Department of Homeland Security

The nation has committed billions of dollars to improving homeland security since 2001, including large sums awarded to states in preparedness grants. In this CIR web exclusive map, reporter G.W. Schulz reports how authorities in each state have managed, or mismanaged, anti-terrorism funds from the federal government. Click on each state to learn more, and to download source documents obtained through state open records laws. Follow our ongoing coverage on CIR's homeland security blog: Elevated Risk

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MAP PRODUCED BY SHIMRIT BERMAN AND CARRIE CHING

Authorities in the state of Wyoming refused to turn over detailed records showing how federal homeland security grants have been used there since 2001. As with other states, we were seeking computer records containing individual grant transactions hoping to detect larger trends in how local beneficiaries have invested the money.

Critics of anti-terrorism and emergency preparedness grants have frequently pointed to Wyoming as an example of how the formula used to distribute the funds during the years immediately following Sept. 11 was flawed. Wyoming benefited more per capita from the grants than other states.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney represented Wyoming as a congressman, but beyond that, the Cowboy State, as it’s known unofficially, maintains a low profile and has just over half-a-million residents.

A spokeswoman at Wyoming’s Office of Homeland Security nonetheless argued that specific grant spending information such as the type of public safety equipment purchased, price, quantity, purpose and more would not be made available citing exemptions in the state’s open-government laws that permit withholding records when disclosure “would be contrary to the public interest.” According to the law, that can include records describing “procedures designed to prevent or respond to terrorist attacks or other security threats.”

The state did, however, supply us with budgetary documents that at least show how much individual Wyoming communities have received in grant funds during recent years. You can download them here. Wyoming officials in addition agreed to give up audits of the spending that states are required to carry out as part of their grant oversight responsibilities.

Auditors hired by the state visit cities and counties to check on gear acquired with federal cash to make sure it’s being used properly and that documents verifying expenditures are all in place. Those records, which you can also download here, show that like other states, some grant recipients in Wyoming have struggled to adequately keep track of federally subsidized public safety gear and make sure purchases were put to good use.

According to a 2008 report, the Riverton Police Department in western Wyoming’s Fremont County received over $18,000 for an incident-command trailer that wasn’t actually delivered until a year later. More than $4,400 worth of equipment purchased for the trailer was “not installed or in proper working order at the time of our site visit,” nine months after it was acquired, auditors found.

The town of Ft. Laramie bought a surveillance system in early 2007, but eighteen months later half of the cameras purchased weren’t being used. Local officials told auditors they planned to install the devices after a new public building was completed. “However, as of the date of our visit, there were no firm plans regarding such construction,” auditors determined. Elsewhere, employees at a water treatment plant in Sheridan County were not trained on how to properly use chemical suits and air packs purchased months before. Plus, the air packs had not been filled, meaning they were “not functional” when auditors arrived.

Police in Jackson, Wyo., the area where Cheney is known to keep a residence, bought five pieces of emergency communications equipment in March of 2007, but 15 months later auditors said they could only verify that one had been programmed and installed in a vehicle, and local authorities were unable to find another. Further, auditors could only examine seven more such devices out of 14 purchased in 2006 as part of a $40,000 investment, because “there was no documentation available showing where the items were located.”

You can view other examples in the records posted here.

The nation’s first homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge, in 2003 appointed a fire chief from Campbell County, Wyo., named Gary Scott to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, a panel of experts that makes recommendations to the federal government. Scott also participated in the former president’s reelection campaign as a member of the “Bush-Cheney ’04 First Responders Leadership Team,” a network of police, firefighters and paramedics that touted the White House’s record on homeland security.

But a federal grand jury in 2007 accused Scott of having sex with four minor children, some of them involved in a fire cadet program he’d created. Other incidents allegedly occurred while Scott travelled to conferences with the victims. A judge later said there were “perhaps dozens of young men and women” actually victimized by Scott’s conduct, according to the Associated Press.

Scott pled guilty in early 2008 to sex crimes that took place between 2000 and 2006, and he was sentenced to 24 years in prison. He also faced sexual assault and abuse charges in state court. An assistant U.S. attorney called it “one of the most serious cases I have ever prosecuted where death isn’t involved.”

Before the scandal, the Tribune-Eagle newspaper quoted Scott arguing that the rest of the nation took Wyoming for granted as a potential focal point of extremists and defending its use of preparedness funding from the federal government.

