Coast Guard Faces Transition, Changes But Pledges to Remain Semper Paratus – “Always Ready”
By Heidi Taylor
WASHINGTON—By March 1, the U.S. Coast Guard will have made its transition into the new Department of Homeland Security, an agency whose prime mission is to protect the United States from terrorist attacks. But many authorities—including some in the North Shore area– worry that this shift of focus will take away from some of the Coast Guard’s established missions.
“One of the concerns I had about the reconfiguration from the beginning was that even their core missions would not be receiving enough funding,” Rep. John Tierney, D-Salem, said in an interview Thursday. He added that traditional responsibilities such as water safety, search and rescue, fishing, and open waterways could be neglected in a financial crunch.
For local residents, some of the traditional missions like search and rescue are crucial. Just this week, the Gloucester Coast Guard was called to make a rescue attempt in the waters off Cape Ann after receiving a report of a diver in distress. A Coast Guard rescue boat from Gloucester and a rescue helicopter from the Cape Cod air station were sent to the diver’s aid, but the diver was announced dead on arrival at Addison Gilbert Hospital.
Adm. Thomas Collins, commandant of the Coast Guard, warned at a hearing held by the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, and Fisheries that “the Coast Guard is shouldering a tremendous responsibility” with its new homeland security role and its new duties to protect the ports, coastal shorelines and citizens as well as its traditional duties.
But he stressed that the Coast Guard has always been a multi-mission organization and that such duties as search and rescue, drug and migrant interdiction, marine environment protection and fisheries management would not be neglected.
“We must be able to balance the rigors of homeland security with the demands of other crucial missions,” he said, adding that the increase in the president’s fiscal year 2004 budget for the Coast Guard would be a big help.
In addition to the financial woes the Coast Guard may face, JayEtta Hecker, director of the General Accounting Office’s physical infrastructure team, said that a GAO study published in January found the overall process of creating the Department of Homeland Security, in which 22 agencies will be consolidated, to be high risk.
The Coast Guard, she said, “must still do the work it has been doing for years in such areas as fisheries management and search and rescue, but now its resources are deployed as well in homeland security and even in the military buildup in the Middle East.”
“We’re asking you to do more with less,” Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, who chairs the subcommittee, said to Collins at the hearing. Snowe expressed concerns about what she called “gaping holes” along the country’s coasts. She warned that with threat levels heightened, the Coast Guard must make constant vigilance the norm.
The biggest challenge the Coast Guard faces right now, according to Hecker, is balancing all its important missions, new and old, as it merges into the new department and hires a huge number—over 4,000—of new personnel.
“The Coast Guard has a solid record…but start-up problems are real,” Hecker said, adding that the GAO has identified such things as communication and partnership-building, strategic planning and performance management as key factors for a successful transition.
Published in The Newburyport Daily News, The Gloucester Daily News, and The Salem News in Massachusetts.
