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H.R. 2291, REAUTHORIZATION OF THE DRUG

FREE COMMUNITIES ACT

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE,

DRUG POLICY AND HUMAN RESOURCES

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

ON

H.R. 2291

TO EXTEND THE AUTHORIZATION OF THE DRUG-FREE COMMUNITIES

SUPPORT PROGRAM FOR AN ADDITIONAL 5 YEARS, TO AUTHORIZE A

NATIONAL COMMUNITY ANTIDRUG COALITION INSTITUTE, AND FOR

OTHER PURPOSES

JUNE 28, 2001

Serial No. 107–65

Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house

http://www.house.gov/reform

(II)

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM

DAN BURTON, Indiana, Chairman

BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York

CONSTANCE A. MORELLA, Maryland

CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

STEPHEN HORN, California

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana

JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida

STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio

BOB BARR, Georgia

DAN MILLER, Florida

DOUG OSE, California

RON LEWIS, Kentucky

JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania

DAVE WELDON, Florida

CHRIS CANNON, Utah

ADAM H. PUTNAM, Florida

C.L. ‘‘BUTCH’’ OTTER, Idaho

EDWARD L. SCHROCK, Virginia

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California

TOM LANTOS, California

MAJOR R. OWENS, New York

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania

PATSY T. MINK, Hawaii

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Washington,

DC

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio

ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts

JIM TURNER, Texas

THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine

JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri

DIANE E. WATSON, California

——— ———

———

BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont

(Independent)

KEVIN BINGER, Staff Director

DANIEL R. MOLL, Deputy Staff Director

JAMES C. WILSON, Chief Counsel

ROBERT A. BRIGGS, Chief Clerk

PHIL SCHILIRO, Minority Staff Director

SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE, DRUG POLICY AND HUMAN RESOURCES

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana, Chairman

BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida

JOHN L. MICA, Florida,

BOB BARR, Georgia

DAN MILLER, Florida

DOUG OSE, California

JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia

DAVE WELDON, Florida

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois

BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

JIM TURNER, Texas

THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine

——— ———

EX OFFICIO

DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California

CHRISTOPHER DONESA, Staff Director and Chief Counsel

NICHOLAS COLEMAN, Professional Staff Member

CONN CARROLL, Clerk

TONY HAYWOOD, Minority Counsel

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on June 28, 2001 ............................................................................... 1

Text of H.R. 2291 ..................................................................................................... 6

Statement of:

Dean, Arthur T., Major General, U.S. Army, retired, chairman and CEO,

Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America; Honorable Michael Kramer, judge, Noble County Superior Court, Indiana, chair of Drug-Free

Noble County and member of the Advisory Board of CADCA; and

Lawrence Couch, program manager, Montgomery County Partnership,

Maryland ....................................................................................................... 78

Levin, Hon. Sander, a Representative in Congress from the State of

Michigan ........................................................................................................ 35

Portman, Hon. Rob, a Representative in Congress from the State of

Ohio ................................................................................................................ 27

Vereen, Donald M., Jr., M.D., M.P.H., Deputy Director, Office of National

Drug Control Policy; and John J. Wilson, Acting Director, OJJDP,

Department of Justice .................................................................................. 48

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:

Couch, Lawrence, program manager, Montgomery County Partnership,

Maryland, prepared statement of ................................................................ 94

Dean, Arthur T., Major General, U.S. Army, retired, chairman and CEO,

Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America:

Information concerning selected outcomes .............................................. 98

Information concerning Lessons From the Field .................................... 102

Prepared statement of ............................................................................... 81

Kramer, Honorable Michael, judge, Noble County Superior Court, Indiana, chair of Drug-Free Noble County and member of the Advisory

Board of CADCA, prepared statement of .................................................... 88

Portman, Hon. Rob, a Representative in Congress from the State of

Ohio, prepared statement of ........................................................................ 31

Souder, Hon. Mark E., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Indiana, prepared statement of ............................................................... 3

Vereen, Donald M., Jr., M.D., M.P.H., Deputy Director, Office of National

Drug Control Policy, prepared statement of ............................................... 51

Wilson, John J., Acting Director, OJJDP, Department of Justice, prepared

statement of ................................................................................................... 59

(1)

H.R. 2291, REAUTHORIZATION OF THE DRUG

FREE COMMUNITIES ACT

THURSDAY, JUNE 28, 2001

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE, DRUG POLICY AND

HUMAN RESOURCES, COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM, Washington, DC.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room

2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Mark E. Souder (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Souder, Gilman and Cummings.

Staff present: Christopher Donesa, staff director and chief counsel; Nicholas Coleman, professional staff member; Conn Carroll,

clerk; Chris Barkley, intern; Tony Haywood, minority counsel;

Lorran Garrison, minority staff assistant; and Peter Anthony, minority intern.

Mr. SOUDER. The subcommittee will come to order. Good morning

and thank you all for coming.

This morning the subcommittee will consider reauthorization of

the Drug Free Communities Act, particularly H.R. 2291, which was

introduced by Congressman Portman last week. The Drug Free

Communities Act is one of the pillars of our national demand reduction strategy and a priority for President Bush. This program

also enjoys broad-based and bipartisan national support. It is intended to drive Federal assistance for prevention and treatment

programs directly to the communities where it can do the most

good to help parents and neighbors to keep children away from illegal drugs.

Since its enactment in 1997, the program has a proven record of

success, and I am glad to have the opportunity to consider and

strongly support its reauthorization in this subcommittee. From

Nome, AK, and Kauai, HI, to Kendallville, IN, and Montgomery

County, MD, we have seen how Drug Free Communities Coalitions

can make a difference in individual cities, towns and counties

across America. The program now assists 307 communities in 49

States, all of which are funded primarily by private sector, State

and local dollars. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses

about the many success stories which have come from the program.

I want to thank Congressman Portman and Congressman Levin

for their bipartisan leadership on this legislation along with Senator Grassley and Senator Biden.

The bill recognizes the administration’s priority to increase overall funding for the program in fiscal 2002 from $43.5 million to

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$50.6 million and steadily increases the programs authorization to

$75 million in fiscal 2007. It also addresses an issue which has

been of some concern by allowing previous grantees to compete

anew for program support after 5 years. H.R. 2291 also envisions

improvements to the program by allowing supplementary grants

for leading coalitions to mentor new coalitions in their area and the

creation of a National Community Anti-Drug Coalition Institute

which would provide technical assistance to coalitions in expanding

the program to new communities.

While I strongly support this legislation, I also want to ensure

that any reauthorization bill reported by this subcommittee reflects

the original goal of the program to move Federal assistance directly

to the communities who are doing the work.

I look forward to further testimony and explanation from today’s

witnesses with respect to the proposal to more than double the

statutory cap on administrative expenses for the program from the

current 3 percent to 8 percent, about which I have some concern.

In the outyears of the program, this increase in administrative

costs potentially represents grants to 35 additional communities.

I would also like the subcommittee to be satisfied that in the

course of laudable efforts to expand and improve the program we

do not inadvertently create or fund duplicative Federal efforts. In

particular, I hope to hear from witnesses how the program will reconcile multiple entities who would have such tasks as technical assistance and training to local coalitions, including the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the Justice Department, the new mentoring coalitions and the proposed new Institute.

We have excellent witnesses with us today to discuss the overall

track record and benefit to the Drug Free Communities Program

as well as the proposed legislation.

Our first panel consists of Congressman Rob Portman from Ohio

and Congressman Sander Levin from Michigan, who worked tirelessly to create this program and have carefully nurtured it over

the years to the success that it is today.

On our second panel we have Dr. Donald Vereen, Deputy Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and Mr. John Wilson, Acting Director of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the Justice Department.

On our third panel we will welcome true leaders of the community coalition movement, including General Arthur Dean, the chairman and CEO of the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America;

my friend Judge Michael Kramer from Noble County, IN, in my

district, whose coalition won a national award from CADCA; and

Mr. Lawrence Couch, the program manager for the Montgomery

County partnership in Congressman Cummings’ home State of

Maryland. We look forward to your testimony.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Mark E. Souder and the text

of H.R. 2991 follow:]

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Mr. SOUDER. Now I would like to yield to Congressman

Cummings for an opening statement.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Today’s hearing offers a welcome opportunity to review one of the

most successful and least controversial initiatives in our national

war on drugs. At a time when much of our Nation’s anti-drug policy seems caught in political cross hairs, the Drug Free Communities Program enjoys broad bipartisan support.

I am proud to say that I have been a strong supporter of the

DFCA since its enactment, and I have strongly supported increases

in the funding for many programs in subsequent years. I am just

as proud to be an original cosponsor of the reauthorizing bill before

us today.

This year, H.R. 2291’s primary authors, Congressman Portman

and Congressman Sander Levin, deserve congratulations for their

committed work in putting together a bill that will sustain the near

universal support the Drug Free Communities Program has enjoyed since its inception. The Bush administration, too, deserves

credit for recognizing the value of this program by accommodating

in its fiscal year 2002 budget request increased funding levels that

are set forth in H.R. 2291.

The 5-year reauthorization and increased funding levels provided

in H.R. 2291 are designed to breathe additional life into an already

vital and small-scale program that attacks the problems of substance abuse where it resides, namely, in our communities and especially among our youth. Moreover, in addition to continuing congressional commitment to assisting the concerted grassroots efforts

of communities to address their substance abuse problems at their

source, the bill contains several new provisions that make it responsive to both the needs of struggling coalitions and the desire

of thriving coalitions to pass on the benefits of their experience.

I must say, Mr. Chairman, that I am most impressed by this. Because in the Baltimore city limits, which is—I guess I represent

about 55 or 60 percent of Baltimore city, I would imagine you

would have probably somewhere between 75 and 150 organizations

that could use these funds and could use them effectively and efficiently.

A reasonable increase in the program’s administrative cost cap,

new supplemental mentor grants, expanded eligibility for coalitions

that have completed their 5-year funding cycle and the newly proposed National Community Anti-Drug Coalition Institute would not

only increase ONDCPs’ and the OJJDPs’ ability to serve Community Anti-Drug Coalitions but also empower coalitions further to

help themselves and each other.

Just this past week I visited three organizations in my district

who have anti-drug efforts going on, and one of the things that was

clear was that it would have been very helpful if they had some

other organizations that had been successful to mentor them and

to provide them with advice. It’s not a question of whether people

have the will. The question is whether or not we can equip them

with the information and the resources to do the things that they

want to do.

People want to take back their communities. They want their

communities to be the best that they can be. They want their propVerDate 11-MAY-2000 07:34 Sep 05, 2002 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00030 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\79781.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
27

erty values to go up. They want their children not to be involved

in drugs. The question is whether we will provide the resources

and whether we will provide the information so that they can be

most effective.

Although I understand that there are a couple of aspects of the

legislation that have raised some concern, I know, more importantly, Mr. Chairman, that you strongly support the Drug Free

Communities Program as I do. Thus, it is my hope that the witnesses will address your concerns satisfactorily today, Mr. Chairman, and that, in any event, we will be able to proceed to a markup on this important legislation in the very, very, near future.

I thank all of the witnesses for appearing before the subcommittee today, and I look forward to hearing from you all. And I want

to thank everybody in the room, in case we don’t get a chance to

thank you, for doing what you do every day to lift up our Nation

and to attack this very, very serious problem that we have in so

many communities throughout the country.

With that, Mr. Chairman, I thank you.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you.

Before proceeding, I would like to take care of a couple of procedural matters.

First, I’d like unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative days to submit written statements and questions for the

hearing record; that any answers to written questions provided by

the witnesses also be included in the record. Without objection, it’s

so ordered.

Second, I ask unanimous consent that all exhibits, documents

and other materials referred to by Members and the witnesses may

be included in the hearing record and that all Members be permitted to revise and extend their remarks. Without objection, it is

so ordered.

I would like to welcome our first panel, Congressman Rob

Portman and Congressman Sander Levin. It’s a pleasure to have

you both here.

Following standard committee practice, we recognize your oaths

of office and will not swear you in as other witnesses to the panel

are sworn in.

Congressman Portman, you are recognized for your opening

statement.

STATEMENT OF HON. ROB PORTMAN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN

CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF OHIO

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for agreeing

to move this legislation on an expedited basis and having a hearing

today.

I think there are a number of opportunities you are going to have

on the additional panels to get into the issues, but Sandy Levin

and I would love to have the opportunity to have some questions,

and I will try to keep my statement relatively brief.

I’ll start by saying that we appreciate your support and Mr.

Cummings’ support over the years. In 1997, we started this project

together with your input, both of you, and with your support. We

think it has been very successful, and we’re here to try to reauthorize it now and improve on it.

28

The whole notion of this program is to provide a Federal grant

program directly to communities to encourage them to put together

a comprehensive, long-term approach involving all segments of the

community and to do it in a way that can be measured. And very

significantly, of course, it’s a 100 percent matching grant program,

so every Federal dollar leverages tremendous nonFederal resources.

We have so far been able to give these grants out to 307 community coalitions in 49 States, D.C., Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. So it’s been broad based. And again we think we have had

some great successes out there in creating more coalitions as well

as rewarding those doing a good job encouraging them to do more.

Now this was a new approach. We had not tried this previously.

It involves the Federal Government directly and local coalitions;

and we did it because, frankly, many of us were frustrated with

what we saw as a war on drugs that was not successful in getting

at the demand reduction side. And effective prevention and education at the local level we thought worked, and we wanted to encourage it.

We have found that coalitions are successful because they are focused on the individual communities. They devise specific strategies that work in very specific communities, and that means usually in a neighborhood often defined by a school district. I think

that’s the level at which we think we’re going to find the most success and where we believe this has worked well.

Also, these coalitions have to involve sort of all of the players

that influence the decision of a young person, and that’s law enforcement, and that’s the faith community, and that’s our schools

and parents and teachers and business community. That we

thought was a new approach in terms of the Federal Government

encouraging and being involved and again one that we believe

works very well.