“We produce a third of the nation's energy out of (Campbell) county,” he said. “Our infrastructure is important to somebody.”

In our profile of Pennsylvania, we described how emergency managers there faced tough criticism over the poor handling of a winter storm in 2007 that led to what Gov. Ed Rendell publicly described as a “total breakdown in communications.” He heard about the storm’s severity from stranded citizens, not officials.

Pennsylvania wasn’t alone. Despite having studied what happened to the Keystone State, Wisconsin had a similar experience the following year.

A winter blizzard in 2008 buried parts of Wisconsin in piles of snow and left more than 2,000 motorists pinned down overnight without food and other supplies on a highway that the state patrol did not close. Like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin officials in charge of disaster response weren’t aware of how problematic the storm had become, and thus didn’t inform the governor that greater assistance was needed.

Government blunders in reacting to major storms after the Sept. 11 hijackings raise questions about the effectiveness of billions of dollars in homeland security grants handed out by Washington to state and local communities. Beneficiaries argue the funding should have an “all-hazards” application and not be distributed just for terrorist threats. Most areas of the country are unlikely to be attacked by international extremists, but they do endure tornados, flooding, earthquakes and wildfires, the logic goes.

Partly as a result of the 2008 storm, Wisconsin’s Legislative Audit Bureau launched a probe into how the state has used about $218 million in federal readiness funds over five years to determine whether the cash has been spent appropriately. But their report was not yet complete as of our deadline.

During the storm, Wisconsin’s top emergency management administrator was trapped in a traffic jam on a highway for four hours. By then, other motorists had been stuck for much longer and a state-level emergency operations center was only beginning to realize that cars were stalled all the way to Illinois, the Wisconsin State Journal reported.

“Communication and coordination remained poor as the situation progressed and the day became night,” a later official report concluded. “Agencies were ineffective at sharing important information with the people that needed it. An effective unified command system was not established, which left many of the responders unclear about who was in charge and which actions should be taken. There were no uniform directions given to motorists on what they should or should not do; instead, motorists were dependent on the knowledge of snowmobile volunteers to answer any questions.”

A separate investigation called for by Gov. Jim Doyle and carried out by the head of the Wisconsin National Guard found that officials inexplicably almost closed the emergency operations center when the disaster reached an apex and barred some citizen snowmobilers from providing help by checking on marooned drivers. Doyle apologized for the state’s response in the wake of the report.

It also found that authorities didn’t fully grasp the breadth of the situation for hours, even though media organizations were reporting on the freeway logjam. Interagency communication between state and county highway departments was “virtually nonexistent.” As snow blanketed the region and traffic was halted, a state patrol lieutenant erroneously informed superiors that the incident was being handled and the operations center could be shut down because there weren’t any major problems. High winds by then had stopped even snow plows from moving about. Public officials vowed that such failures would never occur again.

“From one end of this incident to the other, and from top to bottom, it is remarkable the extent to which some operators and decision-makers in local and state agencies failed to use commonplace and well-known information-sharing practices,” Brig. Gen. Donald Dunbar’s report determined. “Operators within the various jurisdictions were cooperating in normal, non-emergency patterns when they were actually in an emergency but did not know it.”

As for anti-terrorism and emergency preparedness grant spending in Wisconsin generally, authorities supplied us with a detailed spreadsheet showing how the federal funds were used beginning in 2003. We submitted a request for the material under the state’s open records laws, but it took the Wisconsin Office of Justice Assistance, which oversees the distribution of law enforcement and homeland security grants, six months to comply.

We’ve uploaded the file in Excel format here for you to examine. State and local grant recipients are allowed to actually spend the money up to three years after it’s first awarded, so in many cases more recent spending figures aren’t available. While at times the electronic records don’t provide clear enough descriptions to determine precise, overall amounts for what the state has purchased, the file still easily enables you to search for local communities and detect trends.

For example, communities inside Dane County, which was deeply affected by the 2008 storm, spent millions of dollars on intrusion-detection systems, night-vision goggles, chemical-resistant clothing, public safety radios, computer-aided dispatch equipment, bomb-suppression blankets, tactical entry gear, rescue devices and other items.

The State Journal reported in March of 2009 that Wisconsin had among other things used the grants to pay for “hazmat story tellers” costing $3,900 a day who described for local officials how they survived industrial explosions or helped rescue victims from tragedies that involved dangerous substances. The paper also said Dane County picked up a $145,000 bomb robot, armored vehicles and “an 18-person van to haul equipment and officers to events like Freakfest,” a Halloween bash that takes place annually in Madison, Wis.

