NO TOWN LEFT BEHIND IN TERROR FUNDING FLOW

by Jordan Carleo-Evangelist

WASHINGTON - The town of Bennington, N.H., population 1,273, has one school and five chemical weapons suits.

Bennington bought the suits with some of the more than $6,500 in federal Homeland Security grants it received in 2003 - grants Congress authorized to help New Hampshire's 234 cities and towns respond to and prevent terrorist attacks.

Towns like Bennington highlight allegations by some government watchdogs and Congress members themselves that millions of taxpayers' dollars are going to waste in small corners of the country that face little real danger.

The reason: politics.

As congressional leaders rushed to fund anti-terror efforts after Sept. 11, they realized they wouldn't win enough votes to send money to New York and Washington unless they also provided a little something for every state from Alaska to Wyoming.

And New Hampshire. "I don't see no specific threats," said Bennington Police Chief Steve Campbell, whose department has two full-time and three part-time officers. "It was just something they offered, so we figured we'd get on the bandwagon. Even though we're a small department, we take advantage of it."

Critics say the current system - which awards funds based primarily on geography and population rather than need - wastes money protecting unlikely targets. They say a system that gives Wyoming, the least populous state, seven times more money per person than New York or Texas is fundamentally flawed.

"It's almost like an entitlement, like if you're below the poverty line you get food stamps," said David Williams, a policy executive for Citizens Against Government Waste, a Washington-based advocacy group that monitors government spending.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, Congress has created two main grant programs to help states prepare for terrorist attacks: one that spreads money to every state in the nation and the other that concentrates on areas most likely to come under attack. More than two-thirds of the $2.8 billion distributed by these programs in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 was awarded without regard to risk.

The $2 billion State Homeland Security Grant Program sent each state about $15.4 million, regardless of size, population or likely risk of attack. Six U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico and American Samoa, received a smaller amount. The roughly $1.2 billion remaining was spread among the states based on population. Under that program, New Hampshire got $17 per person and New York $5 per person.

"The way it's being done now is not rational, and it has to be changed," said former U.S. Senator Warren Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican who led an independent task force this summer that evaluated the grant system.

To make up for the imbalance, the Homeland Security Department devised the Urban Area Securities Initiative, which distributed another $800 million to 30 cities based on population density, the presence of potential terrorist targets and real threats intercepted by law enforcement agencies. New Hampshire received no money under this program.

But even with the extra $150 million that New York state garnered through the risk-based program, it still received $4 less per person than New Hampshire.

There's "a complete mismatch between the funding provided under this program and the need," New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly recently told Congress.

U.S. Congressman Jim Turner of Texas, the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, was less diplomatic. At the same hearing, he called the system "haphazard" and "unfocused."

Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Rachael Sunbarger acknowledged the criticism, but said that New York also receives money from several other programs, many of which existed before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"If everything was just based on the Urban Area Security Initiative formula, then potentially states like New Hampshire and others would get very little from us," she said. "It'sáa good way to make sure that everybody gets a piece of the pie, and that's what everybody was shooting for."

At least eight bills currently before Congress would modify the way the swelling pot of homeland security money is doled out, in part to give a greater share to states that face the greatest threat of attack.

Meanwhile, members of Congress are working to "perfect" a threat-based system to distribute some of the homeland security money, said Sen. Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican and member of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. But, he said in a statement, it is important to "strike a delicate balance between protecting highly populated urban areas without neglecting still-vulnerable rural areas."

The Homeland Security Department gave $36.4 million to New Hampshire in 2003, $20.9 million of which came from the state grant program. New Hampshire sent more than $5 million of that to cities and towns based on population. The result: every hamlet in New Hampshire got at least a small piece of the pie.

New Hampshire's smallest town -- Hart's Location, population 39 -- received $182.82. Ellsworth, the second-smallest town with 87 people and no fire department, received $407.82. Manchester, the state's largest city with a population of 108,078, received more than $626,377.

Campton-Thornton Fire Chief David Tobine, whose volunteer department covers Ellsworth, said the town spent its money on chemical decontamination equipment.

State officials now say that system was flawed. Bruce Cheney, director of the Bureau of Emergency Communications in the state's Department of Safety, said several committees of emergency workers were tapped to recommend how the homeland security money ought to be divided up and spent.

Initially, he said, "there was some fear that if we don't send Ellsworth something, they're going to be complaining that because they're a little town up north that they got forgotten."