Congressman Levin and I have witnessed first hand how these

community coalitions work. We both in our districts have active

community coalitions. We’ve gotten very involved in them, and we

are believers, and we think there ought to be a continued support

network here from the Federal level.

When we were all down at the White House hearing President

Bush announced John Walters as his nominee for NADP, he

stressed that the best way to reduce the supply on drugs he

thought was to reduce the demand for drugs in this country. And

as you recall he went on to specifically mention the Drug Free

Communities Act as a way to do that. So we’re pleased to see that

kind of support from the administration.

As Mr. Cummings has mentioned in the budget, we in greater

Cincinnati have seen a lot of success with our coalitions. Let me

give you just a few things we have done.

We have trained over 6,000 parents. It was very intense. My wife

and I went through that training. The courses they work in the

sense of getting parents engaged in their kids’ lives and ultimately

sending those parents out as Ambassadors in the community to get

other people engaged in talking to kids about the dangers of drugs,

understanding, identifying what the problems are and having more

informed parents and other caregivers, which is obviously crucial

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to getting at this problem in Cincinnati as well as around the country.

There’s also been a lot of partnering with the local media—TV,

radio and so on. In our case, over $1.2 million has been provided

through public service ads in the last year alone. This is all

leveraging what the Drug Free Communities Act can do.

We believe also that these coalitions have engaged members of

the community who have not been previously involved. I mentioned

specifically the business community, and in Cincinnati we have certainly done that, brought the business community in in ways never

before seen. We have got over 100 new drug-free workplaces in our

area, for instance, in the last few years.

The faith community. In some communities, the faith community

is more involved than in others, but in many communities the religious community is less involved today than they may have been

back in the 1980’s. This was the case in our area, and we’ve seen

a redoubling of effort there. We have spearheaded the Faith Community Initiative, which trained over 100 local congregations to implement substance abuse prevention programs in their churches,

mosques, synagogues; and that’s very exciting to me. We’re adding

value, and I think you are seeing that around the country.

We have also, Mr. Chairman, made it a point, Mr. Levin and I,

not to make this just a bipartisan effort which we have worked

hard to do but also make it bicameral and make, hopefully, all of

our jobs easier. We have worked closely with Senator Grassley and

Senator Biden to come up with identical legislation in each body,

at least as we introduced it, to not only get this through the House

but hopefully get it through the Senate and get it to the President’s

desk to be signed with the least amount of difference between the

Senate and the House legislation. It provides reauthorization

through the year 2007.

It also authorizes, as you know, a new Anti-Drug Coalition Institute to help provide education, training and technical assistance to

coalitions which is something we have identified over the last several years as a need. This Institute will also be helpful in developing and disseminating evaluation and testing mechanisms to assist

coalitions in measuring and assessing their performance.

I said at the outset that’s one of the unusual aspects of this legislation from 1997, that we really wanted to be sure we were measuring our results; and this Institute would be very helpful in providing technical assistance to coalitions to be sure we’re doing that.

Ultimately, Mr. Chairman, as you know, the goal here is to get

as much bang for the buck out of the Federal dollar and not to

spend money on administrative costs and overhead; and I think we

have been true to that and been tough on that. We want to send

the most dollars we can directly to the communities, with a minimal amount being spent on administrative expenses.

Although there is an increase here from the 3 percent cap we established in 1997, I am pleased that the bill does cap administrative costs at what I think is a modest level that apparently

ONDCP, OJJDP and the Advisory Commission of the drug communities have all agreed on.

30

The Advisory Commission, by the way, is made up largely of people representing coalitions around the country, so they have a pretty good feel for what is needed I think at the administrative level.

We can talk more about this later. I think you may have some

questions. I’d love to talk about it.

But the notion is just to be sure we have the people available to

monitor what is going on with these grantees around the country.

The mentoring we can talk about later. I don’t want to get into a

lot of detail on that.

But what this does is it allows more mature coalitions to help

other coalitions get off the ground. The statement from the Institute we can talk about later. But I think it makes good sense to

provide some funding, and it is very limited here, less than 5 percent, as you know, for the mentoring side of it to be able to let

more mature coalitions pass on their know-how to others.

We also have a new provision here that you can’t apply for a second round of grants unless you are willing to increase your own

match. So it goes from, you know, 100 percent to 125 after a 5-year

period, which I think is a nice innovation of this legislation; and

it’s trying to respond to the need of not having coalitions get too

reliant on the Federal side but to force them to look more into local

and other nonFederal sources.

Finally, I just want to thank you again, both of you, for all your

help and, Mr. Chairman, for your willingness to schedule this hearing so speedily after the introduction of the bill and to work with

us to try to get this to the President get it signed into the law to

be able to continue this good program.

Thank you.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Rob Portman follows:]

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Mr. SOUDER. Congressman Levin.

STATEMENT OF HON. SANDER LEVIN, A REPRESENTATIVE IN

CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF MICHIGAN

Mr. LEVIN. Thank you very, very much. Rob and I are pleased

and proud to be here. We’re proud parents of quite a few children,

each of us, and, in my case, grandchildren. We’re most proud of

them. But in terms of legislative children, if you want to call it

that, I think we’re very proud parents and glad that you are also

parents of this program and so many other people are who are in

this room and not in this room today.

My interest in this originated with, No. 1, the urgency of the

issue. Hello, Mr. Gilman. I just saw it first hand, how the problem

had exploded, even beyond that of my children’s generation; and it

was serious enough then compared to when I was a kid. It was

also, though, originated because of what I saw was going on in the

local communities, and in that case, really, one community more

than others, Troy, the city of Troy, and the leader then was Mary

Ann Salberg, who is now chair of the Advisory Committee.

It’s been sustained by what I’ve seen happen in the local communities in the ensuing years, the blossoming of involvement and interest at the grassroots and how that is an essential ingredient in

the battle to gain control of drugs and their effects.

So in a sense, I think that is all that needs to be said except to

talk about the future. So let me comment on just a few points.

First of all, the mentoring provision in the Institute, in your

statement, Mr. Chairman, you raise questions about that, and let

me just say how I see it. Mentoring, it’s been so valuable to have

experienced organizations work with other communities. There was

money that came through this program, and Rob and I have talked

about it, that went to a community to mentor other communities,

and it’s really been invaluable.

One of the problems we have in a free society—it’s even more so

in a nonfree society—but in our wonderful, rambunctious society of

the United States is replication. We have successes, but it’s hard

to spread the word and the experience, and I think that’s the value

of our nurturing more mentoring.

The Institute, as I see it, takes the experience more nationally,

more globally and tries to help us learn from those experiences and

spread the word even more broadly than can be done by mentoring,

which after all, has some geographical limits and also helps with

the evaluation and assessment of success and failure. Because, like

any program, there are failures as well as successes; and I think

the Institute can be very, very helpful in analyzing and assessing

local experience on a national basis. So I believe, in addition to the

expanded reauthorization amounts which are important, because

the demand here has been, I think, gratifying, we didn’t create it.

We didn’t go out and spawn these applications. They kind of

poured in because of local need.

Last, in terms of the question of the cap, other witnesses perhaps

can address this more effectively than I. I know that an issue arose

before, and I think legitimately so, and a report was issued after

considerable inquiry, and I would urge that we use that comprehensive report as a base for a continuation.

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So I close with this, to congratulate you who are so interested in

this, who now have such major responsibilities for nurturing this

infant that is now more than crawling, it is more than walking, it’s

kind of running; and I guess we have to make sure it has an effective adolescence.

Thank you very much.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you.

Mr. Gilman, would you like to make a statement?

Mr. GILMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

This seems to be drug day. We started off earlier today with the

Colombia Plan. We’re going into another hearing very shortly on

the Andean Ridge.

I want to welcome our two good colleagues who are here today

and giving us the best of their thinking on a very important measure, Mr. Portman and Mr. Levin. We want to thank you for your

continued support of what we should be doing in communities.

You know, when I was in the State legislature many years ago,

it was Governor Rockefeller then who had drug-free community

programs and put a lot of money into it and was very successful.

But over the years, as the drug problem waned temporarily, it sort

of faded out in the distance, and I am pleased that you are doing

the DFCA program.

Let me just say this to both of you. This program I think is a

major component of our national demand reduction strategy; and

over the last 5 years, through its program of distributing grants to

our communities, the DFCA has demonstrated itself to be a resounding success. We can put billions of dollars into our drug war

in eradication at its source, in interdicting and distribution and

providing the kind of enforcement when it reaches our shorelines

to try to put away the drug traffickers and then to do some things

about prevention in educating our young people and then treating

those who are victims. But the most important of all of these efforts I think are right in our own communities; and unless our

communities are involved and unless we can convince the parents,

the teachers, the schools, the churches, the synagogues, all of them

to become involved, all of those billions of dollars go down the drain

because we’re not doing enough in demand reduction.

I think your program is an excellent program. I think the success

is due in part to the nature of the grant recipients, various antidrug coalitions; and I think these coalitions are community groups

containing representatives of our young people, our parents, our

private industry, our media and President, law enforcement and

health care professionals, religious and civic leaders working together to provide a cohesive anti-drug message and strategy.

The DFCA reauthorization for an additional 5 years is something

I fully support, and I hope our committee will fully support. I know

our chairman is vitally interested in it. It increases overall funding

levels. Prior awardees would be able to apply for new grants and,

in addition, to be eligible for mentoring grants in order to help new

coalitions with their initial startup efforts, which I think is significant.

Mr. Chairman, the threat posed by illicit drugs is, you and I both

know, is one of the more crucial national security threats facing

our Nation; and we can’t emphasize that enough. Several presiVerDate 11-MAY-2000 07:34 Sep 05, 2002 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00040 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\79781.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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dents have also labeled it a national security threat. And while

some opponents have argued we spend too much on combating

drugs, I can’t conceive why they would say that. Those opponents

ignore the extensive costs of drug use on our society if we were to

add up all of the problems—the loss of youth, the loss of productivity, of health care, of all the other aspects that go into the drug

problem.

In addition to costs associated with supply and demand reduction, drug use costs billions each year, when we add up all of those

expenses. Moreover, it’s also the intangible costs in terms of broken

families and destroyed lives, destroyed minds.

Our children are on the front lines of the drug war, the primary

target of both the drug producers and the sellers. The DFCA has

a proven track record of success in reducing demand for drugs

among our younger population. Given that today’s adolescents are

potentially the addicts of tomorrow, I wholeheartedly support extending and expanding this important Federal program.

Just one question, if I may, Mr. Chairman. What is the cost of

the reauthorization?

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. Gilman thank, you for your statement, first,

and for never taking your eye off the ball.

Mr. GILMAN. Thank you.

Mr. PORTMAN. Because from the days of Nelson Rockefeller until

today’s very different problems and faces, whether it’s Ecstasy or

new issues in the Andean Ridge, you, Mr. Rangel and others have

kept your eye on the ball; and when the public’s interest has

waned—as you said, when we started this program, for instance,

there had been a doubling of teen drug use in the previous 10

years. We knew that. And that’s because we took our eye off of the

ball. So you have been out there ever since I’ve been here in Congress and I know well before, doing that. We have for funding in 2002 proposed, as you know, $50.6 mil- lion. Then it goes to $60 million in 2003, $70 million in 2004, same

in 2005, up to $75 million in 2006 and 2007. We had $40 million

go out in 2001. So it’s a slight increase over time. And, as Sandy

said, that’s really in response to the knowledge we have that there

is a tremendous increase in demand.

For instance, we’ll have about 408 we think—and we will hear

from Don Vereen and others later, but—coalitions that we awarded

grants this year, as opposed to 307 last year. So it is a slight increase in funding over time, and it’s consistent with the administration’s budget as well.

Mr. GILMAN. Thank you, Mr. Portman. I think when you consider

what we’re spending on defense, this is minuscule and well spent,

and I certainly urge full consideration for this by our committee.

Thank you.

Mr. PORTMAN. Thank you.

Mr. GILMAN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SOUDER. First, let me say how much we appreciate both your

efforts.

Congressman Portman has been pushing our leadership into

doing some prevention things and worked with our leadership to

develop this legislation. I worked with Congressman Levin back

when I was the Republican staff director on the Children and FamVerDate 11-MAY-2000 07:34 Sep 05, 2002 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00041 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\79781.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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ily Committee in earlier lives of ours, and I know his commitment

to children and families has been from the time he first came to

Congress.

I want to ask a couple of tough questions just to get your reaction to this. One of the problems with the traditional part of the

drug war is, for example, we hear when we put money into Colombia that we don’t see the results that we want. Part of the problem

with the results—we did this as we went through the drug-free

schools program, too, and really never did come up with a fair way

to monitor the results. And the demand reduction programs seem

to be similarly measured like the results in the other parts of

eradication and so on. In other words, they’re process oriented, that

we hear how many people went to the program, how many people

who were in the program didn’t have the problem.

But should there be some sort of a measurement like we demand

from police departments? They ask this fundamental question: If

you get a community anti-drug grant, did your drug use go down

in your community or did it go up? Should we see an actual community change in the abuse of drugs? For example, Ecstasy is up

from 3 percent to 8 percent in the last 2 years among high school

students. Should that be equally true in places where they have

the coalitions as where they don’t?

Mr. LEVIN. Should I tackle that first?

I did not bring with me the materials put out by the various coalitions, but, Mr. Chairman, the more effective ones ask that question. Now, it isn’t always easy, as you know, to obtain data by community. But I think it’s fair enough to ask communities—and I

do—how’s it going? What has the impact been?

My only caution on this is to remember the difficulty of obtaining

data per community. Also, we have to keep in mind the question,

what would it have been without these programs?

But let me say that—and they’re handing me for Troy—I didn’t

bring it. I now have it. So Troy—I’ll just read the one paragraph,

OK? And I want to mention that we encourage communities to do

as Troy is doing.