The nation’s first homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge, in 2003 pointed to West Virginia as an example of preparedness done right while standing on the steps of the state capital building in Charleston.

“Your regional approach and your use of common training, exercises and equipment is setting an example that the other states must follow,” the Charleston Gazette quoted him as saying.

What Ridge didn’t know at the time was that several of the state’s top homeland security officials would resign, retire or be fired in a few short years. The departures occurred amid allegations that hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal homeland security grants and other public safety funds were wasted, abused or mismanaged.

When the smoke cleared, the state was unable to pay $5 million it owed to the federal government and contractors. State officials among other things had permitted local homeland security grant recipients to spend over $1 million on purchases that weren’t permitted under federal rules.

“I hope it doesn't come down to state taxpayers footing the bill, but mismanagement happened,” a spokesman told the Associated Press in late 2005. “We're going to have to pay for it somehow.” West Virginia eventually was held responsible for paying $1.1 million back to the federal government.

But documents we obtained show the Department of Homeland Security had earlier designated more than $8.2 million as “questionable costs.” Dubious purchases included numerous trucks, $3,000 worth of lapel pins, $8,000 in trips to Washington, D.C., and Chicago, thousands of dollars in cell phone charges, furniture, office supplies, a Taser and more. Debts owed to vendors totaling $2.4 million that resulted from poor money handling had to be covered using an account controlled by the governor.

During the summer of 2006, the federal government ranked West Virginia as less prepared for a disaster than any other state in the nation concluding that none of the areas examined, such as plans for evacuation and emergency communications, could be deemed “sufficient.” Officials there disputed the conclusion, however.

The state invested more than $3 million in 10 rapid-response trailers authorities intended to distribute across the state that were packed with equipment for analyzing potentially dangerous chemicals, medical supplies for treating disaster victims, a watchtower for looming above crowds of people and more. Costing up to $443,000 each, reporters from the Gazette later determined that despite investing so much, the trailers experienced only limited use.

Journalists also learned that a state homeland security official who proudly showcased the vehicles to the public after they were purchased once worked for a critical subcontractor on the deal and his father managed the company involved, West Virginia Truck and Trailer. Investigators examined the procurement but did not ultimately accuse the duo of wrongdoing.

The controversy didn’t stop there, and West Virginia newspapers detailed the fallout. One official in charge of anti-terrorism and emergency preparedness grants first resigned in April of 2005 as investigators probed his use of a state airplane and helicopter. The man, Neal Sharp, claimed he was pressured to carry out “political favors” for others with the federal funds and insisted that he’d done nothing improper.

But reporters noted that Sharp made large purchases with a state-issued credit card and took multiple expensive trips in aircraft owned by the state. Sharp allegedly hired his son to work in a warehouse used by the state’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management and also awarded himself and others thousands of dollars in overtime. He told the press those expenses, covered by federal grants, were due to his team putting in long hours loading a warehouse with public safety equipment.

Indeed, auditors complained as recently as 2007 that the homeland security division had stockpiled nearly $8 million worth of gear in a central facility that was not distributed to local governments as it was supposed to be. Additionally, an audit found that officials “did not have a dollar value of the inventory on hand” and that no physical inventory was done at the end of 2007. Reports show those findings by auditors were eventually resolved.

Meanwhile, the Gazette obtained flight records showing that Sharp had traveled on state aircraft 19 times in a year-and-a-half. He also hired a private airplane five times when the state’s aircraft weren’t available. All of his travelling cost approximately $60,000 and was charged to homeland security grants. One relatively short, in-state jaunt totaled $1,332. If he’d driven, the charge to taxpayers would have been only about $120.

On two occasions, officials claimed they needed a helicopter to conduct “reconnaissance” before Bridge Day in West Virginia’s Fayette County due to fears that terrorists might target the public celebration. Residents turn out for the event annually to see base jumpers leap from the the New River Gorge Bridge. Other records publicized by newspapers showed that Sharp had made frequent use of a credit card funded by taxpayers filling up with gas on weekends and holidays, and even when he was out sick.

They discovered later that Sharp had in fact been fired from his previous job at a training center for emergency responders “because he set up a business that could have siphoned money from the program,” according to the Gazette. No one had apparently contacted the center when he applied for his new job. The company planned to teach classes similar to what the center offered. Gazette reporters also disclosed that Sharp had been fired from yet another job before that time at a chemical company where he worked as an emergency response coordinator.

