into this issue in the Banking Committee, he was my Bank Committee staffer and he quoted his grandmother, who said: “ ways sweep in front of your own stoop first." We are out sweepi in front of everybody else's stoop and we have to ask the questi is the legislative branch of government going to be Y2K-complian Now, those of you who testified before this subcommittee befo know that I always raise it. I am putting you on notice that I w raise it again this morning and that the subcommittee is prepar to have another hearing on this issue later this year if in fact t Y2K preparedness warrants it. I can think of nothing more perso ally embarrassing to me than to have other parts of the econom all work and the legislative branch fail to work and have peop say, well, he was out sweeping in front of everybody else's stoo but he did not bother to look at the dust and debris that had acc mulated in front of his own. So I am putting you on notice. I know that comes as no surpris because that is an issue that I have been so outspoken on for th last 3 years, but I wanted to make that clear. It is worth noting that OMB has set the 31st of March as th deadline for every executive agency to have things done so that th testing can start. We already know that there are executive ager cies that will not meet that deadline. We think that is a decen deadline. It gives you 9 months for testing, which in some in stances will be plenty. In others, like the Defense Department, i will probably not be, because the testing is in many ways the mos time-consuming part of the Y2K challenge. If the agencies we hear from this morning are not ready by the 31st of March, then we plan to have some kind of additional hear ing in April to have you outline when you plan to be ready and ex actly where you are with respect to remediation. Now, Senator Feinstein, we appreciate again your being here your joining us, and happy to have whatever opening statement you may care to make. Senator FEINSTEIN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to say that it is a great pleasure for me to work with you. I find you very open and willing to discuss and share, and I want you to know that, in the best bipartisan spirit, I really appreciate that very, very much. For me, some of the numbers that I see on the Legislative Branch have been a surprise, and as we begin the process of this detailed review of the fiscal year 2000 battlefield I note that the Legislative Branch Subcommittee's total is $2,621,321,000, which is an increase of $269,521,000, or an 11.5 percent increase from fiscal year 1999 enacted levels. For the Senate items only, the amount requested for fiscal year 2000 totals $517,460,000, which is an increase of over $42 million, or approximately 9 percent over last year's enacted level. Those are for me, who has only done city and county budgets really, a substantial amount. I expect that, because the budgetary constraints on the domestic discretionary budget will be tight again this year, the 302(b) allocation to this particular subcommittee will also be tight. I note that members of the Capitol Police Board are scheduled to testify first. As you know, the fiscal year 1999 Omnibus Appro priations Act provided emergency funding of $106,782,000 to the Capitol Police Board to enhance security for the Capitol complex and the Library of Congress buildings and grounds. I have been privileged to hear the Chief's presentation at the Rules Committee. This includes additional police staffing of 260 to be brought on over a 2-year period to assist in implementing these security upgrades, which incidentally I support. It is my hope, Chief, that you will take some time during your opening remarks to outline for this subcommittee the impact these additional staff will have on an annualized basis to your budget request beginning with fiscal year 2001. I would like to thank the chairman for scheduling these witnesses to appear before us today, and I thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Senator BENNETT. Thank you. Our first panel is the U.S. Capitol Police Board, James Ziglar, and we welcome you, sir. This is your first experience before the subcommittee. I hope we will not continue to see the musical chairs phenomenon with respect to the Sergeant at Arms. Since I have been on this subcommittee, I have heard testimony from Howard Green, Greg Casey, and now you. We hope you are here for certainly as long as you want to be and for a good long time. We welcome you and welcome your expertise to this assignment. Along with Mr. Ziglar are some more familiar faces: Mr. Livingood, Mr. Hantman, and Chief Abrecht. BUDGET REQUEST The budget request for the police is $90.2 million, $81.2 million for salaries and $9 million for general expenses. This is an 8.6 percent increase over the fiscal 1999 level. It supports the current FTE level of 1,251 civilian and uniformed officers. Before we begin with the testimony, I want to formally and publicly thank the Police Board and the police staff for your openness and your willingness to share with us the specifics of many of the