Where there’s a problem, for example, of a spread in the use of

Ecstasy or any other drug, I think community coalitions should be

working on this, and they should be able to—at least they should

try to assess the impact. So I’ll just read you the one paragraph,

OK? This is the Troy Community Coalition.

There was a significant decline of students in Troy indicating

that they have smoked cigarettes—this was on cigarettes—in their

lifetime in grades 8, 10, 12 by 39, 20 and 24 percent from 1998 to

2000. These declines are far greater than the national average.

Then if I might just read one more paragraph, because I think

it’s relevant here.

Troy students in the eighth grade increased their disapproval of

their friends smoking marijuana from 77 percent in 1998 to 83 percent in 2000.

Also, there’s a figure here about Troy eighth graders first trying

marijuana, and they drop from 7 percent to under 5 percent in the

couple of years where there was an emphasis on this. And then

there’s further data.

39

So I think you have a salient question, and I think that we

should be encouraging that as one of the tools of evaluation.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you.

Mr. Portman.

Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. Chairman, I couldn’t agree with you more.

Sandy’s talked about some of the information that we have been

able to garner over the years, but, in fact, the substance abuse prevention does work. But this has been one of my great frustrations

in this field generally, and you and I have talked about it, which

is the lack of good measurement on the prevention side.

We tried to do something new with this act back in 1997, as you

know, which was to put in place some evaluation requirements that

had never been in previous grant requirements, whether it was

from the Federal Government or the State government, including

CSAP or HHS and so on; and it’s very difficult to do.

But one of the reasons—and we’re going to get to this in a second—where we want to increase the administrative cap somewhat

is to be able to be sure that we are giving the coalitions better feedback on the evaluation that we’re requiring from them as to how

their program is working so that they can improve. Because one of

the complaints we got from the community coalitions is there’s not

enough sort of help from Washington in telling them what we’re

doing with their evaluation and how they could then take their program and make it better.

Then, second, is this institute. The notion in the Institute is best

practices, basically. That is to say what is working and what is not

working, taking the best out in the community in terms of performance measurement and spreading it.

As you know, in our coalition we focus religiously on this; and

some would say too much. I don’t think too much. But we did our

survey late last year. 47,000 students—which is almost a census;

that’s more than most of the big national surveys have—47,000

students, and we asked all the questions we possibly could that relate to the national surveys to be able to benchmark to see how we

were doing compared to the nationals, including Monitoring the Future and the PRIDE survey.

We also benchmarked as best we could every previous survey

that had been done in our community, and there hasn’t been one

done in 21⁄2 years. But every 2 years previous to that there had

been one done in the public schools. Then there had been the

PRIDE survey and now again in the suburbs and so on, and what

we have come up we think is a template for the rest of the country.

Again, every survey has got to be a little different because you

want to try to benchmark back to your previous surveys in your

area. But we’re providing that as best we can to other people; and

we’d love to, frankly, have the folks at ONDCP and OJJDP do more

in terms of spreading the word as to how you can measure your

results better.

We measure absolutely everything. We have parent training. We

give the parents a survey they have to get back to us on our approaches to different chemicals. We have the athletic directors and

coaches come for the seminar. We then measure the performance

of the seminar. But then 3 months out, 6 months out we ask them

whether they are putting something in place; and we are getting

40

great results. You know, 60 some percent of them are putting

something new in place in their schools.

So I agree with your question. Your premise is there’s not

enough testing, I think, in your question. I agree with you, and we

have got to figure out a way to do it without overburdening coalitions with a lot of paperwork and red tape. I think one way to do

it is to have this Institute because I think the Institute can provide

some more of that technical help so they know how to evaluate

their individual programs and then to come up with some sense of

how they are comparing their community to communities that don’t

have coalitions.

I would just say, our own community, we had the highest drug

use ever in Cincinnati when we started our thing in 1994. Then

our latest survey shows that, for the first time in 10 years, we’ve

got a reduction in hard drugs, leveling off of marijuana use after

dramatic increases, you know, every year from the previous decade.

We’ve got a slight uptick in alcohol; and I think in smoking we are

about level, maybe a little bit up.

But we feel like, as compared to other communities that don’t

have this coalition effort, that we have done better; and that’s

based on Monitoring the Future and PRIDE surveys and so on and

certainly as compared to our past. So all I can tell you is I truly

believe substance abuse works.

We have got some other data here that CADCA has provided to

me this morning, which I will be happy to provide to the subcommittee with your permission. But it shows, for instance, that in

1999, 10 percent of teens saw marijuana users as popular and it

was 19 percent in 1997 and 17 percent in 1998. Now some of this

is the Drug Free Media Act, some of it is just the American public

getting reengaged with this issue. It has been said, you know, we

kind of lost track of it. But I think these community coalitions deserve some credit for what we have seen in the last 3 or 4 years.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you.

Mr. Cummings.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

You know, I was just sitting here listening and, right now—I

mean, I look at the list of—and I want to make this statement so

you can get where I’m coming from.

I was looking at Maryland and what is happening in Maryland.

Montgomery County, which is our richest county, and all due respect, they got their grant. They got a grant. Baltimore City has

not, which has the worst problem in the country with regard to

that, in the country. Now, I don’t know whether that’s Baltimore

City’s fault, and I’m not here arguing over whether Baltimore City

should have gotten it or not. I am sort of going at the aim of the

program generally.

I think the thing I like about this program is that it does go into

the communities. Because one of the things that I’ve noticed since

being in the Congress, gentlemen, is that there are a lot of people

who make a lot of money off of the ills of society, and the people

who are ill never get well. And I’ve seen it over and over and over

again.

I am beginning to look at some of the grants that come into Baltimore, research grants. There has been a lot of research. But then,

41

after the research is over, the community is still in bad shape, and

there’s nothing to sustain anything. There’s nothing even put in operation so that you even have something to sustain.

So that is what I like about this program, and I’m trying to—

and so I had to set that up to get to where I’m going to.

When I look at the mentoring program and this institute, I think

these are very, very important things, very important, because one

of the things that all of us—and I tell my constituents constantly,

if you want to know something the Republicans and Democrats

agree on, this one thing, that our tax dollars—that your tax dollars

will be spent effectively and efficiently, whatever the purposes are.

So I guess I like the idea of organizations that have been doing

it and have been effective to then take that and take it somewhere

else, because I’m telling you probably from what I’ve seen in my

neighborhoods, neighborhoods get more respect—I mean, in other

words, if somebody is trying to accomplish something, like a neighborhood association wants to accomplish something, like getting

guys off the corner selling drugs, they will listen to somebody who

has done it, who looks like them, who has a similar situation, and

they talk the same talk. They will listen to them.

When it comes to the super experts, that is a whole other thing.

So I think this is good. I think it is good for us to try to figure out

how we can do this mentoring thing.

The institute situation, as I think—I mean, as I understand it—

is a good idea, because I think a lot of people, like I said in my

opening statement, they really want to do something. They just

don’t know what to do. And as you all were talking and I started

looking at all the material in front of us, I realized we have got different kinds of problems. I mean, in Michigan you’ve got—I don’t

know what Detroit is, but I know you’ve got Detroit, and you’ve got

rural areas.

You’ve got urban areas. The problems that I face in Baltimore

City are things like the committee organizations who are tired of

people selling drugs on their corners and tired of seeing their

young people go down the tubes and tired of seeing their property

values go down. I mean, big time. I mean, I live in a neighborhood

where if you bought a house for $100,000 20 years ago and put in

$100,000 in improvements over, say, 10 years, 10, 20 years, you

can’t even sell it for what you bought it for because of drugs. That

is serious.

So I guess what I’m saying to you is that—and then one of the

things that kind of bothers me, it seems like the same organizations get the same—as I understand it, get the grants over and

over again. Now, some people may say, well, that is because they

want to continue and sustain what they are doing. I think that is

important, but at the same time, I think the way they should be

proceeding is the way that eventually they sort of get weaned off

of this government support so that other organizations can have

the benefit of the same thing, and going back to what I said about

the organizations that come in and get rich off the ills of society,

I don’t want them to become so used to getting this money that

they don’t do all of those things that are self-sustaining. In other

words, I believe in training people to control their own situations.

42

Now, if government has to come in and put some dollars in to

help them do some things that are really, really necessary for government to do, that is fine, but at the rate we’re going, I think we’ll

have maybe—I think you said 307 that we’ve already helped. You

know, I don’t know how many of these have duplicated over and

over again, but believe me as I said just now, I would imagine that

in my city, we’ve got—we can put—I can easily put together 100— at least 75 coalitions, easy, easy, and—all of whom are suffering

greatly, and all of whom have a will, but they don’t have a way,

because they just don’t know what to do.

So, you know, I just point that out for the future witnesses that

will come up, too, that, I mean, it is just something we need to give

consideration to. I’m not trying to say that this legislation is supposed to be the cure for everything, but I just want us to kind of

look, say, 10 years from now and say, OK, what are we doing to

really, truly empower people so that they build into the process and

even in their application process, how they will, you know, eventually get to a point where they really don’t need us. That is all.

You might want to comment on that.

Mr. LEVIN. Well, just—you said it so well, I should say nothing.

Just a couple quick comments.

I think it is so important that all of us here heard your statement, and I would think that one of the purposes of the Institute,

for example, would be to implement that spirit. And I believe there

has been sensitivity in the offices in terms of the applications.

There is always a problem with any grant program that the applicants that need it the most, perhaps, are sometimes the least

equipped to get in line. And we have to be sensitive to that.

Second, quickly, one of the most useful meetings we had, we

brought together all the coalitions, the suburbs—and I represent

suburbs near Detroit and next to Detroit—and representatives of

the city, including Congressman Conyers, and we had a really marvelous discussion about the coalition experience and how we could

learn from each other, because there really isn’t an urban-suburban

line, a rigid line when it comes to these issues.

So, Mr. Cummings, I believe deeply that Mr. Portman and I

share your feelings; and that helped to inspire us in the first place,

that kind of feeling. And from my experience working with the people who are now seated behind us, I think they’ve tried to implement this program consistent with your sentiments and you’ll inspire us to do even better.

Mr. PORTMAN. Just briefly, Mr. Chairman, I am glad to hear that

my buddy, Mr. Cummings, doesn’t think this program is going to

solve all of our problems. But we think it can solve some of them,

and you have been a big part of how this thing was put together

originally, and now you’re the ranking member on the subcommittee. You wanted to be a ranking member because you have a lot

of passion on this issue, and now you can do even more. But I

think part of the answer is what Sandy says, that you only can

give so much direction through legislation, and then you’ve got to

let the people administer the program.

We’ve tried to put in the report language and in the statute

enough direction to give people a sense of what we’re about; but

we’re about exactly what you’re suggesting, and you know that,

43

and that’s basically being sure that this is going to communities

that need it the most.

Now, the communities do have to have some resources, and I

mean that in the broadest sense, to be able to put together a group

that can handle the Federal money in the way we want it handled,

and that includes the assessment. We have a baseline requirement

they have to give us, and the assessment stuff we talked, and Mr.

Souder talked, about.

And we also made it clear we want to wean people off this program. This is not about having the same money go to the same program that’s more and more successful and can attract, therefore,

other resources. It is just to move the money then to the next one.

That is why there is the cutoff. You have to reapply after 5 years.

And even when you reapply under this new one, you have got to

come up with 125 percent match, not 100 percent match. In a way,

it is punishing success, you could say, but in another way, it’s

doing exactly what you’re saying.

This is very limited money. I mean, we’ve got a—what, maybe an $18 billion war on drugs budget, depending on what you add into

the war on drugs, and we’re talking here about somewhere between $40 and $75 million. So it is a relatively small piece of the pie, but

it can have, I think, enormous impact if it is used right, as you say.

And I think they have done a pretty good job of spreading it. The

challenge is—I think Sandy put it well—some of the communities

that need it most are least equipped to handle the Federal program, because we do have some accountability and stuff in here

that is very important to us as—you know, accountability for the

Federal Government, if used right, the assessment that the chairman talked about, and that is where the mentoring would help.

The mentoring is very limited; you know, it’s less than 5 percent

of the funds. You’ve got to apply separately for it. Most coalitions

won’t apply for it; some will. Maybe Detroit will, maybe Cincinnati

can now; and that probably helps.

I mean, we do a lot of work in our little coalition with these communities that don’t really have the resources. Again, broadly

speaking, there is a community group, but it may not have enough

volunteerism, enough help to be able to kind of get this thing off

on its right feet and to be able to do the assessments and have any

kind of reporting back and so on.

So that is part of the answer. It’s part of why the advisory committee that you’re going to hear from later, I believe, came up with

the idea of this mentoring idea of having coalitions that are successful. As you say, people are going to relate more to a neighborhood coalition, to maybe share some similarities, rather than the

super experts coming in from Washington telling them what to do.

That is part of the answer, but it is a tough, tough problem, and

I think every coalition needs to be more focused on it; and we need,

as legislators, to direct the good folks behind us as to what our goal

is here as best we can.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I just want to make it real clear—and thank you,

Mr. Chairman, for your indulgence—that I really believe in this. I

think that of all the things that I’ve been a part of since I’ve been

here, this is probably within the top three, no doubt about it, because I think we—you know, when I look at the pain that I see

44

children experience, and if there is something that we can do to

avoid that pain, this is the kind of thing that we’ve got to do. And

so I didn’t want you to get the impression that I—you know, I just

want to make sure that we are, again, going back to that effective

and efficient use of our dollars. And I’m sure the panelists who will

come up behind you all will talk about that in a little bit.

But thank you.

Mr. LEVIN. Thank you. Thank you for your work.

Mr. SOUDER. I want to thank you again for your leadership. This

is an unusual subcommittee that’s authorizing in an oversight, and

so we have to ask tough oversight questions. Even though we’re enthusiastic about the authorizing, we didn’t ask you questions about

the money because we all agree it needs more money. We need to

fight in the appropriating process to make sure it’s there, just like

we have in other prevention programs.