From there the dominoes continued to fall. West Virginia’s emergency services director was fired after notifying other top public safety officials of alleged abuse and mismanagement in the homeland security program controlled by Sharp. Then a bureaucrat in charge of the division’s budget resigned without public explanation. A regional response coordinator also left quietly, although investigators were looking into his use of overtime. And the homeland security official whose father managed a subcontractor doing business with the state resigned, too.

A newer military affairs and public safety director, James Spears, has since sought to assure the public that reforms were put in place, including a panel to monitor grant expenditures and prevent future misspending.

Our attempts to obtain records such as spreadsheets from West Virginia showing generally how the state has used federal homeland security grants since 2001 weren’t successful. We first sent a request under the state’s Freedom of Information Act to the Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety, but it was passed on to a number of offices without us receiving any of the material by deadline.

Washington State set the standard for transparency and completeness in responding to open-records requests with information about homeland security grant spending for this project. We even used computer records supplied by authorities there to show others how we’d like to receive the material.

Officials at the state’s Military Department, which is in charge of distributing federal anti-terrorism and emergency preparedness grants there, turned over dozens of electronic spreadsheets detailing individual grant transactions for state agencies and local communities.

We were also provided with hundreds of pages of progress reports that show the evolution of major investments made with the grants in Washington. In addition, the state supplied us with inspection narratives and checklists, which are compiled by state employees who visit cities and counties to scrutinize safety equipment purchased with federal funds and examine invoices to make certain they support expenditures.

All of it was made available in digital format, and we’ve uploaded the records here for you to look at. Openness is only one facet of good government, however, so you can download spending files and reports by jurisdiction to determine for yourself both if the grant investments seemed reasonable for your community and if the money was managed appropriately as authorities spent it.

The Excel spreadsheets show purchases by product type, price, quantity, grant year and more, although in many cases like with other states some details are still limited, such as the number of grant years represented.

Tiny Garfield County, estimated population 2,060, bought a $7,000 4x4 ATV and a $28,000 Ford Expedition with a siren package for “incident response,” records show. The Washington State Police picked up high-tech bomb robots and accessories totaling more than $285,000, a $343,000 armored-response truck with systems for detecting radiation and explosive gases, 30 bullet-proof flotation vests costing $58,000 and 16 pairs of night-vision goggles with a price tag of $47,000.

The police department in Seattle spent millions of dollars on watercraft for responding to threats posed by chemical and biological agents, Lincoln County acquired three Blackberries for “terrorism prevention” and Spokane won five bomb suits priced at $47,300.

Officials in Washington State received praise from the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, Richard Skinner, whose office has been auditing the use readiness grants around the country. A Sept. 2008 report described as a “best practice” its requirement that local grantees link their purchases to Washington’s overall preparedness strategy and establish clear plans to execute objectives.

Plus, planned safety equipment must be approved by a committee that confirms the gear is allowed under guidelines, and officials determine if it can be bought more cheaply through a statewide contract already in place.

But not everything was perfect. The report also found that equipment wasn’t always tracked well and when auditors wanted to check up on supplies, it sometimes took “hours or days” to find people who knew where the property was being kept. “A state agency or region must be able to quickly and easily identify the location of equipment needed for response in the event of a disaster,” the report said.

In separate incidents, the inspector general also examined how Washington State used millions of dollars in disaster assistance from FEMA, issuing four reports since 2007 alone. One questioned $286,000 in costs claimed following a late 2006 winter storm. The Snohomish County Public Utilities District lacked supporting documentation for expenses, some charges were “unreasonable and ineligible” and accounting flaws led to duplicated expenditures, according to auditors. Local officials mostly agreed with the findings but disputed that they had used the wrong formula for equipment rates that led to $91,000 in “excessive” charges.

Another report in Aug. 2007 zeroed in on nearly $3.6 million worth of charges against federal funds made by Washington’s Department of General Administration and stemming from an earlier earthquake. Auditors pointed to more than $600,000 worth of repairs done on the state’s legislative building that couldn’t be blamed with “convincing evidence” on the disaster itself.

There were plenty of other findings, but state officials disagreed with many of them arguing among other things that FEMA approved its recovery projects and that the Department of General Administration used the right methodologies for determining what costs were justified.

