offered to cross-service that function for us. They have done some testing. It shows that it can be accomplished. We are very excited that that is probably the very best solution for us. They are planning to charge a very modest fee for this and it seems like the ideal solution for us. We are very excited and hopeful that the budget that you are considering today will be administered through their accounting system.

Senator BENNETT. You say they will charge you a modest fee. Do you experience concomitant savings by virtue of having that now done out, where the net cost stays the same? Or are we looking at increased costs?

Mr. ABRECHT. It is hard to tell, because the system that we are currently running on is essentially the Sergeant at Arms main

frame. So if there is any savings, it would be in the operating cos of the Sergeant at Arms mainframe. I expect that would be th only savings that would be involved. There may even be some add tional staffing involved.

It is a much better system. It requires, unfortunately, that w keep much better records than we currently do, so there are som additional personnel that will probably be required to make th work. They are provided for in the security enhancement plan.

Senator BENNETT. Are they provided for in this budget?

Mr. ABRECHT. No, they are provided for in the security enhance ment plan. We anticipated that bringing on the additional officer and increasing the complexity of our physical security would ult mately have an additional impact on our infrastructure. So as par of the 260 additional personnel, we have a small number in ther for administrative support. There are five for the Office of Finan cial Management to bring that operation up to snuff.

PAYROLL INCREASES

Senator BENNETT. Do I understand correctly that, back to you point, Mr. Ziglar, about the payroll portion of the increase, tha there are no increases in FTE's, that this is entirely COLA's an merit pay for your existing FTE's?

Mr. ZIGLAR. Correct. The new FTE's that will come on through the enhancement plan are being funded through that enhancemen plan through fiscal year 2000. In 2001 our budget, the Capitol Po lice budget, will reflect those additional hires. We estimate that cost to be about $12 million.

Senator BENNETT. How big a number do you use in the COLA what percentage?

Mr. ABRECHT. We asked the Congressional Budget Office to pro vide us what they expect the COLA to be.

Senator BENNETT. I do not think it is going to be as high. In stinctively, I am saying that is an awful lot of merit increases to get the total.

Mr. ABRECHT. There are no merit increases actually at all. That was a misstatement. We have never been authorized to do merit increases, Mr. Chairman.

In addition to the COLA's, there is $1.3 million in there which is the result of underfunding in the past. We have not been funded at our funded level in fact.

Senator BENNETT. I see.

Mr. ABRECHT. There is some attrition that has always been counted on and fortunately, thanks to the support of the committee in providing pay parity for our people in this last year, our attrition has gotten very, very low. We do not anticipate that we are going to lose nearly as many people.

So the float that you get while you are replacing somebody who attrites is not going to be there this year.

Senator BENNETT. I see, OK.

Mr. ABRECHT. So in order to fund the budget at the 1,251 level we are going to need more money than we had in the past year, because we really were underfunded.

Senator BENNETT. I see, OK.

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Mr. ZIGLAR. Mr. Chairman, Bruce Holmberg just handed me a note that the assumptions that we use is a 4.3 percent COLA and a half percent comparability pay, the assumptions that went into this budget.

Senator BENNETT. I will not argue with whoever does the numbers, but that strikes me as a pretty high COLA in an age when, according to Alan Greenspan, inflation is dead and we are nonetheless adjusting for it at the rate of 4 percent. That is fairly high. Mr. ZIGLAR. We may have some money to give back to you.

Senator BENNETT. Well, I will not hold my breath for that. [Laughter.]

Mr. ABRECHT. My only hope there, Mr. Chairman, is that—and this is my mantra that you have heard for many years-that we remain comparable with the executive branch.

Senator BENNETT. Right.

Mr. ABRECHT. Whatever you give, whatever the government ultimately gives to the executive branch, that we remain there.

Senator BENNETT. I think that is legitimate, and that is not an issue that we can address.

You made reference to the rest of the increases coming out of a shifting of responsibility from the Sergeant at Arms to the police. Mr. ZIGLAR. A large part of it, not the entire amount.

Senator BENNETT. And of course that raises the question, is the Sergeant at Arms budget going to reflect a decrease by virtue of that shift? I have asked that question before and they have been unable to find the decrease. They just find the increase somehow. Are we going to see that again this year?

Mr. ZIGLAR. It is a $500,000 number. This year, as you know, the Sergeant at Arms is asking for a relatively sizable increase that is reflective largely of technology and those sorts of things. So the answer is we are not going to plan to give $500,000 or $600,000 to the police this year, but we will try to parse it and respond to you when we come back on March 24th.

SECURITY UPGRADE PROJECT

Senator BENNETT. Can you talk to us about your security upgrade project?

Mr. ABRECHT. Absolutely. You will recall the context here was that in 1995 a substantial survey of the Capitol grounds, a security survey of the whole complex, was accomplished jointly with United States Secret Service. We had planned to do a review of that study in 1998, and after the tragedy on July 24th we moved that up. We planned to do it in the fall and we started working on it right away.

We brought in experts from several of the large executive branch agencies. The United States Marshals were very helpful, the Secret Service, people who have done this for the executive branch.

From that we developed a number of recommendations, which ultimately were pared down some in the meetings with various committees and $106 million was included in the omnibus supplemental, including $25 million for personnel, which we have already discussed. The rest of it was primarily physical security upgrades, although there is some money in there to support the new officers,

for equipment for them, for vests, for new weapons. But the bu of it goes to physical security in a number of areas.

Most of them I think have some law enforcement sensitivity, I would rather not go into

Senator BENNETT. Right.

Mr. ABRECHT (continuing). The nitty-gritty details. But obvious we are looking to protect the Congress against terrorists, terroris fundamentally, in all the different ways that the Congress could b assaulted from a terrorist standpoint. We tried to address ever one of them in this study.

Senator BENNETT. Senator Feinstein.

Senator FEINSTEIN. Thanks very much, Mr. Chairman.

BOOZ-ALLEN AND HAMILTON REPORT

I wanted to go and just speak for a moment about some of th Booz-Allen and Hamilton recommendations. It is my understandin that the report contains some specific recommendations on how yo can improve operations in administrative areas. The chairman re ferred to certain cross-cutting issues. I think the report also found that the current organizational structure neither facilitates commu nications between the operations and the administrative suppor functions nor integrates administrative support functions into the management process.

It went on to say that as an organization the Capitol Police does not utilize formal strategic planning to help plan and direc changes in current administrative support activities which are needed to support future operational demands, and that your sup port operations lack current and complete operating policies and procedures.

The report goes on to recommend that you create an assistant chief for administration, who would report directly to the police chief. In making this recommendation, they note that potential candidates should have operational and administrative experience. In addition, they say this individual should possess strong managerial skills, have a vision and an understanding of how an effective and efficient administrative structure can support police operations.

They also say that this individual should institute a formal strategic planning process for administrative operations and that the objective should be a mission and vision for operations within the department. They identify key administrative functions that need to be developed and maintained with formalized policies and procedures that need to be followed to carry out the functions.

My questions are: Do you agree with those recommendations and are you going to establish the position?

Mr. ABRECHT. I think that is one of the subjects that the Board will clearly be discussing on Friday. We have drafted a reorganization plan that follows Booz-Allen's recommendations almost to the letter, with some very minor tweaks based on things that we know that they perhaps do not know about our organization, and we are going to be discussing that with the Board. At least that is mychairman?

Mr. ZIGLAR. Senator, at an intellectual level, if the facts as presented in the report are accurate and I have not had the oppor