challenges you are facing. Too often we have people who when they have problems try to hide them and hope that in hiding them they can make them go away. But you have been very open and candid with this subcommittee and I appreciate our relationship. I think this relationship makes it easier for us to help you. We know that sometimes you would rather not share some of your problems, but your willingness to do so I think is admirable and much appreciated. We want to work together with the police to help you get the infrastructure that you need. We recognize that the police provide an absolutely vital and, as was dramatically demonstrated last summer, life-threatening service for all of us. We sometimes take that protection for granted. It was a tragic incident that reminded us just how professional our Capitol Police force really is. I would be remiss if I did not publicly, through you, Chief Abrecht, thank you for all of the work that all of the men and women on the police force do to take care of us. So we will, I assume, begin with you, Mr. Ziglar as the Chairman of the Board. Mr. ZIGLAR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Senator Feinstein. With respect to the musical chairs comment you made, I ho that I do not contribute to that. But in keeping with your comme about Y2K, the Leader has explained to me that I will contribu to that if I do not get it fixed right. So if I am not here for ne year's hearing, it is because we failed on Y2K and the Leader d not think kindly of it. But hopefully that will not occur. As you mentioned, this is my first occasion to be here and I a very pleased to be here. I am also very honored to be Sergeant Arms of the Senate and I am looking forward to working with yo As you know, Senator, I worked here when your dad was a Se ator, and so it is like coming home for me 35 years later. INTRODUCTION OF ASSOCIATES I would like to introduce-well, you have already introduce them, Bill Livingood and Alan Hantman, the other two member of the Capitol Police Board, and make one comment, and that in a very short period of time we have had an extraordinarily goo working relationship. In addition to working together well, we hav actually become friends and are enjoying each other. In fact, today is the first time that consolidated testimony amon the Architect and the House and the Senate has been presented o a budget request, and we think that this demonstrates our unity I would like to also introduce to you two other folks in the audi ence here, Doyle Frederick and Ozzie Girard. Doyle is the Chief o Staff of the Sergeant at Arms and Ozzie Girard is here working or security and police liaison issues for me. I did a little bit of reorga nization in order to focus on those things. We have prepared a written statement which has been submitted for the record. In addition, I would like to just make a few comments. Senator BENNETT. Your statement will appear in the record in full. SUMMARY STATEMENT Mr. ZIGLAR. Thank you. I would like to just make a few comments, if I could, summarizing and somewhat expanding on it. Since I became Sergeant at Arms of the Senate, and particularly since I became Capitol Police Board Chairman, I have developed a very strong respect for the Capitol Police Department, the Chief and all of those folks that run it. It is a very professional and very capable organization. I have to tell you, having arrived right at the beginning of the impeachment process, which does not happen that often, with all sorts of incredible security problems and challenges, the Capitol Police performed superbly. There were very, very few glitches. It was a seamless performance in terms of security. I want to especially thank the Chief and officers for their performance in that. I think we all should be very thankful for and proud of the service that we get from the Capitol Police Department. Now, that is not to say, however, that over the next few years that we do not have some challenges that we are going to have to meet in terms of the security around here. During the next few years we are going to do a number of things. As you pointed out, we are going to add roughly 260 new officers VV CON BRAR IBRAR NOO. CON 5 to the police force, which is a massive infusion of new personnel, and that will create some transition challenges. We are going to upgrade the personal equipment for officers and we are going to upgrade the training for our officers. We are going to be implementing the massive physical security upgrades that are part of the omnibus authorization from last year, and that is Capitol Complex-wide. We are going to be developing or are developing a master plan to address some of the deficiencies in the Capitol Police infrastructure. And we are going to implement many of the recommendations of the recently released Booz-Allen and Hamilton report, having to do primarily with the administration and strategic planning part of the Capitol Police. The Congress has been very supportive of the Capitol Police and of the security issues around the Capitol. Just in the last few weeks literally, we have had a