Frequently, battles between the states, FEMA and government auditors in Washington, D.C., over federal disaster aid can become highly convoluted, as this particular report attests, with disputes arising over such things as whether the funds can be used to pay contractors for negotiating maximum payments from FEMA itself.

At times reports from the inspector general are intensely bureaucratic and almost appear to be written in a foreign language:

“Once a construction timeline is established, the escalation factor is determined using a three-step process that relies on average cost escalation indices reported in the Engineering News Record. The [state of Washington] used a three-year period instead of a two-year period to determine the escalation factor. Table three shows what we computed as the monthly escalation factor based on a two-year index average and what the [Department of General Administration] computed using a three-year index average. As indicated, the department’s methodology resulted in a higher monthly escalation value being applied to determine the eligible reimbursement cost.”

Just a few years after the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed 184 people at the Pentagon, citizens living in the nation’s capital became less concerned about emergency preparedness.

So says a report by Washington, D.C.’s Office of the Auditor released in March of 2009. Local governments in the Washington area spent a total of $4.6 million in federal funding during 2005 on a media blitz of television, radio, print and Internet advertisements with the goal of inspiring at least half the area’s residents to better plan for a future catastrophe.

One million wallet-sized “personal preparedness planners” were even distributed as part of the campaign. But despite the big investment, according to auditors, the number of people who identified themselves as ready for a disaster as a result of the effort ticked up only slightly.

Focus-group research done as part of the project revealed that the public “already has a general idea of what it means to be prepared for an emergency situation. … The bottom line is that citizens are doubtful there is really any way to prepare for an unknown type of attack, in an unknown place, at an unknown time.”

Citing interviews with community leaders, the auditors said only a small segment of the public participates in homeland security training sessions and “the rest of the population is very difficult to motivate or reach.” One online initiative, 72hours.dc.gov, walks visitors through how to create a family emergency plan, but just 100 or so people had used it at the time of the report.

The audit also found that a threat and vulnerability assessment the city completed in 2008 was “overly generic” in the advice it gave and lacked “specificity that would be useful to policymakers.” Moreover, the assessment didn’t examine what had already been done in the region to enhance security.

That’s notable because government watchdogs have repeatedly said homeland security officials are not sufficiently evaluating how billions in federal anti-terrorism grants distributed to local governments have made the nation safer. Congressional investigators came to the conclusion five years ago that there was no convenient way to determine what D.C., Virginia and Maryland had done by then with $340 million worth of grants awarded between 2002 and 2003.

“The lack of consistently available budget data for all emergency preparedness and homeland security grants limits the ability to analyze and assess the impact of federal funding and to make management decisions to ensure the effective use of federal grant dollars,” the Government Accountability Office determined. “There is no central source within each jurisdiction or at the federal level to identify all of the emergency preparedness grants that have been allocated to [the nation’s capital region].”

To be sure, emergency responders working in the district know they work in one of the highest-threat cities in the country. During the first half-decade after 9/11, the capital helped set a nationwide tone for how others cities could better commit to improving security.

Police officers and civilian employees from the city’s Metropolitan Police Department now have personal protective gear. An elaborate emergency notification system is being implemented that includes voice and text alerts and the use of local TV and radio stations for warning citizens about danger. The city’s emergency preparedness program is accredited by experts, a rare achievement nationally. Its interoperable communications capabilities, which enable police and firefighters to communicate effectively amid a disaster, rank high among other metropolitan areas.

But at times, new security investments have still come at a price for taxpayers. Last year the Washington Examiner obtained a report through a Freedom of Information Act request showing that officials from the city’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency had lost dozens of two-way radios valued at $3,200 each for a total of $250,000. The office couldn’t account for half of the 150 radios it had.

An investigation by the city’s inspector general found that the radios were in an unsecured location and distributed to employees who didn’t have to sign out for them. Fourteen of the radios eventually showed up for sale on eBay. An agency worker responsible for them who also helped staff a 24-hour command center used a government computer to view pornography during his shifts, the probe found. He was fired.

In response to our own public-records request asking for homeland security grant spending information from D.C. city officials, we received two spreadsheets that provided limited details about how hundreds of millions in federal funds were distributed throughout the capital region between 2003 and 2007. You can download the files below.

For instance, the D.C. metropolitan police spent $2.6 million in 2004 on anti-explosives equipment including vehicles for a K-9 unit and detection gear, while the Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia directed $8.5 million toward its automated fingerprint identification system the following year. Other buys included fireboats, a $200,000 “sewer system vulnerability analysis,” mobile data terminals and office supplies.