But I am going to continue to ask some questions about the overhead question, because it isn’t just the 3 to 8 percent. If you take

the 5 percent for mentoring and the Institute, which is 3 percent

of next year’s budget, that is an increase from 3 to 16 percent in

one swallow, and that 3 to 16 percent difference is 100 coalitions,

or one-third of what we’ve done in the whole course of the bill.

There is a natural tendency for any kind of program to proliferate its overhead and argue that, well, we could be more effective. There’s no question that this needs to increase the overhead.

They can’t work at 3. We actually started higher and went down

to 3. There is no question that there’s merit to mentoring in the

Institute. The question is, how much do we do at what time, because it makes the whole program vulnerable when you have an

over-five-times increase in overhead, two-and-a-half in the one department.

And the extra problem that we have to work with here is, all

three are saying that technical assistance and helping in grant requests and monitoring, in other words, the mission statement, with

the exception of the mentoring, particularly the Institute and

OJJDP, are telling us the same mission. So that’s one of the things

we are going to sort out in the hearing today, because if one can

do one thing and another, another, that’s another matter. But if

they both say they’re doing the same thing, we have an oversight

obligation to address it.

I also am concerned, and one of our dilemmas in addition to the

paperwork and the accountability question, is the entrepreneurial

and empowerment component that was part of this program. To

the degree we try to replicate and have everybody do the same

thing, you have less ownership because, to some degree, the success

of this is the local pride. Even if it isn’t an ideal model, it is theirs.

And so much of this is the motivational function, and this is another balance between saying, here is what we need in accountability and here is what we need in empowerment and entrepreneurship.

And then last, possibly one distinctive difference that could be

from the traditional grant application that goes through the current system and the Institute and even the mentoring is to look at

a different phase, which Congressman Cummings is addressing.

45

Right now, the process comes in as far as who has the proposals

that meet the standards and what are the best proposals.

One of the things the Institute or the government could do if

we’re going to put more into overhead is identify the highest-risk

communities and how to get them into the process, much like what

we’re trying to do in the faith-based initiative with the technical

assistance. Because it is one thing to say who can apply for faithbased; it is another thing to say, how can we go and help those

groups that have no idea how the government process works, that

don’t have an attorney, that don’t have a CPA, that don’t know how

to do it. How can we get them the assistance to do it?

Did you want to comment?

Mr. LEVIN. I think, Mr. Portman, they want to hear from somebody else, so we should go. I would think that when the panels

start, they will address the question, for example, for high-risk

areas and how that has been taken into account in evaluating the

grant applications. I believe there has been sensitivity to need

within a community but also between communities.

And also they will talk about the Institute and whether it is—

I think it is a separate authorization, how you—mentoring, I don’t

think, is part of overhead.

And last, replication doesn’t mean identical programs. Replication, if it has effectiveness built into it, is going to be different, but

take the best threads of a program and weave it into that community’s needs. That is, anyway, what I mean by replication.

So good luck. Mr. Portman probably will close it, with the panel.

This is such a marvelous program, and you two have been so important—and Mr. Cummings’s feelings about this as one of his top

three, I think says a lot about the challenge before us—and we are

proud to be working with the two of you and others. This is quiet

work, but in the end, I think, may have more impact than some

of the programs that have much higher profile. This is maybe

below some radar screens, but this is where much of the action

really is.

Mr. CUMMINGS. But that is just one—I’m sorry.

Mr. PORTMAN. First of all, my partner, Sandy, has put it well,

and I won’t try to add to what he said about the importance of the

program. Let me just touch briefly, though, on your four points and

then let you talk to the real experts.

This 8 percent figure is a compromise figure between ONDCP,

OJJDP, the Senate, Sandy and me; and I don’t want to speak for

Sandy on this, but we, I think, have come to realize that 3 percent

is too low. We were pretty tough initially, and frankly, we knew we

were being pretty tough. We wanted to err on the side of getting

the money to the communities, and we had a lot of pleas over the

past 4 years as this program has become implemented to do more,

and we held firm, feeling again that we really wanted to push on

getting the money out and not creating a new bureaucracy. I think

we feel as though, with these additional coalitions and the need for

more oversight, it’s important.

Let me give you this just quickly. There are seven program managers now, as you know, that oversee an average of 44 coalitions

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age, we’re told that we’re going to have about 20 more grants on

each portfolio. So each one will have 60-plus coalitions to oversee.

And again, we were involved with some of these coalitions. We

see what happens. Some coalitions need help more than others, but

my concern is that we need to ramp that up a little bit to be sure

we have the right oversight and we’re getting the right technical

assistance out. And so we’re believers now in that.

Maybe 8 percent is not a magic number. Maybe there is another

number somewhere between 3 and 8 percent, but we know there’s

a need to raise that cap somewhat more, and we still keep a pretty

good cap in place. Again, compared to any other Federal program,

it’s still stingy.

The second issue is the Institute and the mentoring, and I think

Sandy has said it well: The mentoring is not supposed to be overhead. I’m thinking how we would use it or how Detroit would use

it. We already do a mini-grant program that we get from other

sources to local neighborhood coalitions, and we give them a couple

thousand bucks a year to help them get started, just to get a computer or just to get, you know, literally a rental space for an office

so they can set something up to have some kind of continuity and

some kind of organization. Sometimes they use it for materials, literally, to hand to the parents.

So I don’t think it is going to be so much overhead. It won’t create more overhead for us if we were to get it in Cincinnati. What

it will create is the ability to get money right out to these other

coalitions and to monitor what they’re doing. But—there will be

some overhead in there, but it is not a—it shouldn’t be viewed as

the same thing as the 8 percent, I don’t believe.

The Institute, Sandy said there may be a separate authorization

here. I’m not sure quite how that’s going to work, but apparently

it will be not out of these program funds. And it’s—the idea of the

Institute—there may be an overlap with OJJDP; and I hope the

chairman will get into that and the ranking member, because I

think it is important to understand the differences there. That

would be my concern, that there not be overlap between the two.

We need to be sure we have that fully vetted before we enact this

legislation.

Mentoring is not the same thing as overhead, because it is what

we talked about earlier, the best practices and technical assistance

and so on. We know there is a need for that and that will help to

expand the number of coalitions.

I couldn’t agree with you more on entrepreneurship. That’s a big

part of this. I think Sandy is right. I’m just thinking about our own

experience, when we have sort of gone from neighborhood to neighborhood trying to put models together. Everyone is different. In

some neighborhoods, heroin is a bigger issue, for instance. In other

neighborhoods, methamphetamine labs are starting to come up.

Other neighborhoods have Ecstasy, and these Rave parties are a

problem. And some already have a pretty good school-based program, for instance. Others have nothing in schools.

So everyone is going to be a little different, and they should be.

And that ownership is key to this. I mean, all of this is about

leveraging local funds but also local spirit and entrepreneurship.

So I see that as a potential problem, but I think if it is done right,

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it is not; because it needs to be part of—the whole purpose of this

is to make sure it fits with the local community.

We talked about that in our testimony. We talked about it in

1997. That’s the whole focus of this.

The high-risk neighborhoods, I agree with Sandy. You ought to

talk to the experts who have looked at these. They do take that

into account, I’m told.

And finally, the faith-based side, as you know, we spent a lot of

time on faith-based. Mr. Souder was the person who pushed us on

that in 1997. We were doing some pretty pioneering work then.

Now it’s become a lot more commonplace, but we made sure that

we did not step across the establishment clause line, and we were

very careful not to do that. On the other hand, we all made it very

clear in the legislation, there is important language that the faith

community should be ‘‘encouraged,’’ not just ‘‘can be involved,’’ but

should be ‘‘encouraged to be involved.’’ We didn’t require it. And we

talked about doing that, as you recall.

There may be ways we can strengthen that, and I certainly

would be very open to that, but the faith-based groups are doing

a great job out there, particularly on treatment. And many of the

prevention groups work with them. But the real potential is prevention, to get these faith-based communities as engaged in prevention as many are in treatment.

I think you could have obviously a captive audience often on a

Sunday or a Saturday, but more than that, just using those incredible networks they have to get the prevention message out is a

huge potential for an increased prevention and education message.

And so if we can do more of that, I’d love to work with you on

that.

Mr. SOUDER. And I want to make it clear that I don’t think overhead is evil. Overhead is what it takes to administer a program.

You have to fill out the forms. And so the question is, how much

of a change does an individual program need? Because mentoring

is not traditional overhead, but it is still money that is not going

to the grantees.

And so we have to look at it and say, in fact, we’re increasing

the management and technical assistance, and is that much overhead justified? It may, in fact, be because of the needs of the community.

But to give you an illustration on the case load, in the maximum

dollar a year, 2006 and 2007, to do the current case load would

only take a 5, not an 8. To reduce it to 35, it would take a 5.5. To

reduce it to 25, like the very beginning of the program, would take

a 6.7. So we need to kind of look at those statistics, and it may be

that we can do more in the program and be more effective with a

little more overhead. But when you have that big a jump, you have

an obligation to analyze it, and that is what my point was.

Mr. Cummings.

Mr. LEVIN. Good segue to your next point.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Just as you leave, gentlemen, I too want to

thank you all for what you have done and what you will continue

to do. But there is just one other thing I want to add, Mr. Levin.

You know, you talked about the benefits of the program, but

there is another benefit and that is, it empowers communities. It

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helps people to see what they can do in neighborhoods. And I don’t

know what we can do—I don’t know how we can put a value on

that when you have so many people who would become so cynical

about, you know, making any change in their communities and

whatever. But this kind of thing helps them know that they can

make a difference; and that hopefully spreads into other areas beyond drug abuse and things of this nature.

Thank you all.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you very much for coming.

Would the witnesses on the second panel please come forward?

You have got a good taste of what are likely to be some of our next

questions.

From the administration, we welcome Dr. Donald Vereen, Deputy Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy; Mr. John

Wilson, Acting Director of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Department of Justice. If you could remain

standing as you come to the table, because as an oversight committee, it is our standard practice that our witnesses need to testify

under oath. If the witnesses will rise and raise their right hands,

I’ll administer our oath.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Mr. SOUDER. Let the record show that the witnesses have both

answered in the affirmative. We will now recognize the witnesses

for their opening statements, and I’d like to thank you again for

being here today and working out your schedules to do so. We ask

our witnesses to limit their opening statements to 5 minutes and

include any fuller statements that they may wish to make for the

record.

Dr. Vereen, do you have an opening statement?

STATEMENTS OF DONALD M. VEREEN, JR., M.D., M.P.H., DEPUTY DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF NATIONAL DRUG CONTROL POLICY; AND JOHN J. WILSON, ACTING DIRECTOR, OJJDP, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

Dr. VEREEN. Good morning and thank you, Chairman Souder

and Ranking Member Cummings and the distinguished members of

the subcommittee, for this opportunity to testify today about the

Drug-Free Communities Program. I’ve prepared an extensive written statement. At this time, I’d like to submit that for the record.

I serve as a Deputy Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. I am a public health—with a public health background,

covering the biology of the brain through the behavior of individuals and, most importantly, the health and functioning of our communities. I am a father, and the dangers of drugs are a threat to

my own children and the Drug-Free Communities Program is there

for all of our children.

There are a couple of acknowledgments I want—it’s important to

make this morning. There will be two grantees, the Honorable Michael Kramer and Mr. Lawrence Couch in the third panel. I do

want to draw attention to an advisory commission member, Henry

Lozano of Big Bear, CA, and also a great prevention leader, Judy

Cushing of the Oregon Partnership, who is also here.

For more than 3 years, Congress gave ONDCP the responsibility

for this fine program. While we are unusual in that we’re a policy

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shop, Drug-Free Communities have given us a unique window to

the communities in America. Not a day goes by that we do not hear

from citizens of places such as Perrysburg, OH, Morgan County,

IN, or the Nez Perce Tribe of Lapwai, ID. We receive calls with

questions about emerging drugs, requests for help in designing new

strategies, and even a few calls from parents who are discovering

the risks of substance abuse for the first time.

This feedback loop between America’s communities and our Nation’s principal policy office on drugs provides much added value

for all of us. This program specifically addresses our goal to educate and enable America’s youth to reject drugs. There are specific

objectives in our congressionally mandated performance measures

of effectiveness that this program is addressing.

Our drug-free communities are our front lines on our—in this

fight against drugs. Our work as a policy office is greatly enriched

by the program. The coalitions’ work to reduce substance abuse

among our youth may strengthen collaborations among organizations and agencies that are both private and in the public sector

and wouldn’t normally naturally come together. They also serve as

a catalyst for increased citizen participation in our effort to combat

drugs. That is critically important.

We have a wonderful advisory committee that the Congress created, which includes 11 active members who we collaborate with in

some form or another almost on a daily basis. They were the ones

who came up with the observation that mentoring needed to happen, and a part of where we are with this reauthorization is taking

that into account.

Although some of my colleagues on this panel may give examples

of coalitions that are having a significant impact on our communities, I’ve got to tell you about at least one. Perrysburg Area Substance Abuse Prevention Partners is a 14-year-old community coalition in Perrysburg, OH, which has never had any kind of State or

Federal grant before being awarded a Drug-Free Communities

grant in 1999. This community of 25,000 has wisely leveraged their

Federal support and greatly expanded the work of their coalition.

They have developed a sophisticated Web site, where anyone can

read about their underage drinking initiative; a community action

lifeline; and a host of other initiatives, strategies and opportunities

for citizen involvement. This work comprises the front lines, again.

I refer you to the chart at the far wall. This gives you a snapshot

picture. I can’t list all of the community coalitions, but the story

I just told you is 1 of 307 community coalitions, and this number

will grow to more than 600 by September 2002.

A new round of applications for our fiscal year 2001 were just received by OJJDP. Closing was this past Monday, and we received

nearly 400 applications. With such an increase in the participation

and interest this year, we expect to be able to announce between

140 to 150 new grants in September.

