Michael A. L. Balboni

Michael A. L. Balboni is the founder and Managing Partner of Redland Strategies Inc., a consulting firm that aids companies and government agencies. Michael also serves on several homeland security think tanks, charitable boards dealing with public health and is a regular contributor as a terrorism expert on national and local television and print media.

Before starting Redland Strategies, Michael had been a leader in New York security, politics and government. He served as New York State Senator from 1998-2007. Following September 11, 2001, Balboni was appointed as the first Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee. During his tenure, he wrote nearly all of the major laws relating to Homeland Security for New York State, many of which became models for national legislation.

In 2007, he left the Senate to become Deputy Secretary for Public Safety and Homeland Security Advisor for New York State and served in this position until January 2009. In this role, Mr. Balboni was the Senior Homeland Security and Law Enforcement official for the State of New York. Mr. Balboni oversaw the creation of many innovative programs, the first of their kind in the nation.

These include: "New York alert," a multimedia, cyber-based emergency notification system that currently has 1.5 million subscribers; "CI-SAR," which overlays suspicious activity tip information upon critical infrastructure to provide threat context and trend analysis capability; and "Empire Shield Reconfiguration“, which redeploys National Guard units so as to form a rapid response and a "surge" patrol capability for the region's airports, train terminals, tunnels, bridges, and nuclear power plants.