The second spreadsheet provides richer data by jurisdiction, type of purchase, quantity and total cost, but it only covers spending from the 2006 Urban Area Security Initiative.

Much of the responsibility for overseeing federal homeland security grants was shifted away from Washington after the Sept. 11 attacks and placed on a single office in each state designated by the governor to be in charge of the money.

Personnel in that office determine what the state’s preparedness needs are, review documents like invoices from equipment purchases made by local communities to ensure they’re appropriate and ideally at some later time inspect safety gear around the state to make certain it’s working properly and can be quickly deployed in the event of a disaster.

They’re known in bureaucratic-speak as the “state administrative agent,” and in the case of Virginia, that office is the Department of Emergency Management.

Authorities there, it turns out, embraced a strategy similar to Washington’s and decentralized “the majority of grant requirements” by further farming out the handling of tens of millions of dollars in federal funds spent during the years immediately following Sept. 11 to local government agencies, according to a 2006 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general.

Federal auditors concluded that Virginia’s move led to problems:

“The Commonwealth did not ensure that local jurisdictions had staff in place to effectively and efficiently apply for grants, procure equipment, and close out grants. Because of insufficient resources, local jurisdictions could not comply with grant requirements in a timely manner, nor be responsive to those requirements.”

Grant duties still largely appeared to be in the hands of local governments when we contacted state officials in 2008 requesting records that would help show specifically how the state had spent anti-terrorism and preparedness grants since 2001. We were told then that many of the records were not in the state’s possession and would have to be obtained from each county. In fact, one of the few records we received from the state was the report from Inspector General Richard Skinner.

Each grant also carries with it an “authorized” equipment list designed to prevent recipients from indulging in spending sprees that don’t lead to greater security. That list has changed frequently in recent years as the federal government identified more gear it considered relevant to homeland security. But auditors examining Virginia still zeroed in on more than $400,000 worth of tee-shirts, pagers, Blackberries, generators, traffic cones, binoculars, televisions and more that they viewed as questionable.

When local newspapers in Virginia publicized Skinner’s findings, an anti-terrorism chief for the state, Robert Crouch, said the report was “second-guessing judgment calls” and that local emergency responders knew what their needs were.

According to published reports, Crouch argued that some of the criticized purchases “may have been taken out of context” and the state over time along with many others was establishing reforms, such as using a “risk-based” strategy for distributing homeland security grants across Virginia.

However, state auditors in separate reports concluded in 2009 that the Department of Emergency Management in Virginia had still not implemented a plan for monitoring grant recipients “to ensure that they are properly spending funds for their intended use.” A report added that state officials “are not sharing information on how well or poorly [grantees] are using their funds.”

State emergency managers acknowledged they had certain oversight roles but argued since several state agencies funnel money to local governments through various federal programs, one office could perform functions such as site visits to make certain purchased safety equipment is well maintained and records verifying expenditures are in place.

The state of Virginia has also invested heavily in a new statewide public safety radio system for enabling emergency responders to better communicate, an essential but also costly initiative that virtually every state pursued after the Sept. 11 hijackings. Even before the attacks, the Virginia State Police in 2000 began to replace equipment first installed in 1977 with modern digital technology that nearly two-dozen agencies would use to speak with one another during emergencies while allowing localities to tap in as well.

Authorities eventually signed a whopping $330 million deal with Motorola, the only company to bid on a request for proposals, and it became known as the Statewide Agencies Radio System Project, or STARS. In the spring of 2009, state auditors noted that the effort continued to face scheduling setbacks and budget shortfalls.

Among other things, laptops installed in government vehicles and provided by Motorola that were supposed to work off the new system failed up to 30 percent of the time in various tests and public officials finally stopped putting them in cars, because they did not meet contract specifications.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported in the summer of 2009 that some state troopers had grown so frustrated with the system’s lack of reliability they were using personal cell phones to communicate. A state legislator complained that STARS “has had continuing problems, and we are repeatedly told that this thing will be corrected and made to work. At some point you just wonder if we are getting the whole story,” according to the paper.

Unlike many other states that have relied heavily on federal homeland security grants for new emergency communications devices, Virginia issued state bonds to finance STARS and expected to pay the money back through a tax on rental cars. But officials in charge of the project don’t have funding for future maintenance of the system, which could cost anywhere from $9 million to $18 million annually, reports say, and it’s not clear where the money will come from.