The President’s budget includes $50.6 million to expand the

Drug-Free Communities Program for fiscal year 2002. That is an

increase of almost $11 million. Congress is wise to continue to lead

the Nation in this drug prevention initiative as it works to reauthorize this program, and we support the introduction of H.R. 2291.

The bill will continue to ensure that communities leverage grant

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dollars they receive by matching grant funds with non-Federal support, including both monetary and in-kind contributions.

The bill also provides for additional support via a National Community Coalition Institute. A couple of words about that. The Institute is there for two reasons. It is there to focus in on and to generate the specific research findings that these community coalitions

need to not only improve in what they are doing, but to help create

new coalitions. In much the same way that we have a National Institutes of Health to do research, it is still a lot of heavy lifting to

apply that research where it actually belongs.

In the case of—or to give the example of SAMHSA, if we focus

on mental health, substance abuse and alcoholism research, a tremendous amount of work is needed to translate that research into

action. More on that in the question-and-answer period.

Our partners include OJJDP. We would not be able to administer

this grant program without OJJDP. We have important partners in

the private sector. CADCA, the Community Antidrug Coalitions of

America. They function under the leadership of General Art Dean,

and they will inspire us with their own testimony. But we model

this program after the local communities that they organized.

We also are the focusers of research and science. It is very important to understand that this is not just a fly by-night idea. Public

health-based research, specific research, makes it very clear that

this is the way to go in terms of focusing resources.

We also need to take the investment that we have made in

places like the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse and benefit from that investment by being able to apply that knowledge directly into communities so that the leaders and the members of these coalitions

can apply it appropriately.

So we thank the committee for this opportunity to offer our support for this very important legislation on behalf of the President,

and as you know, he has committed his administration in an allout effort to reduce drug abuse, and community coalitions will be

in the vanguard of that effort. Thank you.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Vereen follows:]

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Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Wilson.

Mr. WILSON. Thank you, Chairman Souder and Ranking Member

Cummings. The Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice

and Delinquency Prevention—oh, sorry. Thank you. Welcome—— Mr. SOUDER. It is still not working. Could you maybe switch to

the other mic?

Mr. WILSON. We welcome the opportunity to discuss our role in

the Drug-Free Communities Program with you. Since 1998,

ONDCP and OJJDP have shared an important mission to develop

and administer a successful Drug-Free Communities Program. We

have forged a strong and productive partnership. I am always impressed by the tenacity, innovation and dedication of the broadbased community coalitions that this program supports.

In the area of delinquency prevention, we have learned about the

power of communities who come together to make investment in

children, to make a commitment to programming and have ownership of the programs. And with the increases in arrests of juveniles

for drugs, we see our participation in this program as vital to our

statutory responsibility to help prevent kids from getting into delinquent conduct and eventually getting into our criminal justice

system.

Since 1999, OJJDP and ONDCP had explored ways to remedy

the fact that the effectiveness of the Drug-Free Communities Program is being endangered by a lack of program support funds. My

written testimony details this problem and makes, I believe, a

strong case that an adequate level of program support funds is critical to the long-term success of this outstanding program.

Since the program’s inception in fiscal year 1998 with the award

of 93 coalition grants, we have grown to 307 grants in fiscal year

2000 and expect, as Dr. Vereen said, to add over 140 new coalition

grants this year. This is nearly a fivefold increase, yet the program

support dollars, which were designed to support both ONDCP and

OJJDP program administration, training and technical assistance

and evaluation, have only increased from $1 million to $1.2 million

since the program began.

One result is that OJJDP’s Drug-Free Communities Program

staffing level has remained at seven professional staff and one clerical staff this year because of the lack of any available administrative funds to hire additional staff to manage the program.

Simply stated, the current law does not allow an increase in administrative, or what I call ‘‘program support funds’’ commensurate

with the continuing expansion of the program. Our program managers who are responsible for Drug-Free Communities Program implementation are currently carrying an average of 44 grants, compared with the average work load of 26 grants for Office of Justice

programs and OJJDP discretionary program staff.

This high number limits their ability to monitor existing grants;

package, award and administer new grants; and provide programrelated technical assistance. We strongly believe that the bill’s 8

percent program support fund cap provides an appropriate balance

between direct coalition funding and efficient processing, award

and administration.

It will also allow us to support program evaluation to meet training and technical assistance needs—not us, but the program—and

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also cover those grant processing administrative costs, some of

which are currently being absorbed by OJJDP, but for which funds

may not be available in the future. Absent enhanced funding support, the ratio of grants to program managers following the award

of fiscal 2001 funds is projected to reach 66 grants.

Our program managers provide critical support in the areas of

management and operations, program development and provision

of cutting-edge information on substance abuse prevention efforts.

Many fledgling coalitions rely on the guidance of their program

manager and seek it regularly. Given the nature of the program

and its expansion, this need for programmatic support will not diminish. In fact, it will increase greatly.

Program managers also reach out to communities that are interested in applying for funds. This year our program staff in partnership with ONDCP and others conducted seven applicant workshops

designed to enhance the understanding of the Federal application

process, grant writing and to explain how the Drug-Free Communities Program could support their coalition. And we held one of

these workshops in the Baltimore area, and I am hopeful that this

does pay off in a coalition just being successful in the Baltimore

City or the Baltimore—or Baltimore County area.

In addition, the program team, in conjunction with our juvenile

justice clearinghouse, developed and implemented a comprehensive

outreach plan to communicate this funding opportunity to the field.

It has been a big success in reaching tribes, rural communities and

new coalitions. As Dr. Vereen mentioned, this week we received

361 applications in response to the fiscal year 2001 solicitation,

compared to 228 in fiscal year 2000. Subtracting the 94 new coalitions funded last year, this means that at least 227 new coalitions

have applied for a fiscal year 2001 award.

Another critical factor in investing in adequate staffing levels is

to protect taxpayer funds. Our program managers are a critical resource and liaison to grantees who are attempting to navigate the

Federal grant process. Program managers help facilitate clearance

of the grantee’s budget, conduct proactive grant monitoring to ensure that the grantee is in compliance with all Federal requirements, ensure that the grantee is making progress and achieving

coalition goals, and protect against waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement.

In sum, an investment in program support will pay great dividends for community drug coalitions and will help us achieve our

common goal to strengthen community coalition efforts to reduce

substance abuse among youth. The Drug-Free Communities Program brochure that we use shows rows of homes with each house

having its own foundation. This program, too, must have a solid

foundation in order to flourish and continue meet both your expectations for a quality program and the dreams of the American people for drug-free communities. Increasing the program support cap

to 8 percent will provide this foundation, reduce program vulnerability and protect both the Federal investment and the matching

investment that communities and their coalitions are making to

the Drug-Free Communities Program.

I also want to assure you that ONDCP very carefully looks at our

budget every year and asks a lot of questions about it. I also think

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it’s important to remember that the 8 percent is a cap, not an automatic amount of money. And certainly all of that money does not

come and should not come to our office, only what we can clearly

justify as being in the best interest of the program.

We at OJJDP are honored to serve as ONDCP’s partner in this

historic effort, and I would like to thank the committee for giving

me the opportunity today to discuss this critical aspect of the DrugFree Communities Program and to answer any questions you might

have. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Wilson follows:]

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Mr. SOUDER. Thank you. And I have a number of questions, and

let me say at the outset—we’ll probably do a couple of rounds

that—once again, don’t take any of my questions about overhead

as critical of the employees who are doing this, because we always

yell about overhead and costs, and then the next thing—I know

when we first did this in northeast Indiana, one of the first

things—Noble County got a grant. So immediately we’re asking

Noble County to come down and talk to the other counties, which

would be basically called ‘‘mentoring.’’ The next thing you know,

we’re hollering at the government wanting somebody to come in

and give some guidelines.

So I do it just like everybody else does it, but the plain truth of

the matter is, we have a fiduciary responsibility here to make sure

that we are staying tight with this, because the truth is that if 100

groups, in effect, have it transferred into one form or another of administrative overhead and then don’t get a grant, that means some

communities in my district and Congressman Cummings’ and elsewhere are not going to get a grant because we decided to move that

money over.

It is also a natural tendency of a bureaucracy and your advisory

groups to say, yes, now that they have the knowledge, they would

like to be mentors. Now that they are included, they would like to

continue their grants. It is a natural bureaucratic thing that occurs

in everything, and there’s merit to it, but it’s a tough tradeoff.

My first question is on the 8 percent, which I understand is a

cap, not a guarantee. There was—we were given an estimate that

went to the Senate Appropriations Committee from ONDCP, that

1.5. Is that estimate still pretty valid as far as what—you haven’t

changed any of those numbers, the 4.5 for OJJDP, 1.5 for independent evaluation, 1.5 for technical—that the independent evaluation percentage then would be going up as the grants go up?

Why would you need the dollars to go up for independent evaluation that amount? I guess the total budget is doubling.

Dr. VEREEN. A general way to respond to that question is the

character of the coalitions is changing. As was presented earlier,

the first to line up to apply for these moneys and the folks who

were the most successful were the mature coalitions. There were

already coalitions out there.

What has happened over time is that there are only a finite number of those. The work it takes—and I made this point in my oral

statement. The work it takes to pull together parts of a community

that normally don’t necessarily talk to each other——

Mr. SOUDER. But is that the independent evaluation? In other

words, there is 1.5 percent in the budget, an independent evaluation by Caliber Associates. Is that—that, in effect, goes from an

amount of $40 million to a substantially different amount. And the

independent evaluation is not how difficult is the setup; it is to

evaluate.

And then also in the—my understanding from Mr. Wilson’s testimony is that part of the goal of the independent Institute is to provide on-hand—you know, this is what we learned, here is the evaluation of how we did it. And I’m trying to figure out why so much

money—I am not against evaluation, but I don’t want to see a duplication—and also why it needs to go up proportionately.

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Dr. VEREEN. Yes. When you talk about evaluation, there is evaluation at many different levels.

There must be evaluation to make sure that there is compliance

with government performance, related to government performance.

There is evaluation on how the coalition itself is functioning.

They have to be able to generate a baseline of drug use in their

community. They have to demonstrate that they are actually making progress on that. That is different in every community. These

communities are—most—almost all of them are not set up to do

that. That takes a lot of technical assistance to get up and going,

and then we must evaluate that to make sure that the information

we are getting from them is true.

Mr. SOUDER. And how do you view that technical assistance as

different from the mentoring technical assistance and the independent Institute’s technical assistance?

Dr. VEREEN. OK. The Institute is a way of focusing research that

specifically is relevant to the coalitions. Knight has done a lot of

research. Other groups have done research, but often it isn’t focused enough specifically for the communities.

Representative Cummings talked about the experts. Yeah, they

do this work out there, but it has to be able to be applied. The example that I gave earlier was our National Institutes of Health.

They churn out great research and great research findings, but it

is a huge challenge to apply that. One of the reasons I work at

ONDCP as a doctor, as a researcher, is to do that. It is a very difficult job, and sometimes it is expensive.

Mr. SOUDER. Now, I am not against the research and I am not

against applied research, but I have also watched how women’s infant care, Food Stamps, and a lot of the Head Start, all of a sudden

all say their primary mission is nutrition, and in fact they start to

drift from their—nutrition education I should say. And all of a sudden rather than having one—somebody focused on nutrition education and the others focused on delivery of services that they were

originally targeted to do, it becomes almost a bureaucratic overhead where you have people employed doing the same thing for the

same mothers, when the dollars could have actually been helping

them. And that is what I am trying to sort.

I understand the difference in evaluation directly of the grant,

and I understand the difference of mentoring, of how to be more

effective and using the information that comes from the research

to apply it. I don’t see quite yet the difference between the mentoring that’s applying it and the institute that’s applying it, and I

don’t quite see the difference in the technical assistance you’re applying and the technical assistance that’s coming from the mentoring and the institute.

Dr. VEREEN. Let me offer this in addition. These—some of the research that helps us to guide community coalitions comes from a

longstanding set of studies that looked at successful communities.

What we culled from looking at all of these successful communities

were a series of principles, and we’re trying to apply those principles, those research-based principles.

Mr. SOUDER. That’s in the Institute’s——

Dr. VEREEN. Yes.

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Mr. SOUDER [continuing]. Guidelines that they’re going to do

that, not this.

Dr. VEREEN. No. But these newer coalitions, first of all—— Mr. SOUDER. That’s the Institute—I mean, the statement we

have from the Institute has exactly the same purpose you just described.

Dr. VEREEN. What the coalitions actually do themselves, they

have to use resources to actually do that, to actually implement

that. When a suburban coalition, for example, reaches out to an

urban—a neighboring urban coalition or a neighboring rural coalition, they actually have to generate up a team to actually carry

that out.

Mr. SOUDER. In the mentoring?

Dr. VEREEN. In the mentoring, yes.

Mr. SOUDER. That’s the third one.

Dr. VEREEN. And I am trying to make the distinction that these

things—they flow together. The real challenge here is coordinating.

I understand—we understand what you’re trying to say in terms

of separating this out and making sure that there isn’t a duplication; but the real challenge is coordinating all of these pieces, and

at the same time being able to be accountable. We have to come

back to report to you every year on how successful we’ve been in

being able to apply that knowledge.

Mr. SOUDER. Even in between?

Dr. VEREEN. Yes, and even in between.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Cummings.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m confused. But let me try get unconfused here.

You have the—and my confusion is coming with regard to the— why the increase. I’m not knocking the increase, I’m sure it’s justified, but I’m just trying to figure out how we get from 3 to 8. Am

I right, 3 to 8?

In the process of applying—and I have been trying to make up,

make my own little lists of why I would think it would go up. In

the process of applying, first of all, you’re getting more applications. Is that calling for more people?

I’m starting at the beginning process now. Does that call for

more man-hours, woman-hours?

