(The following article by Dan Eggen was posted on the Washington Post website on January 3.)
WASHINGTON — Regions at the highest risk of terrorist attack or natural disaster will receive an increased share of grant money under a new urban funding formula unveiled Tuesday by the Department of Homeland Security, the latest step in its effort to focus more resources on the gravest threats facing the United States.
The policy change, announced by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, comes after several years of criticism from lawmakers and private research groups.
They complained that sparsely populated states such as Wyoming were receiving a proportionally greater share of homeland security money than populous jurisdictions, such as New York and Washington, that are much more likely to be attacked.
For fiscal 2006, Washington and 34 other metropolitan regions will be eligible to compete for $765 million from the department’s largest grant program, the Urban Area Security Initiative.
Eleven other urban areas that have received grants (including Indianapolis and Toledo) may still compete but are being warned they may be dropped if they cannot show a compelling need, officials said.
The smaller list is in part because of a cut in funding by Congress, which slashed $90 million from the program this year, and will force cities in the same region to work together in seeking aid.
But Chertoff also characterized the changes as part of a broader effort to distribute money based on measurable risk factors, and said that such grants are “not party favors to be distributed as widely as possible.”
“We’ve looked at what happened in the hurricanes, we’ve looked at what happened over in London with the terrorist attacks on the rail lines, and that has reinforced the idea that we have to consider consequences, vulnerabilities and threats,” Chertoff told reporters at a news conference.
Lawmakers and local officials in Washington and other major urban regions praised the changes, which were enacted in the face of continued infighting in Congress over funding formulas for other types of homeland security grants.
Dave Robertson, executive director of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, said the change could mean more leverage for the District and its neighbors in competing for federal money.
“It’s hard to minimize someone else’s risk or what they perceive, but by any measure, the Washington area is right up there in terms of risk, both for terrorism and natural disasters,” Robertson said.
The policy shift applies only to one part of DHS’s vast grant apparatus, which is slated to distribute a total of $2.5 billion in state and local homeland security grants during the coming fiscal year. One focus of controversy has been Homeland Security grants given to states in a separate program that will total $550 million in 2006. About 40 percent of that money is divided evenly among the states, regardless of threat or population, although DHS has been given wider latitude by Congress in spending part of the money this year.
Some smaller states and regions left out of the urban grant program have also protested the changes.