There were additional issues identified in state audits of the system, which we’ve posted here, including $20 million in payments to a technical consultant questioned because Virginia wasn’t reviewing documentation to support the company’s invoices, meaning “they may have overpaid the consultant and the potential for future overpayment exists.”

Our efforts to use open-government laws and obtain detailed records from state officials showing specifically how Virginia had spent its federal homeland security grants in recent years didn’t make it far. As mentioned, an official told us many of the records are scattered across the state and not located in the capital. We were promised a conference call to discuss possibly narrowing our request for limited records, but the state did not come through by deadline.

In response to a request submitted under Vermont’s open-records laws, the state Department of Public Safety turned over several electronic spreadsheets detailing how they’ve used federal homeland security grants since 2001. You can download the Excel files here, and for the most part they’re simple to navigate and understand.

Local communities purchase equipment and services first before being reimbursed with grants, so the final column “expended” under the “local equipment” tab, for example, would tell you what items a town or agency received funding for, an official told us. While more detailed than what many other states sent us, the computer files from Vermont are more evidence that systems across the country for documenting how billions of dollars in grants have been spent after Sept. 11 vary widely.

Records here themselves vary. The Vermont State Police budgeted $63,000 to “enhance information technology,” according to the files, with no additional detail. Elsewhere it’s easy to view specific purchases, such as a $4,500 laptop bought by Lyndonville’s fire department in the northeastern part of the state and two infrared cameras the South Burlington Police Department purchased for a combined $22,000.

You can also determine that the town of Milton picked up a $26,000 video surveillance system for its municipal center, while several law enforcement agencies bought fingerprint stations costing up to $45,000 each.

Costly automobiles have been a popular purchase with grant funds across the United States, such as response vehicles stuffed with communications gear, flat-panel monitors, conference centers and more. Records show that the South Burlington Fire Department used $219,000 for a special operations command post, and fire officials in Hartford, Vt., spent another $300,000 on an incident-response truck.

On two occasions in recent years, auditors have questioned purchases made by officials with grant funds in Vermont. An Aug. 2007 report targeted $5.7 million in federal cash received by the Vermont Department of Health for bioterrorism preparedness.

Vermont relied on a private state association of hospitals and health systems to aid them in processing a portion of the grants, but that group later complained they were given little direction and were unfamiliar with federal guidelines regulating how the money should be handled. “We operated somewhat blindly,” an administrator told auditors.

Among other things, staff at the hospital association “were not fully aware” at the time of the audit how much in emergency preparedness supplies they actually had on hand – in other words, critical inventories of the gear weren’t conducted, although state officials did later complete them in the report’s wake.

Major purchases of equipment and services were another issue. One consulting contract worth $76,000 was not bid out competitively and was awarded to a former employee of the hospital association. More than $43,000 was spent purchasing emergency radios with no record of competition, and the same thing occurred with more than $67,000 in pharmaceutical drugs bought for emergency responders and hospital personnel to use in the event of an infectious disease outbreak.

Auditors said a company called Fisher Scientific International received $191,000 to supply Vermont with personal protective equipment – including gloves, masks and goggles – but there was no competitive bidding for those purchases either. Fisher, for its part, is a relatively obscure but large company that’s earned millions in revenue selling homeland security gear and services to states and local communities nationwide.

“The planning efforts were not well documented and there were no purchase recommendations included with invoice records,” auditors said of the Fisher deal. They added that a lack of competitive bidding, which has been an issue for homeland security grant recipients elsewhere, can result in major investments costing more than necessary “reducing the amount of funds available for other grant purposes.”

Moreover, according to the report, because equipment purchases and deliveries were poorly tracked, state officials didn’t realize until the spring of 2007 that more than 100 cases of shield masks worth nearly $14,000 had been paid for by the hospital association but never received. An acting health commissioner for the state promised that the missing equipment would be pursued from Fisher. We confirmed that the state did eventually secure the items.

Officials also used federal funds for a $400-a-night hotel room during a conference in Quebec. Auditors determined that other rooms were available for half the price.

Responding to auditors, the state vowed to better oversee bioterror grant spending in the future and that charges for alcohol to the grants, which the report also criticized, have ceased. The hospital association answered the report in a letter, too, and said federal purchasing rules would be followed but added that it had contacted a maker of safety equipment to confirm Fisher Scientific’s price for supplies was the best available. It also said travel and meal charges would be more tightly controlled.