Dr. VEREEN. I’ll say, not necessarily. I’m trying to make the point

that the work in generating the coalitions, that’s taking more work.

Mr. CUMMINGS. OK. Well, let me just—I want to come to the

process, because this is—in other words, I’m starting at the application process.

Dr. VEREEN. OK.

Mr. CUMMINGS. So people send in these applications—did you

want to say something? I’m sorry.

People send in the applications. Are you saying that although

there are more applications, it does not necessarily take a lot more

person-power—— Dr. VEREEN. If they were all—— Mr. CUMMINGS [continuing]. To evaluate them?

Dr. VEREEN. If they were all the same, then it would be easier

to manage, but certainly at some point you would reach a threshold

where you would need more personnel. And John can——

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Mr. WILSON. Yeah. Our administrative budget is made up of the

grant managers and support staff and financial staff, but it also includes the cost of processing the application as part of the competition.

We use a peer review process and, naturally, if you are reviewing

more applications, it is going to cost more money to implement that

peer review process. And, of course, as the number of actually funded coalitions grows, if you keep the numbers of grants assigned to

each program manager at a reasonable level, you’re going to be

spending more money to support more program managers; and

you’re also going to need more money to support travel, to go out

and visit coalitions which is part of the monitoring responsibility.

So, yes, the more applications, the more costs in processing; and

the more projects that are funded, the greater the costs to administer the programs, of course.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Now, during that evaluation process, do you—I

mean, is there—in other words, if you’ve got a—some little groups

from, say, from my district, and their applications are not—say,

like, they’re not as sophisticated as people who have been doing

this for 50 years, is there something, Doctor, that you do? I’m not

asking you to do it. I’m just trying to make sure that I am clear

on this cost thing.

Is there something that you do to, say, you know, maybe you

didn’t do something right here and just—I mean, is that a part of

the process?

Dr. VEREEN. Yeah. We call it technical assistance.

Mr. CUMMINGS. OK. So then you’ve got this technical assistance

piece. So that’s more, because your pool of applicants is becoming

broader?

Dr. VEREEN. That’s correct.

Mr. CUMMINGS. So then you’ve got a little increase there, too?

Dr. VEREEN. And we want that to happen. We want to go into

those kinds of communities.

Mr. CUMMINGS. OK—yes?

Mr. WILSON. A couple things: First of all, in response to your earlier question, 20 percent of the scoring of an application depends

upon demonstrating the need for the program in the community.

So the extent to which a community has a serious drug problem,

for example, certainly is something that is taken into account by

the experts who are rating these applications.

I think that the peer reviewers are sophisticated enough that

they can see through a glossy, well-packaged application and see

the substance of what the community coalition stands for and what

it has accomplished and what its goals and objectives are.

So I don’t think that really in my experience—and I’ve been with

this program for 27 years, with the juvenile justice program—that

applications get funded simply because they know how to write applications better than other people. There is a certain amount of

that, and it is a skill. We do debrief applicants. We tell them what

the major deficiencies were in their proposal, and we encourage applicants who are unsuccessful to come back the next time, address

those deficiencies and reapply for funding.

Dr. VEREEN. And provide the technical assistance for them to reapply.

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Mr. CUMMINGS. OK. All right. That is where I got confused, for

them to reapply. OK.

Dr. VEREEN. That’s correct.

Mr. CUMMINGS. So I guess that’s increased a bit, too. The more

applications you have—I guess it’s the more rejects you have, the

more advice you give for future reference?

Mr. WILSON. Correct.

Mr. CUMMINGS. All right.

Now, then after that, you have some awardees, and you monitor

their situation, and because you’re going to have more awardees

and a lot more work, that is the big piece. Is that it?

Mr. WILSON. Right.

Mr. CUMMINGS. That is where most of your top overhead comes

in?

Mr. WILSON. That’s correct.

Mr. CUMMINGS. OK.

Mr. WILSON. Yes. And, you know, overseeing grants is not a clerical function. The program managers at OJJDP are high-level Federal employees. They’re GS–12s and 13s who have a great deal of

background information, know the drug prevention field, know how

this program operates and are able to give really solid advice to the

coalitions. They work with them very closely, steering them to resources.

And I think one of the things that our program managers will

do under the reauthorization legislation, and the challenge for all

of us, will be to coordinate the delivery of services and resources.

So if someone has a need that they’ve identified in their coalition,

we need to know what the resource is out there to steer them to,

whether it is a mentoring coalition, whether it is the Institute, because they need some help with evaluating their program, or whatever the resource is, it’s the job of our program manager to be able

to steer that grantee to the right resource that meets their needs

in the most cost-effective way.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you.

Mr. SOUDER. Well, we are going to run into a problem here. We

have 10 minutes left in the vote; there are three votes. We have

to be out of the room at 1:30 and I want to make sure the next

panel gets in. So if I can ask you a couple of quick questions here.

Then when we come back, then Congressman Cummings has a few

more. Then we’ll ask you some written questions, and we’ll continue to work with you as we work on the bill.

But I wanted to clarify a couple of things, and it’s important we

have this in the record, too, that this question of currently operating, Mr. Wilson, at 44 grants approximately per case—per program

manager; and you’ve proposed, I think it is 25—could you explain

maybe how you’ve arrived at that and how is this program like

other programs?

In other words, that is apparently a pretty standard thing in the

department. Is there anything that makes this program easier or

harder? And supposedly we’ve made it at 35. How hard has this become inside the department?

Mr. WILSON. Well, 26 is the average for individuals who monitor

discretionary grants in the overall Office of Justice programs

which—we’re talking there about a $3.7 billion program that’s priVerDate 11-MAY-2000 07:34 Sep 05, 2002 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00077 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\79781.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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marily grants, so it’s a pretty broad average. I think that 26 would

be the standard that we would work toward. I have no reason to

believe that we’ll ever get there. If we can come close to it, then,

again, I—as I mentioned, I believe that the grantees under this

program will be better served.

I think, yes, that there are some economies of scale in terms of

people’s increased expertise over time, over the fact that the programs have a lot of similarities, and I think that helps. But, again,

that is the standard that we’ll probably never meet. But as close

as we can come to 26, I think the program will benefit from that.

Mr. SOUDER. Do you believe the Institute would take some of the

pressures off in technical assistance?

Mr. WILSON. Yeah. The way I look at the Institute in the legislation, that—the answer to your question is yes, to a certain extent.

The Institute will be able to provide the research, the best practices, some hands-on assistance to coalitions, and how to better

evaluate the success of their program. And these are needs that

exist right now in the program.

To the extent to which we as program managers provide technical assistance it’s really technical assistance on the nuts and

bolts of Federal grant management and the effective expenditure of

funds, which I don’t think would be duplicative of what the Institute would be doing.

Mr. SOUDER. So you don’t see the mentoring group or the Institute as giving technical advice on how to do grants or apply for

grants or filling out the grants?

Mr. WILSON. I think the Institute would be a partner with us in

getting that kind of information out to coalitions all around the

country, yes. But I don’t think it would be duplicative. It would be

a collaborative venture.

Mr. SOUDER. The—how do you see the—in other words, let’s

say—we are all sensitive here in Congress because we are adding

new parts to our districts, so our districts are changing; so all of

a sudden I have 200,000 people in my district who I haven’t represented before, and they don’t have any coalitions. For instance,

Elkhart, Warsaw, and so on. Now, say they’re interested in it. Are

they going to be approached by—because Dr. Vereen said one of the

things that costs money is you go out and do advance in talking

to coalitions. They’re going to get technical assistance from OJJDP.

The CADCA and other groups are likely to be promoting it. The

mentoring groups would come in and talk to them. And the Institute partly has this as a goal. Is that not correct? And so am I

going to be more confused or less confused if I am in Elkhart?

Mr. WILSON. I don’t think you will be more confused. We coordinate now with ONDCP, with CADCA, in the delivery of information to coalitions around the country or communities that are interested in forming coalitions about how to do that and how to successfully apply for funding under this program. So, again, right

now it’s a collaborative effort, and with the addition of an Institute,

they would become part of that collaboration and getting that information out into communities around the country. OK. Thank you.

I’m going to run over to vote. I apologize. But this is what we’re

actually elected to do. With that the subcommittee stands in recess.

[Recess.]

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Mr. CUMMINGS [presiding]. You know, in the elevator up I was

just asking the chairman, you know, I said, what can we do to give

them some incentive for keeping the costs down, and I won’t tell

you what his answer was. But I’m just wondering, I mean, I guess

when you see the movement from 3 to 8, that is substantial. And

one of you said, and emphasized, that this was a cap, and I understand that. And I remember Mr. Portman saying that we were very

conservative before when we established the 3 percent.

And I was just wondering, do you feel like you’ve been pretty effective with the 3 percent? Or you think it’s a—you just haven’t— in other words, I’m going back to what Mr. Portman said, and I

know we are now talking about expanding and the program getting

bigger, but I’m just saying, do you feel like you did a pretty good

job with the 3 percent, Mr. Wilson?

Mr. WILSON. OK. If I can answer that, the 3 percent cap, or basi- cally keeping it at $1.2 million, it hasn’t actually been reduced to

3 percent, because both NADP funds and other OJJDP funds have

been used to support the program; so that, for example, in 2001

we’re spending really about 6.5 percent, including funds that have

been made available to the program from other fund sources.

ONDCP admin money, our drug prevention fund money supports

the capped training and technical assistance piece of the program.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Is that all of what would now be considered as

a part of the overhead, the 8 percent? Are you following me?

Mr. WILSON. Yes. And, yes, it would. So the difference between

what we effectively are spending which is about 6.5 percent this

year, that 11⁄2 percent would be kind of the amount of money that

we would need to get up to full staffing levels on the program management side. So that’s where we’re suffering right now. I think it’s

because we’re still funding the evaluation. We’re still doing the

peer review, and providing support for the evaluation and the

training and technical assistance from the caps from other fund

sources. So the 8 percent really would allow us to bring the program management up to—not to the level of 26 grants, but certainly at a more manageable level. So that’s what we—it’s not really going from 3 percent to 8 percent in reality, because in fact we’re

putting in other resources to bring it well up, much closer to the

8 percent level now.

Mr. CUMMINGS. So you’re still working—now, let me make sure

I understand how the budget stuff works. So you’re obeying the law

and staying under the 3 percent, right? Just hang with me. But

then you’re tacking on this other 3.5 that’s coming from other

places. So technically you’re still within the 3 percent.

Mr. WILSON. Correct.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Now, that’s where I want to get to. So that other

3.5 percent is money that probably should be used for something

else. Is that reasonable?

Mr. WILSON. Yes.

Mr. CUMMINGS. And so something is going lacking.

Mr. WILSON. Yes.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Some things. So you’ll be able to then spend that

3.5 percent for things that it’s supposed to be spent for, and then

we’ll come up to the 8 percent.

Mr. WILSON. Correct.

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Mr. CUMMINGS. OK, let me ask you this. Can you tell me exactly

how this Institute is—just give me just a thumbnail, simple, stepby-step, how the Institute will work from a logistical standpoint. I

mean, if I was just some layperson calling into the office 6 months

from now and I said, ‘‘Well, how does that Institute work? I heard

you got an Institute, how does it work, how can that help my community,’’ what would you say?

Dr. VEREEN. There are two basic areas. The first is best practices. How do coalitions actually work? What are the ingredients of

a coalition? I want to form a coalition; what are the active ingredients?

And the other thing the Institute has to be able to do is to teach

the coalition, to provide the information to the coalition on how to

evaluate and assess the coalition. They have to be able to assess

themselves. That’s a requirement for the grant. So those are two—

they’re all based on research. They’re very technical. And General

Dean will explain this as well.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Well somebody’s not gotten a grant, and they call

in and they just heard that you got a—it’s a community association, it’s a group, a coalition. They have not—they may have applied, say, for example, because I think this is going to happen.

Hang with me now. They may have applied. You may have given

them some wonderful advice about how to do it the next time. They

say, look, Doctor, we love all that. You know, thank you for your

advice. But we’ve got people dying in our streets right now, and

I’ve got a group of people who really want to do something and

want to do it now.

How does this Institute that you’ve established help me, if at all?

Dr. VEREEN. It’s a repository of information. And I want to make

one important point here. When a coalition applies, they actually

have to demonstrate that they’ve been in existence and can function for 6 months before they’re eligible. OK. In order to get to that

point, they need mentoring, which comes best from another coalition, somebody who’s been there to get them to the point for them

to apply.

Then in order for them to interface with the government, there’s

the application process, the reporting requirements, all those

things that we try to minimize. That’s what OJJDP does. But the

information which we’re still gathering on what are the active ingredients of a coalition, what makes them work—and we want to

require those of every new coalition that comes along—lives in the

Institute; and we’re still generating some of that information that

gets fed back directly into the coalitions that are now coming on

line.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Maybe you missed my question. And let me

just—I’ve just got to ask it one more time and thank you for what

you did say.

Dr. VEREEN. OK.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I’m saying if there’s—and maybe you did answer

it. If there’s an organization which doesn’t make it, I mean and

they just need some help.

Dr. VEREEN. We tell them how and why they didn’t make it.

OJJDP will do that.

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Mr. CUMMINGS. Got that. But they’ve got a coalition. They’re saying well, we didn’t get the money. But you talk about best practices. Is there something that we can do? Do you have something?

You’re the Federal Government. Can you help us, through your Institute, can you help us.

Mr. WILSON. Yes. That would be—— Mr. CUMMINGS. Because I’m telling you that’s going to happen.

Mr. WILSON. We would have the capacity to do that through this

Institute that we don’t have now.

Mr. CUMMINGS. OK. That’s why I’m asking. So in other words,

you could tell them some things that they could possibly do, maybe

send them some brochures or something. Let me tell you why I’m

asking that. Because that’s what I’m doing in my district right

now, trying to find out what other groups have done. And I’m trying to pull together a book to hand to my community associations

because most of my associations will never, probably, not unless— not in the next 10 or 15 years, get into, you know, it’s just too

much competition.

