Acting Commerce Secretary Rebecca Blank Remarks to Association of Public Safety Communications Officials (APCO) Annual Conference, Minneapolis, Minnesota Thank you, Greg (Riddle). It’s great to be here with APCO and many of our country’s top leaders in public-safety communications.
And I’d like to recognize and thank the first responders and public safety workers who are with us today, along with all of your colleagues throughout the nation. On behalf of the Obama administration, we are grateful for all that you do to keep our nation safe and secure.
It’s great to be back in the Twin Cities. I went to high school and college here, graduating from the University of Minnesota, home of the Golden Gophers. The Gophers certainly made America proud over the last few weeks with five athletes from the University of Minnesota competing in the Olympics. And, I want to point out that all five of these all-stars were women.
Now, America has always been a nation of competitors. It’s in our DNA to go for the gold. And it’s not just our athletes. Resilience and hard work is the American way—for our businesses, our workers, and our public servants.
And sometimes that means fighting our way back—which is what the Obama Administration is focused on as we continue to recover from the biggest recession since the Great Depression.
Back in 2008, our economy was in free fall. The damage inflicted by the financial meltdown was enormous. By the end of that year, about 750,000 Americans were losing their jobs every month.
President Obama knew we had to get back on track. That’s why, less than a month into office, he signed the Recovery Act. As you might remember, it had three parts.
Here in Minnesota, unemployment has dropped from a high of 8.3 percent to 5.8 percent last month. Still, no one doubts that we have much more work to do before the economy is back to the levels of growth and activity that we all want to see. That’s why the president continues to call on Congress to pass some important proposals that our economy needs to move back to full health.
Make no mistake. The most basic obligation that we have is to keep our citizens safe—whether they’re at home, at work, at school, or—as we’ve been reminded more recently through the heroes in local businesses and in places of worship.
The president and all of us throughout the administration are working every day to ensure that people like you can continue to protect and save lives.
That’s who you are. That’s what you do.
But we can’t stop there. There’s more that we need to do to ensure the prosperity of our communities.
That’s why the president is calling on Congress to extend the middle-class tax cuts for families making less than $250,000 a year. This would help 98 percent of Americans and 97 percent of small businesses. Unless we extend this tax cut through 2013, a typical middle class family of four would see its taxes rise by over $2,000.
Both of these things—funding for state and local public safety workers, teachers and infrastructure jobs and the extension of middle class tax cuts—we can and should do right now. There’s no time to waste.
But we need to make longer-term investments, too—which brings me to today’s announcement.
After 9/11 and Katrina, it became clear to everyone that our public safety communications systems were entirely too fragmented across the local, state and federal levels.
This was and is a problem. This creates both more risk and higher costs. Our first responders deserve better.
That’s why in his State of the Union address last year, President Obama called on Congress to create a nationwide, secure, and interoperable broadband network to help the millions of first responders and public safety workers across our country.
As the president said, this could help a firefighter download the design of a burning building onto a handheld device. It could also help police officers see crimes that are happening in real time.
Congress approved the creation of the FirstNet interoperable network as part of the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012. The design and establishment of this network will be funded with $7 billion from spectrum auctions. The president signed this into law 6 months ago.
And today—flowing out of that law—I have an important announcement to make.
It was also a jigsaw puzzle given the requirements that the FirstNet Board reflect a broad array of backgrounds, ranging from...
First, the public safety community has excellent representation from: I am also proud to announce as board members: Congratulations to all of you. I am proud of the high quality of those who we are appointing to this Board and am confident that they will do an excellent job.
This is truly an exciting moment. We will be building a nationwide public safety communications network that is worthy of the women and men who responded on 9/11... and that is worthy of the women and men who put themselves in harm’s way each and every day.
This project will bring the biggest infusion of innovation into this system in decades. It is a huge undertaking. And it is a call to action for all of us.
Thank you.
Source: U.S. Department of Commerce
