Local reactions to the UASI grants
There’s a lot of reaction in newspapers around the country today to DHS’s announcement of the Urban Area Security Initiative grants on Tuesday, as detailed in these earlier posts here and here.
Officials in the SF Bay Area don’t know how they’re going to be able to cooperate on a single grant proposal. State and local officials in Las Vegas and San Diego are upset at not being on the lisk of “high-risk” cities (rightfully, I think, given the port & military assets in San Diego, and Las Vegas’ known history of terror-related threats). Seattle and New York, among others, are moderately happy with the new allocation.
On a final note, I’d like to recommend again a RAND report entitled “Estimating Terror Risk” that I highlighted in a post about a month ago. The report focuses precisely on the UASI grant program in its analysis, and the data in it might very well have been the basis for some of the risk prioritization decisions made by Sec. Chertoff yesterday – although there are clear discrepancies between their rankings of metropolitan areas and the Department’s list (e.g. San Diego is in the middle of the pack in the RAND report). It’s a good contextual read for people who are trying to understand the decisions made yesterday.
