From Newsday:

Different views on security;
Feds put spending focus on capital improvements while city wanted to fund training, personnel

BY J. JIONI PALMER. NEWSDAY WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - The federal government cut anti-terror funds to New York City by 40 percent because of fundamentally different views on how the money should be spent, according to documents obtained by Newsday and interviews with homeland security experts.

New York's top funding requests - chiefly $138 million to underwrite ongoing counter-terrorism operations and training - seem to contradict the Department of Homeland Security's desire to finance capital improvements rather than personnel.

New York needs "personnel, they need boots on the ground," said I. Michael Greenberger of the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland. "I don't think [the Homeland Security Department] ever put New York on notice that looking for boots on the ground wasn't going to fly."

The city's predicament was further compounded because there was a smaller pool of funds to spread among a greater number of cities that Homeland Security felt were potentially at risk.

"It's kind of like a capital program," Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said Thursday in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. "What you want to do is get yourself up to kind of a basic level and then you want to make sure you're adding as you can, but also raising everybody else's level to make sure we get the total maximum benefit for the most people. That's risk management."

The city received only $124 million of the $458 million it requested.

While New York's grant application ranked funding for the NYPD's Counter-Terrorism Bureau and Operation Atlas, which fields patrols aimed at preventing terror attacks, as its top priority out of 15 programs for which money was sought, Homeland Security's evaluation ranked that near the bottom at 14.

"I think the use of the funds for overtime is needed in many jurisdictions," Greenberger said. "New York has its own intelligence program, so from my perspective that is a valid use of the money."

The Homeland Security Department placed that request - as well as NYPD Counter-Terrorism Equipment and Training and FDNY Critical Infrastructure Protection and Recovery - among other programs in the bottom 15 percent of all requests submitted by the eligible cities, says a federal document explaining the grant awards.

Homeland Security gave the highest marks to a proposed Public Preparedness Campaign and Evacuation Plan, which was the city's 10th priority.

"To me that doesn't make sense," said House Homeland Security Chairman Peter King (R-Seaford), who has pledged to hold hearings examining the grant evaluation process. "When they say New York is the No. 1 target, their job is to find a way to get the money there, not to tell us why they can't."

In January, Chertoff announced that a greater portion of homeland security funds would be dispersed using a risk-based formula instead of one that allocated money based on population, which resulted in low-threat areas such as Wyoming receiving more money per-capita than New York. That decision also resulted in more cities - 46 - qualifying for funds.

King, who voted for President George W. Bush's budget reducing Homeland Security funding, said, "The money is supposed to go to the areas who are most at risk, not those that could be at risk. We live in the real world and we have to address the fact that thousands of New Yorkers could be killed every day."