I mean some of them will, but some of them won’t. So I’m putting

together a little book. It talks about Federal grants. It’s going to

talk about best practices basically from community association to

community association; and then, hopefully, they’ll be able to look

at that and say, well here’s an idea. We can have people like a community on patrol kind of thing and I’ll be able to refer them to the

Mt. Vernon community that did it.

So all I’m asking you, again I’m trying to stretch these dollars

and help people be self-sufficient; and I just wanted to know how

that would work, had you given it any consideration because you’ve

got a lot of people who are desperate for help. And I’m just saying

if you already have the kind of tools there to help people who have

qualified for grants, maybe some of that same information would

be helpful to people who may not have—not that they didn’t qualify, maybe they just didn’t make it because you’ve got so much competition. And I would hate to lose their vigor and their excitement,

you know, particularly if there’s something that we’ve got available. OK? Thank you.

Mr. SOUDER. I want to thank you for your testimony, and we’ll

continue to work with you on the numbers as we move to the

markup in a rapid fashion after break. Part of the problem here,

coming from a business background is that we’re barely covering

the variable costs and we’re not doing the fixed and mixed which

is why you’re having to take some of the dollars from other parts.

And one of the things that we need to work through is that, in

fact, if we expand and cover a higher percentage of the cost rather

than having you take it from the admin budget that you’re given

for your agency, that means that this program, in effect, gets a reduction of the funds going to the grass roots and doesn’t get part

of the admin budget. But that’s a typical thing we do in Congress.

We keep piling new programs in, don’t increase the admin budget.

The question is, why should just this program bear that.

Shouldn’t we be increasing then the admin budget in other programs rather than having it be just in this budget. That’s really

a more technical part of the question, because we obviously fund

the admin budget. This isn’t coming—in other words, the 3.5 that

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came out of juvenile justice isn’t coming out of programs. It’s predominantly coming out of the admin. And that’s because we add

new programs without increasing the administration of ODJJP; is

that——

Mr. WILSON. Well, let me clarify that very quickly. The money

that’s coming—some of it’s coming from ONDCPs admin money for

the evaluation out of the money that we put in directly into the

program to support the work of the cap. The training and technical

assistance work is program money. We don’t consider training and

technical assistance to the field to be an administrative expense.

We consider it to be a programatic expense, and it’s authorized by

our training and technical assistance authorizing legislation.

Mr. SOUDER. But you get other money to do that, and so this program would be eligible for that money.

Mr. WILSON. Well, we can use it for training and technical assistance. This is coming out of our drug prevention money, which is

programmatic money. Which includes training and technical assistance. We would, that money would be going out to communities to

implement drug prevention programs, demonstration programs if it

were not going to support the training and TA from the cap. So

that would be—probably that would be where it would go. So it

would still be going out to the communities.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you very much for coming today, and I appreciate you taking the time to be here. If the third panel could

now come forward. And if you will remain standing I’ll administer

the oath.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Mr. SOUDER. Let the record show all the witnesses have responded in the affirmative. We’d like you to limit it to 5 minutes,

insert anything you want, or if you have additional information to

put into the record. General Dean, would you like to begin?

STATEMENTS OF ARTHUR T. DEAN, MAJOR GENERAL, US

ARMY, RETIRED, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, COMMUNITY ANTIDRUG COALITIONS OF AMERICA; HONORABLE MICHAEL

KRAMER, JUDGE, NOBLE COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT, INDIANA, CHAIR OF DRUG-FREE NOBLE COUNTY AND MEMBER

OF THE ADVISORY BOARD OF CADCA; AND LAWRENCE

COUCH, PROGRAM MANAGER, MONTGOMERY COUNTY PARTNERSHIP, MARYLAND

General DEAN. OK. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, Chairman

Souder; Representative Cummings; and other distinguished subcommittee members. On behalf of Community Anti-Drug Coalitions

of America [CADCA]——

Mr. SOUDER. General, could I ask you to pull the mic just a little

closer. I think it was on but——

General DEAN. Is that better? Nope. OK. Well, to basically—I

hope you won’t take that from my 5 minutes. But I will go as fast

as I can.

But good morning again, Mr. Chairman, Representative

Cummings, and other distinguished members of this subcommittee.

On behalf of the Community Anti-Drug Coalition of America,

[CADCA], and our more than 5,000 community coalitions nationwide, I am grateful for the opportunity to share with you CADCA’s

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unique perspective on H.R. 2291. I’ve also submitted written testimony and supporting data for the record.

I will be very brief. CADCA is proud of its help that it has provided Congress to develop the original Drug-Free Communities legislation as well as the current legislation being considered in both

the House and the Senate. We also have worked closely with our

friends in ONDCP, OJJDP, CSAP, and the Presidential Drug Free

Communities Advisory Commission on successful program implementation. The Drug Free Communities program has been a central bipartisan component of our Nation’s demand reduction strategy.

The premise of the Drug Free Communities program is very simple—and that’s why we care so much about it—that communities

must be organized and equipped to deal with individual substance

abuse problems in a comprehensive and coordinated manner and

that Federal anti-drug resources must be invested at the community level. This program is unique in that Federal support is contingent upon local efforts and results. The GAO 1997 report—and

I have detailed the title of that report in my written statement— says that one of the most promising drug prevention strategies targeting young people is community anti-drug coalitions. I know firsthand from many visits around this country to organizations that

belong to CADCA, many of them that are Drug-Free Communities

grantees, that this program truly does make a real difference.

Let me give you some quick examples, and I have given more for

the written testimony. In Vallejo, CA, the Valejo Fighting Back

Partnership reports that monthly marijuana use for seventh graders was reduced from 16 percent to 6 percent between 1996 and

2000. They also saw alcohol use among ninth graders reduced by

17 percent between 1999 and 2000.

Another example, Miami Florida coalition reports that the perception, and the perception is critical, of the availability of marijuana decreased from 43 percent in 1995 to 28 percent in 1999.

And my last example is the Lane County Prevention Coalition in

Eugene, OR, reports that inhalant use within the last 30 days

among eighth graders dropped from 12.4 percent in 1996 to 5.3 percent in 2000.

I believe these impressive results have been achieved by community coalitions through the implementation of an array of programs

and strategies. I would like, quickly, to address some of the provisions of H.R. 2291 and why CADCA is very pleased and particularly excited about them.

First of all, we believe that the bill raising the 2002 authorization from $43.5 million in current law to the $50.6 million requested by President Bush is a good one; and we support that. We

also support the levels authorized for fiscal years 2003 through

2007. We believe that this will add hundreds of community coalitions to this program. We also support the provision of H.R. 2291

that allows coalitions who have completed 5 years to continue, as

Congressman Portman talked about, with them having the responsibility to have a higher match locally. We think that’s important.

There has been much discussion, Congressmen, about the administrative cap. What I say from a grassroots perspective, having visited many of the grantees is that—and talked to the members of

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the drug free commission, talked to our friends over in ONDCP and

OJJDP—that there clearly is a need to raise the cap so the program can be more effectively managed and evaluated; and we think

that 8 percent is the appropriate level.

CADCA is particularly excited about—that H.R. 2291 includes

the authorization for, and I will be more than willing to answer

more questions about the National Community Anti-Drug Coalition

Institute. The coalition field urgently needs this Institute to provide the most effective and efficient vehicle for developing and disseminating relevant and easily understandable information. The

field needs materials specifically designed to address the unique

sustainability outcome measurement and other challenges facing

community coalitions, like integrating the faith community into

their operations, like integrating the business community.

The Institute will provide the education, training, technical assistance, and performance measurements and other state-of-the-art

information needed to cause these coalitions to be effective. The Institute will be a wholesaler. It will assist in communities building

coalitions, sustaining coalitions, and evaluating coalitions. The new

supplemental authorized under H.R. 2291 enabling mature coalitions, we believe, also is important in that the Institute and the

supplementary mentoring grants are intended to complement each

other and not to be duplicates of each other.

The Institute will develop and provide the field with the latest

and best information and materials needed to implement evidencebased strategies and to measure, assess, and to document their

performance. Mentor coalitions will use the information, will be

trained by the Institute, and will assist in the mentoring of other

coalitions in their communities.

H.R. 2291 authorizes $2 million in Federal funding for the Institute in 2002 and 2003 and a sum to be determined from 2004

through 2007. The Drug-Free Communities program is truly the

backbone of successful local anti-drug efforts, and I am delighted

that the proposed legislation will reauthorize and strengthen the

program. I thank you for the opportunity to testify before you

today, and we appreciate your support and leadership.

[The prepared statement of General Dean follows:]

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Mr. SOUDER. Thank you. I’d now like to have a statement from

Judge Kramer, my friend; and it was great of you to sacrifice a little bit of time from wonderful, beautiful Indiana and come out here

to Washington.

Judge KRAMER. Thank you. It’s an honor to be here. Chairman

Souder, Ranking Member Cummings, I hope I can make some contribution toward the passage of this legislation because, as has

been mentioned before, I do believe that this is one of the keys to

reducing drug use among youth.

I am a trial court judge in the Noble Superior Court in Indiana.

Eleven years ago, in response to seeing the large number of both

civil and criminal cases that are rooted in the use and abuse of alcohol and other drugs and dealing with the resulting devastation

of people’s lives, I became involved with Drug-Free Noble County,

our countywide anti-drug coalition. For the last 7 years, I’ve served

as the chair of Drug-Free Noble County.

I do want to thank you for enacting the original act. I wrote the

successful grant request for our county in 1998 in the first round.

The grant has raised our efforts to new levels. While we were doing

good things before, we’ve been able to provide services in areas of

need. We’ve hired a staff person to organize our volunteers and,

over the last 2 years, have over doubled the number of people who

volunteer with our coalition.

It’s changed attitudes and energized people in our county in ways

that I really can’t describe. And it’s changed attitudes and made

drug prevention and youth development really a priority for the

county. One program is our youth program, which is Noble County

PRIDE, affiliated with national PRIDE Youth Programs. I’d like— I could sit here all morning and talk about the things that they’ve

done. They’re known locally as miracle workers for all the work

that they do. Their emphasis is on community service and working

in the community to make it better while serving as models for a

drug-free lifestyle.

One thing that I’m particularly gratified by, we have a lot of top

students and top athletes, but a lot of those kids don’t have time

to be involved. And although we have some right now grades 5

through 12, about 40 percent of the student body are active participating members in PRIDE. And a great number of those are kids

that would otherwise have very little connection with the school

and are not otherwise involved in things after school or other activities.

And I think this has played a very big role in their lives. And

through the grant, we’ve been able to expand that so we’ve gotten

up to the 40 percent that we’re at right now.

I do support the ability of current grantees to continue to receive

funding beyond the 5th year. I do not want to see grantees become

so dependent upon Federal funds that when that support is taken

away, they fail. On the other hand, it’s important to realize that

we’re working with problems that have been around for 40 years,

actually a lot longer than that, and quick fixes are not going to

work.

Programs have to be given time to take root in the community

and become a part of the fabric of the community. We need to have

a consistent, devoted, research-based effort over a long period of

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time to make changes in our community. And I see this part as getting that process started.

We have limited funds. We’re a small rural community in our

county; and before receiving the grant, we’d done a pretty good job

at tapping into those resources.

Our original plan to replace the funding was unsuccessful. And

late last year, we had to switch to plan B and without continued

support after the 5th year, I guess my fear is that we’re going to

have to cut back on some of our effort and even with the 50 percent

cut in the 5th year, we may not be able to continue with full services, even in the 5th year of the program. I believe that to be able

to allow current grantees to reapply, but with an increased dollar

match will help balance the needs in the communities with the desire to not make coalitions dependent upon the Federal funds. It

will best insure that new programs and positive changes seen

throughout the country will further develop and become ingrained

in the communities and have the best chance of continuing with

local support.

One thing that really bothers me is seeing other communities

that are not making full use of the opportunities and resources

available to them to address the drug problem. I mean, things that

we’ve done in Noble County can be done in every community across

the country. A lot of these groups are just waiting for the spark to

come. All of these people, as Representative Cummings had mentioned, are people who care very deeply for their communities and

want to make a difference.

What they lack is direction and training and expertise. They

know what they want, but they don’t know how to get there and

don’t know where to turn for help as I think you had put it. For

these reasons, I’m excited about the National Community AntiDrug Coalition Institute and mentor coalitions. I think they will

help spread the influence and energy of community coalitions

throughout the country and in every city and town and help create

new coalitions and strengthen existing coalitions.

Our coalition right now does mentoring in kind of a haphazard

way. I got a call about a week and a half ago from a woman in LaGrange County whose son is in middle school and addicted to

methamphetamine. And she wants to get involved in prevention activities with youth in LaGrange County, so other kids don’t end up

as her son. And she wanted to start a PRIDE group there. And so

we’re helping her.

I think mentoring would provide a more organized program to

allow these types of people who are struggling and don’t know

where to turn to have a place to turn to. The Institute will provide

training and resources and the mentor coalitions will put those

training and resources into practice. I think that this will help not

only struggling groups and people who are first addressing a problem, but will help strengthen existing coalitions.

And I do truly appreciate the dedicated people at OJJDP who

have over seen our grant. They’ve done a very good job at keeping

the grantees accountable and doing so in a helpful, flexible way by

working with each coalition. Their work has shown me that they

truly care about the success of each grantee. An institute, I feel,

would work very well and not duplicate current efforts. I know that

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we had asked the people there some program-type questions; but,

as I think had been expressed before, their main focus is in making

sure that we comply with the Federal grant requirements, the code

of Federal regulations, and other technical requirements as far as

the grant.

It would be nice to have the Institute to work along with that

and when OJJDP got questions, to be able to refer them to the Institute about program questions, about evaluation. We have a mentoring program in a homeless shelter in our county, and I’ve tried

everywhere trying to find ways that we can do a good evaluation

of that program to see whether having the high school kids come

in and mentor the homeless kids is helping.