“The Vermont Association of Hospitals and Health Systems has reviewed the audit report and is taking immediate corrective action to eliminate current weaknesses in our policies and procedures,” the group’s president assured auditors.

There were other audit findings in a separate report for homeland security grant expenditures made by Vermont, which we’ve uploaded here.

Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona is famous for his criticism of unregulated congressional earmarks, and losing the 2008 presidential election to Barack Obama didn’t slow him down. In November of 2009 he embraced new media to spread his theology of less government waste using Twitter to announce the top 10 earmarks he considered worthy of ridicule that lawmakers had packed into several appropriations bills.

His crusade began with a spending package for the Department of Homeland Security that contained 181 earmarks worth more than $269 million. “No hearing was held to judge whether these were national priorities worthy of scarce taxpayers' dollars,” he complained on the floor of the Senate. McCain described several of the appropriations before reaching the state of Utah:

“There is $250,000 to retrofit a senior center in Brigham City, Utah. The last time I checked, senior centers are important but they have very little relation to homeland security.”

Republican Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah, who sought the senior-center earmark, sees it another way. He doesn’t quietly request the widely condemned brand of government spending from appropriations committee members on behalf his constituents back home. Bennett actively defends earmarks on his congressional Web site arguing that local mayors and county commissioners know more about what residents need from the federal government than the federal government itself.

“If earmarking was removed from Congress,” the site states, “Washington bureaucrats would decide whether or not Utah would receive funding for projects such as light rail or water infrastructure, and Senator Bennett believes the bureaucrats do not know the needs of Utah better than the local leaders and elected officials.”

Earmark disclosure records describe Bennett’s homeland security appropriation that drew fire from McCain as a disaster mitigation project to be funded by FEMA for structural upgrades including window-and-door braces and a new roof at the Brigham City Senior Center. Supporters of the money cite the center’s proximity to an earthquake fault line.

“As the Brigham City Senior Center is located less than one mile downhill from the Wasatch Fault, should liquefaction occur, the center could sustain potentially severe damage or, at worst, collapse outright,” local authorities from Utah argued in an appeal for the money.

McCain nonetheless said during Senate debate that earmarks lack the oversight other types of government expenditures receive. He and a handful of fellow senators such as Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin tried to amend the homeland security appropriations bill and require that some of the funds be distributed on a competitive basis rather than arbitrarily as earmarks. Among the majority of no votes was Bob Bennett and Utah’s other Republican senator, Orrin Hatch.

“Maybe there is a reason why we have to spend $250,000 to retrofit a senior center in Brigham City, Utah, in the name of homeland security,” McCain argued during his floor speech. “... But we will never know because we don't have any hearings, we don't have any authorization. We just go ahead and spend the money.”

Other homeland security earmarks pursued by Utah’s congressional delegation in the 2010 spending bill included a $2.1 million back-up data center to preserve public records for Salt Lake City in the event of a disaster, more than $1.2 million for new fire stations and equipment in Box Elder County and $6 million for Utah State University and other academic institutions to study cyber attacks.

Earmarks secured for Utah come in addition to the tens of millions of dollars in anti-terrorism and emergency preparedness grants the state has already received alongside every other since Sept. 11. In response to a request submitted under Utah’s Government Records Access and Management Act, officials at the state’s Division of Homeland Security turned over detailed computer spreadsheets showing individual grant transactions between 2003 and 2007 for several programs.

You can download the records here, but a note about understanding them. State and local communities generally must purchase homeland security gear and services first with their own money before being reimbursed, which means they may not actually obtain the funds until up to three years after amounts are first awarded. The spreadsheets divide Utah’s grant spending by region, and you can search inside each one for individual cities and counties. A spokesman told us the “actual cost” column reflects what the grant recipient absolutely received, so others may show a purchase that was planned or budgeted but hasn’t gone through or was abandoned.

For example, the fire department in Manila, Utah, estimated population 324, bought a $58,000 incident-response vehicle with 2004 grant funds. The sheriff of Piute County (1,400 residents approximately) bought five Toughbook laptops for $19,000 with homeland security cash from 2005. Morgan County that year picked up two all-terrain vehicles for $30,000, neighboring Davis County received $52,000 for an alarm system and the Daggett County Sheriff’s Office won 11 pairs of binoculars totaling $6,000.

It’s worth noting that the electronic records Utah made available are substantially more detailed and convenient than what many other states and Washington, D.C. sent us.