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Local, State Officials Square Off Over Response Grants By Joe Fiorill BALTIMORE — In remarks that prompted a scornful rebuke from a state official, the mayor of this key U.S. port city blasted the Bush administration yesterday for favoring states over cities in doling out dwindling grant money for WMD and terrorism response (see GSN, Jan. 23). “Why are we sending first-responder dollars to secondary-responding levels of government?” Democratic Mayor Martin O’Malley asked at a homeland security industry meeting. O’Malley’s comments and the ensuing remarks of a top Maryland state homeland security official mirrored an often rancorous national debate over how to fund local improvements in terrorism preparedness. Bush presented Congress last week with a fiscal 2005 budget request that includes $3.6 billion, or about $600 million less than estimated spending for fiscal 2004, for the Homeland Security Department’s Office for Domestic Preparedness, the main federal grant-giving office for state and local terrorism response efforts. Although Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said last year that he expected the office’s budget to grow to more than $7 billion annually over the short term, he told senators this week that more than half the money allocated in the past two years has not yet been disbursed. In a speech to state emergency managers this morning, House Select Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) estimated the unspent allocations at $5.5 billion, saying, “This $5.5 billion bottleneck is unacceptable.” Such remarks are likely to fuel state-local tensions over control of the funds, which in recent months have led Bush to issue a directive reaffirming the primacy of the states (see GSN, Dec. 18, 2003) and the U.S. Conference of Mayors to report that grant money is bogged down in state capitals. Rich Cooper, a business liaison in the Homeland Security Department, yesterday questioned the validity of the mayors’ study, noting that it was based on only 215 of the country’s 17,000 local governments. He said the department “is working to encourage the states to get those funds to first responders” but defended the integrity of state homeland security officials. “There isn’t a state homeland security director that’s interested in sitting on funds and keeping them out of the hands of first responders,” Cooper said. O’Malley, however, sharply criticized both the proposed cut for the Office for Domestic Preparedness ― “You can’t do this on the cheap,” he said ― and the preponderant role of the states in doling out the grants. He derided a federal requirement that states allocate 80 percent of homeland security grant money to localities within 45 days, calling the arrangement a “20 percent skim-off” based on an arbitrary “legislative compromise.” “When citizens call 911, it doesn’t ring at the statehouse. It doesn’t ring in Washington, D.C. It rings at local governments. … [States] don’t have the constitutional responsibility to command those frontline troops. … For better or worse, mayors and county executives are the commanders of those front-line troops,” O’Malley said. Speaking a few minutes later, Maryland Republican Governor Robert Ehrlich’s homeland security director heaped scorn on the notion of bypassing the states in passing out the grants. “The states,” Dennis Schrader said, “share power with the federal government. That’s the whole basis of our democracy. ... You can’t deal with 17,000 jurisdictions. It’s actually absurd to even think that that’s possible.” Schrader added that “the suburbanization of America” has made state involvement more important, as the states participate in coordinating efforts over multijurisdictional regions. O’Malley praised the Bush administration for an increase in one area of the Office for Domestic Preparedness budget: the Urban Area Security Initiative, which provides grants to major cities. O’Malley called for more payments that bypass state governments. Criticizing the administration for playing a tax-cutting “shell game” and neglecting homeland security needs, though, O’Malley laid out what he called urgent, underfunded priorities for cities: local intelligence networks that “gather information, share it instantly and work together”; an integrated terrorist watch list that police around the country can consult; metropolitan biosurveillance systems; local terrorism vulnerability assessments; upgraded local emergency response plans; appropriate training, equipment and inoculations for first responders; and interoperable, redundant emergency communication systems. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks on the United States, O’Malley said, homeland security has become “a greatly underfunded local mandate.” Although some state officials have charged that cities are unable to fruitfully use all the grant money that is available, O’Malley said, “We can absorb it [grant money] a heck of a lot more quickly than they’re sending it to us.” Schrader said the Office for Domestic Preparedness grant process is generally misunderstood by the cities, which he said are in need of state instruction on the matter. Local governments, the Maryland official said, fail to understand that the federal funds are meant as “reimbursement” to cities that have already incurred costs related to homeland security. “Every local jurisdiction has anticipation cash flow” that should be used initially for such purposes, Schrader said. Speaking with Global Security Newswire after the meeting, Cooper regretted the current state of the grant debate. Critics of the Office for Domestic Preparedness budget cut are engaging in “stovepiping” of priorities rather than focusing on the big picture, he said. “Throwing stones at each other isn’t going to help anybody,” Cooper said. Organized by the new Homeland Security Leadership Alliance, yesterday’s meeting brought together government officials and representatives of businesses seeking both to protect their critical infrastructure and to obtain contracts with the Homeland Security Department. The alliance said more meetings will follow at locations around the country.
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