I mean, I feel, from anecdotal evidence that it is; but it would

be very nice to be able to have some sort of evaluation system developed to evaluate that. And there’s really no place that we can

turn for that.

Last, I also welcome anything that can be done to increase accountability. And this is not based upon any abuse by any grantee

or OJJDP. I think that it’s intolerable to waste precious funds that

could be used to save the lives of children, help our communities,

and reduce the destruction of human life.

I welcome anything that insures the funds are used to the best

and highest purpose. For that reason, I do feel that—and I don’t

know about the number, but I do feel that the administrative cap

should be raised for OJJDP because they will insure that there are

no abuses in communities. And I think the greatest threat to our

program, to community coalitions, comes not from outside but from

people who are careless or misguided within, who go off the track.

And I would like to have—make sure there’s proper oversight

available to make sure that there are no abuses with these funds.

Once again, I do thank you for your help in reducing illegal use

of drugs by youth, and I appreciate the honor of being asked to testify here today.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Judge Kramer follows:]

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Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Couch.

Mr. COUCH. Thank you. Mr. Chairman Souder, Ranking Member

Cummings, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the

opportunity to testify in support of H.R. 2291.

I’m a father and, within the week, may become a grandfather. As

a father, I’ve experienced the terrible tragedy drugs can cause in

a family and partly for that reason became involved with the Montgomery County Community Partnership. The Partnership is a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting alcohol, tobacco, and drug

abuse issues.

About 18 months ago, we formed a collaborative arrangement

with the Task Force on Mentoring an all-volunteer group, which

has been in existence for about 10 years, focusing on mentoring atrisk children. We came in with a collaborative application to DrugFree Communities, and were funded. Our relationship with the

task force has been very useful.

In my written testimony, I go into details about our successes

and our accomplishments and the guide we developed with the various mentoring programs in the schools and our efforts to insure

that a mentoring program be available in every middle school and

every secondary school in Montgomery County. We’re far from that,

but we’ve made some progress.

Recently, the school system hired a program-mentor coordinator,

which was at least an acknowledgment by the school system that

mentoring is important. And so we’re moving in that direction. But

during my brief testimony, I’d like to talk more about mentoring

in the sense that mentoring is being used during this conversation.

In one sense, the relationship between Montgomery County Community Partnership and the Task Force on Mentoring has been a

mentoring relationship. The Task force had been, for 10 years, an

all-volunteer effort. They had a conference Once a year which was

useful. But I really believe when they became associated with the

Partnership, not only because of the additional resources made

available, which we’re greatly appreciative of; but I think also just

because the Partnership had a lot of experience in working with

coalitions, looking at institutions, looking at community norms, and

looking at how the environment affects drug use and looking at the

broader picture, that we helped the Task Force on Mentoring to

focus better, to strategize better, and to see more of its own options. We’re talking about mentoring as a way of empowerment.

Mentoring of at-risk children is empowering the children on an

individual basis. But we can also empower organizations, and I

think we’ve been instrumental in empowering the Task Force on

Mentoring. The Montgomery County Community Partnership has

also worked with students and formed the Students Opposed to

Smoking. And again, you know, students can discover how much

power they have. We know they have power. But students often do

not realize how powerful they can be, what type of access they can

have to the media, what type of institutional change they can realize and can affect.

We have also worked with communities outside of Montgomery

County and, in terms of working with the coalitions, helping them

to get formed and get started. Someone once said, an expert is a

person who lives 50 miles away. Maybe there’s some truth to that

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even. Sometimes a person from the outside can get a different perspective of what the problem is and what the potentials are and

can take—I know as a member of the community, you can get so

wrapped up in individual issues that sometimes you can miss the

bigger picture.

Congressman Levin said that replication is not duplication. I

really like that. The idea of going into another community and

working with them would certainly not be to impose my vision or

our vision onto somebody else but really working with that coalition to help them to know what is their vision, what is their voice,

and how they would want to proceed. I believe that the experiences

that we’ve had as a coalition is transferrable and is really something that shouldn’t be wasted. Any coalition that has been in existence and has been successful should get the opportunity to go

out to other communities and work with them. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Couch follows:]

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Mr. SOUDER. Thank you. We have a little—15 minutes. First let

me—General Dean, if you could do this, that CADCA has various

research studies and other examples of some of the programs you

said for example that were in the audience today. If you could submit some of that for the record, because our focus on the record has

been to some degree on budget issues. But this will be the only

hearing on the whole act, and we want to make sure that this

record reflects what we all share, which is that the community organizations have been very effective, that we’ve seen good responses around the country.

Really the only thing we’re going back and forth on the administrative costs is the administrative costs takes money from the community groups. It’s a zero sum gain. And therefore we’re not arguing with that, that there shouldn’t be an increase in funds and

more money going to the communities because we’re just all presuming here today that it’s been fairly effective.

Maybe a little more targeting here and there and how do we go

to the next level. Did we—in effect the allusion was made that

those that were already organized were easier to supervise because

they were already in existence to some degree, like Noble County,

IN, or the mentoring programs in Montgomery County and, therefore, it’s becoming harder so, therefore, it takes more administratively. Those are the kinds of questions that we’re going through.

But we want to make sure that the record from today shows the

successes from as many programs as possible. And if you could

work with the association with that.

Now, let me ask you the difficult question. Authorizing funds are

going up. But appropriating funds may or may not go up. So would

you favor the administrative costs going up if the dollars are the

same, which means an actual net reduction going to the grassroots?

General DEAN. Me.

Mr. SOUDER. All of you briefly.

General DEAN. I would answer the question this way. And I

would quickly say to you that we did submit to you about a three

page summary of outcomes from current Drug-Free Community recipients.

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General DEAN. We also shared with you that we get dollars from

the Annie Casey Foundation in Baltimore to do a research study,

and we left that for you as well.

[The information referred to follows:]

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General DEAN. I would answer the question this way: that after

traveling around this country and having looked at the conditions

of our communities and visiting hundreds of coalitions, that I believe I would favor less recipients in order to provide the current

recipients better support and services and make them stronger and

better.

That’s a very difficult question—that’s not easy for me to say because I want to have as many grantees as possible, but I don’t

want to have so many grantees out there and them floundering

without the appropriate assistance that is so critically needed for

them to be successful, so I have to come down on the side that I

would favor less grantees in order to better provide support and assistance and evaluation.

Mr. SOUDER. Judge Kramer, if I could ask you, you mentioned

LaGrange County. I know DeKalb is also interested in effect. I’m

sure we’re trying to move the prevention funds up, and I think it’ll

go up some. But, for example, this could make the difference

whether one or neither of those counties get any money if we increase the overhead. Or it could make a difference in whether you

get your additional years.

Judge KRAMER. Right. It’s important to have the money in the

communities; but it’s also important to have the proper oversight.

And I guess it concerns me that there are other prevention programs, demonstration projects in the OJJDP, that are not being

funded to help provide the administrative costs for——

Mr. SOUDER. That’s not what he said. He said that it’s not programmatic. It’s administrative.

Judge KRAMER. OK.

Mr. SOUDER. It’s not pure administrative, but it’s technical assistance. In other words, we—in Congress, we give technical assistance to OJJ—this is a very important thing to do because there

was a little misunderstanding. But the admin funds come from

Congress to administer. We also give technical assistance funds.

Those technical assistance funds are to cover all their programs.

There’s no reason some of their funds shouldn’t cover this program.

Because if they can cover other programs——

Judge KRAMER. I guess, I think that the money that’s used

should be used the best, and I think that there still does need to

be some increase in the administrative costs of the program to insure that each grantee builds the best program possible.

And I guess my goal, my vision would be to have that map covered with dots with grantees from the past. And I guess that

means that the map would be covered a little bit more slowly, but

hopefully, with a lot stronger coalitions by having the proper oversight over them.

Mr. SOUDER. This is a tough question. And I appreciate that’s

what we’re having to go through, and you’re, in effect, saying that

this is a great need which is what we need to hear. Mr. Couch.

Mr. COUCH. We’ve received excellent assistance from OJJDP. I

understand our program manager at one time was working with

100 grantees. I mean that’s not realistic, especially for grantees

that need a lot of assistance. I think creating weak coalitions

doesn’t really help anybody and can really hurt the effort.

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Mr. SOUDER. Thank you. And also, Washington, DC, may be the

only place where we don’t view experts being 50 miles away.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I want to thank you all for being with us today.

And yes, judge.

Judge KRAMER. There was one point that I wanted to make, and

I forgot because I was trying to—I kept watching the clock. One

concern that I have in the mentor coalition is the requirement of

requiring a match. And I understand the reason for that. But it’s

difficult for us to raise money in our own community for use in that

community. But I don’t know how I can go out and ask businesses

or individuals to give me money to go help a coalition that’s 200

miles away. I just don’t know how that would work.

There may be some coalitions that have enough money that they

have extra money that they can use to help fund this new coalition

of getting off the ground that they’re mentoring. And I think that’s

the wise outlook because, you know, obviously, people are not stable and people move around. And just because we’ve—may have

made progress in Noble County, there are people that move into

Noble County all the time and we need to have a broader look, outlook. But it’s—I don’t know how I’m going to raise money to be able

to help us mentor for the match. And that was the only comment

that I had forgotten.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Judge, how did you, how did you get involved in

this? I mean, I know what you said, that you had some people coming through your court, and the reason why I’m asking that is because I’ve noticed that there’s a trend of more judges getting involved and I think that’s great. I really do, because, see, you guys,

you all see it up front and personal. You see the men and women

come in front of you every day.

And I often say that there are some of us who are blessed to be

in certain places at certain times to be witnesses so that you can

come before other people and tell them what you’ve seen when your

neighbors might not normally see it unless it happened in their

house or something like that. But they still would never see what

you see. So I’m just wondering, how did that come about?

Judge KRAMER. It was just from seeing people. I got tired of seeing people that were—that needed to be fixed up and that were—

had their lives destroyed. And I—you know, there needed to be

something more than—I can send them to substance abuse treatment; and I can do things to try to maybe help. But you still can’t

really fix them, patch them up totally. And I think the key is to

be engaged in prevention so they never get involved in the system

to begin with.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Do you——

Judge KRAMER. I guess it was just more frustration out of not

being able to put these people all the way back together again.

Mr. CUMMINGS. The dollars that you—I mean, you mentioned

just a few minutes ago some lady that called you and said that she

wanted you all’s help because she was trying to do the same thing

that you were doing. And apparently, I assume, she doesn’t have

dollars.

Judge KRAMER. Right.

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Mr. CUMMINGS. So what—I mean, so do you think you are prepared now, after doing what you all have been doing all this time,

to truly give her advice?

Judge KRAMER. I think so. I think we can—there are things that

we can give her advice on how to go about it and maybe avoid the

mistakes that we’ve made and you know, hopefully, hopefully help

her.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Now, one of the things they talked about a little

bit earlier is the Institute and how they would take best practices

and use them to help other people. I take it that some of the things

that you’ve learned you would be willing to share with the Institute.

Judge KRAMER. Right. Yeah. Exactly. The Institute—I guess I’m

excited about the Institute for what it can do for us. We’ve been

members of CADCA. And CADCA has been a tremendous resource

for us, and I see this as really expanding upon that and giving us

a lot of help and being able to help this woman maybe refer her

to the Institute and get some specific advise for her from the Institute in—to help us help her.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Now, General, does your organization do some of

what the Institute is going to do?

General DEAN. I guess the best way to answer that question is,

you know, CADCA is a private non-profit organization, and to date

has not received any Federal assistance.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I got all that. I understand that.

General DEAN. So the Institute will bring to—the Institute will

bring to the field an expanded capability to take the research that

Dr. Vereen talked about and put it into a usable manner so it can

be delivered out to the field. So the answer to your question is

CADCA has attempted to do for the field using the resources that

it has, some of the things that the Institute will do in a more sophisticated and expanded way.

Mr. CUMMINGS. OK. Now, that leads me to this: the Institute will

gather information. Again I’m trying to figure out how do we maximize our dollars and the use of them. Let’s say the Institute established itself and assuming that you all are not—become the Institute, you know, I’m assuming that. Does—do you foresee being able

to use some information gathered in the Institute to help your organization do what you do?

General DEAN. Yes, I do. I envision a very close proximity—excuse me. A very close collaboration between the two organizations.

Both benefiting each other, both with the goal of creating more

stronger community coalitions. So the answer is, yes. I see a very

close relationship, a close working relationship, whether that relationship is the result of CADCA managing the Institute or someone

else managing the Institute there has to be a very close relationship.

Mr. CUMMINGS. So that would enhance your efforts and help you

be able to do even more. Is that right?

General DEAN. That’s correct.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Finally, Mr. Couch, I want to thank you for

being here and thank you for your efforts. You’re from my State,

and I had to say something to you. And I want to congratulate you

on what you’re doing. And I really do, we all appreciate it very

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much. I didn’t want you to take it personal when I talked about

Montgomery County being the richest county and Baltimore—I

don’t want you to take that personal. I may be running Statewide

some day. I don’t want you to get up in the audience and say he

beat up on Montgomery County. So you did understand that?

Mr. COUCH. I understand. You have my vote.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SOUDER. I want to thank you all for coming but most importantly for the work that you do. There is no question, to restate

Congressman Cummings earlier point, that this is one of our

brightest hopes and success stories in the prevention field. And as

we look to put more dollars in, if we’re being very cautious with

this it’s that we want to build on it.

We’ve had some problems with drug-free schools, but we’ve tried

to amend that and make changes in the recent education bill to try

to address that because it’s clear we’re all focusing on demand reduction in a way that we’ve never done that before. And it needs

to be a key part of any component, and this is hopefully a way to

strengthen that effort. And thank you for contributing to our hearing today. And with that, the hearing now stands adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 1:28 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

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