number of very important developments that have occurred. In the House, both the Appropriations and the authorizing committees have now approved the $106 million implementation plan, and we are hoping very soon to get approval on the Senate side so that we can begin to move ahead. Second, the appropriate House and Senate committees have approved the hiring of our 260 new personnel. With respect to the House, there are about 15 positions that they want us to provide additional justification for. We are in the process of recruiting and also developing a training program. Obviously, to bring that many personnel on board we are going to have to double the size of the training program and bring a little more efficiency into it in order to get them up to the professional level that we have for the rest of our officers. Third, the perimeter security program has now been approved by all parties and the Architect of the Capitol is doing a terrific job of getting it moving. I suspect Alan will talk more about that, either now or in his testimony later on today. So these three very critical elements of our security plan are now in place or just about in place and operating. We are very proud of the way the police have handled this and how quickly it has gone, and particularly for the support from the Congress on both sides. Another significant recent event was the release of the BoozAllen and Hamilton study on the Police Department which particularly focused on administrative activities. They have recommended some changes in both the human resources, information technology, and financial management areas. One of the overarching recommendations was that the Police Department needs to have a strategic plan in this area. We had-actually, before that recommendation was final started the process of working with the Police Department on creating a strategic plan, and also moving quickly to take some action on a reorganization that is obvious, I think, to everyone that we need to do. In fact, when we leave here today we are going to a 2-day offsite Board workshop. We are not going to any luxurious place. We are just going outside the Capitol complex so that our telephones do not ring all the time. We will look at the Booz-Allen report in depth and come up with our recommendations; the master planning docu ment on the facilities side; as well as some other implementatio issues with regard to the omnibus authorization. Let us talk about Y2K. Y2K Mr. ZIGLAR. I was keeping you in suspense by putting it furthe down, not that it is not the number one priority. In my role as Sergeant at Arms of the Senate, I obviously hav more than just the police part of the Y2K. I have been, particularl since the impeachment trial was over and I had a little bit mor time, very involved in it. I was very involved in it when I first go here. I am feeling very comfortable, Senator, that we are doing th right things. I have reached beyond just our in-house people t have some outside folks take a look at it on an informal basis, jus to make sure that there was nothing that seemed to be OK but wa not. I am feeling good that we are although we may not have al things done by March 31 we are doing very well, and I suspect tha you and I and Senator Feinstein will be talking about those issues in another budget hearing on March the 24th. But with respect to the Police Department, we identified 19 criti cal missions systems. I have gone through each one of them with the police. We are now at the implementation stage, beyond valida tion, on at least ten of them, as I recall. I do not have that right in front of me. We are at validation on 14 of the 19, and we are doing quite well on the renovation of the rest of them. There is only one system that at this point I think we are not exactly sure what we are going to do with, and that is the Motorola radio console system. The issue there, quite frankly, having looked at this thing in some detail, is not so much Y2K compliance, because we can get there. The issue is whether or not we are going to spend between $600,000 and $900,000 to replace that console system or we are going to do a patch. Now, without regard to Y2K the fact is that that system is very old, it is outdated, it is at the low end of the technological curve, and, more importantly, it has no redundancy in the system. From a police security point of view, it is not a very attractive situation. So to be quite honest with you, we are tending now, as a result of an additional technical meeting yesterday, toward replacement of the console system through an RFP process. Because there is a lot of good technology out there, we are not limited to the original supplier. PREPARED STATEMENTS I think that is probably what we will recommend and we are very close to making that decision. It really has to do with upgrading our technology as much as with Y2K. [The statements follow:] PREPARED STATEMENT OF JAMES W. ZIGLAR Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, I am pleased to appear before you to present the fiscal year 2000 Budget Request for the United States Capitol Police. |