Pam Urban-Morin, the state's grant coordinator, said the state did not have enough time to devise a system other than population to dispense the first round of money it received. So, it gave every city and town a percentage equal to its percentage of the state's population. When the state received more money later in the year, most of it was distributed based on need, she said.

"I think the population grant thing was in the early stages, saying, 'We can't leave anybody out.' And it's obvious that it didn't work well," Cheney said.

Fifty-two New Hampshire towns with fewer than 1,000 people received grants totaling more than $145,000 in fiscal 2003. More than half of New Hampshire's towns and cities - 121 of them - have populations of less than 2,500. They received a total of $668,000. Another $8 million was earmarked for upgrading radio equipment and distributed according to need.

The largess began when the Office of Homeland Security was elevated to a Cabinet-level department earlier this year and took over nearly two dozen federal agencies. The department began dispensing grants to help states and their first responders - police, firefighters, emergency medical technicians and hazardous materials teams - upgrade equipment and pay overtime costs incurred during times of heightened risks of terrorism.

But even some New Hampshire first responders say the decision to allocate money based on population, rather than on the likelihood of attack, was ill-conceived. In some cases, they said a threat-based system would work in their favor.

Durham, home to the University of New Hampshire, is a potential target, said Durham Fire Chief Ronald O'Keefe. So is nearby Newington, which has a large petroleum storage facility, he said.

"And because their population is less than 1,000, they get considerably less money," O'Keefe said. "Now I think there needs to be a way of distributing it a little more fairly."

Manchester Fire Chief and Emergency Management Director Joseph Kane said the state did the best job it could under strict time constraints imposed by the federal government. The Homeland Security Department gave states just 45 days to pass some of the money on to cities and towns.

"In that 45-day period they couldn't have done any kind of risk analysis," Kane said. A population-based system was the only fair option, he said.

Rudman, the former senator, said that cases like Ellsworth and Bennington are all too common.

"That is very typical of what's happening all over the country," Rudman said. "This shouldn't be a pork barrel; it ought to be something that protects the American people."

Rudman said pegging more of the federal funds to population density and the presence of critical infrastructure, such as power plants and bridges, is a more effective way to improve security.

But the current system has more to do with politics on Capitol Hill than with keeping Americans safe, said Don Kettl, director of the Project on Homeland Security at the Century Foundation, a New York-based think tank.

In the weeks following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the drive in Congress to give states money to cover new security costs bogged down in arguments over who would get how much, said Kettl, who also is a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. To win votes - particularly from lawmakers who represented areas less likely to be targets of terrorism - congressional leaders had to make concessions, resulting in the rigid geographic and population formulas that allotted some money to every state, he said.

"Whenever it comes time to start writing checks, it's very hard for a member of Congress to say the money ought to go someplace else," Kettl said. "We all know that it takes a certain amount of political grease to keep the system running, but the question is how it costs us in distributing money that way to get the kind of protection that we all need."

The state grant program was outlined in the Patriot Act, a controversial anti-terrorism bill that sped through Congress in the fall of 2001. Civil libertarians have argued that Congress was in such a rush it did not adequately review the bill before sending it to President Bush.

Rep. Christopher Cox, a California Republican and chairman of House Select Committee on Homeland Security, has introduced a bill that would eliminate the baseline grant. Cox's bill could significantly cut New Hampshire's slice of the pie by pegging security money to potential risk.

"If we try to protect everything, we will in fact protect nothing," Cox recently told his committee.

But politics could again interfere, both on a congressional and a presidential level.

Bush, who is up for reelection next year, might be reluctant to back a bill that would eliminate large chunks of money to many of the states that supported him in 2000.

Last month, Congress approved $22.4 million in homeland security grants for New Hampshire for fiscal 2004, most of it through the grant program that overlooks risk. New Hampshire's Cheney said state officials have not decided how to divvy up the dollars.

But some New Hampshire officials and first responders are not about to apologize for a system that, so far, has blessed them.

"My view is that New York doesn't need any money and New Hampshire needs all of theirs," Cheney said with a laugh. "But I'm sure they feel the same way. There have been many programs in the past from which New Hampshire got nothing," he said, "So I'm not real sad about the fact that there may be some advantage to us in this go-around."

Hampstead Fire Chief Chip Hastings was equally blunt.

New York, he said, "had a tragic loss. But when the sun shines we all warm up. If they're giving, my palms are up because it helps the town and it helps the taxpayers."