Department of Homeland Security

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.

Texas became the flashpoint of debate over a Bush-era plan to line the southwest border of the United States with fences, motion detectors, lights and surveillance cameras to keep undocumented immigrants out. Known as the Secure Border Initiative, the program included building “tactical infrastructure,” or vehicle and pedestrian fences stretching across 660 miles of the nation’s nearly 2,000-mile boundary with Mexico.

Critics maligned the plan in unlikely alliances. Environmentalists warned that construction would threaten the habitats of endangered species, such as wildcats. Landowners were angry that they were being forced to turn over private property for the project. The University of Texas at Brownsville complained that the fence would split up its campus.

The federal government sued dozens of people for access to needed parcels, and they, in turn, sued right back creating a dizzying array of litigation. In the spring of 2008, a group calling itself the Texas Border Coalition filed suit against former homeland security chief Michael Chertoff in a bid to stop 70 miles of fencing planned for the Rio Grande Valley. Several jurisdictions on the Texas border including the counties of El Paso, Hidalgo, Starr and Webb formed the coalition.

The group’s complaint said Congress had directed the Department of Homeland Security to “reach a reasonable price for the property interest they seek before moving to condemn their land.” But according to the suit, federal officials demanded “voluntary” right-of-ways lasting for six months that allowed them to proceed with work while not acknowledging a need to negotiate fair compensation.

The plaintiffs argued that the Department of Homeland Security failed to consult with them about the environmental and commercial impacts of the fence and alleged that the fencing arbitrarily ceased in locations where wealthier and more powerful landowners controlled property, such as a golf resort in Brownsville. The fence also appeared to bypass land belonging to a Dallas billionaire, Ray Hunt, who donated $35 million to Southern Methodist University, which reportedly helped pave the way for the construction of Bush’s presidential library.

A judge tossed the coalition’s suit in 2009, and the year before that the U.S. Supreme Court had declined to hear a challenge from environmental groups regarding a section of the barrier in Arizona. But in the end, resistance from city leaders, ranchers and wildlife protectionists perhaps wasn’t the greatest headache faced by the Department of Homeland Security. The Secure Border Initiative has been beset with cost overruns, schedule delays and other problems.

The average per-mile cost for fencing has reached $4 million, much more than what Washington had initially predicted. Investigators at the Government Accountability Office, a watchdog arm of Congress, additionally learned in 2009 that fences had suffered more than 3,300 breaches costing an average of $1,300 each to repair.

The project also included an ambitious plan to expand the enforcement range of patrol agents by draping border territories with high-tech sensors, lights, surveillance cameras and radars. That element is known as SBInet. A test portion experienced serious delays “because the contractor-delivered system did not perform as intended,” according to a 2008 report from the GAO, which added that “contractor oversight was limited.”

The contract for SBInet was awarded to the large defense contractor Boeing Company in September of 2006. According to GAO findings, software selected by Boeing was built to accommodate a law enforcement dispatch system and “not designed to process and distribute the type of information being collected by the cameras, radars, and sensors.” Rainstorms accidentally set off the radars and the surveillance cameras couldn’t see even half as far as hoped.

In the latest GAO report from September of 2009, investigators found that SBInet was still being delayed “due to flaws found in testing and potential environmental impacts.” Windy days caused a radar to give off excessive false detections, for instance. The GAO predicted that SBInet wouldn’t be done until seven years after the original estimated completion date of early 2009.

Congress appropriated more than $3.7 billion for the Secure Border Initiative over five years, including $100 million from Barack Obama’s economic recovery package, according to government figures.

In Texas, meanwhile, Gov. Rick Perry launched his own miniature border initiative by deploying 200 cameras to aid law enforcement in identifying illegal boundary crossers and narcotics traffickers. The program was financed with $2 million in federal grants.

But the El Paso Times obtained an internal report with help from the Texas Public Information Act showing that the investment had not met expectations and only a handful of cameras were installed. While a Web site connected to the cameras received hundreds of thousands of hits, three arrests were made in the first six months, a fraction of the 1,200 authorities hoped for over a year-long period. As of July 2009, Perry’s project looked to be running out of money.

When it comes to how Texas has used federal anti-terrorism and emergency preparedness grants generally since 2001, the state’s Department of Public Safety turned over a detailed spreadsheet showing thousands of transactions made between 2003 and 2009 in response to our own public-records request. Texas has been a top recipient of homeland security grants due to its size, population and number of large metropolitan areas.

The Excel file is available for download here, and you can easily search within it by jurisdiction. How much were the three plasma TVs the Alamo Area Council of Governments bought with 2004 grant funds? More than $5,300 total. How about the mobile-command vehicle purchased by the city of Bryan with 2005 cash? $500,000.

Texas officials also supplied us with scores of so-called “site monitoring” reports generated by the Department of Public Safety as part of its grant oversight responsibilities. Guidelines direct each state to periodically visit local communities and inspect grant-purchased safety gear to ensure it’s being appropriately used.

Those records show that while many communities in Texas had no problem complying with federal grant rules, others left expensive preparedness equipment in its original packaging or used trucks for regular patrols that they promised would be preserved for disaster response.

We’ve consolidated the reports into one PDF file and uploaded it here. Search for keywords such as local governments. Additional audits of grant spending in Texas are posted, too.

The mission of Bedford County’s Emergency Management Agency in Tennessee is to prepare for and recover from “natural, manmade, or technological disasters upon its people or property,” according to the office’s Web site.

But auditors found something other than a commitment to preparedness and homeland security when they arrived in 2008 as a result of allegations the state had received. There was a cash shortage in the Bedford County agency’s bank accounts of more than $117,000.

After digging through financial records, investigators discovered a total of 27 checks worth $107,000 payable to “Midstate,” “Mid-S” and “Mid St.” that actually went to the Midstate Finance Company for a series of personal loans taken out by an agency deputy director named Eugene Nichols, according to a Nov. 2008 report. Another $10,000 repaid money to a second loan service.

All of the checks were prepared by Nichols, and for eight of them, the agency chief’s signature had been allegedly forged. The auditors also discovered over $33,000 in additional payments that were signed to Nichols “for various reimbursements, overtime, or payroll advances.” Investigators were not able to determine the legitimacy of those transactions.

“The lack of oversight and supervisory review by [emergency management officials] contributed to the failure to properly account for agency funds, the lack of internal controls resulting in the misappropriation of funds, and several questionable expenditures,” their report said.

Local authorities admitted that the “improper financial activity” of Nichols, who was also in charge of federal homeland security grants for the county, appeared to span four years and past audits had not detected it. But they insisted that once problems were uncovered, county personnel were the ones to report it and a repeat of the findings would not occur again.

“The Bedford County Department of Finance will continue to strengthen internal controls over public funds to safeguard against future losses of taxpayers’ money not only to fraud, such as this crime,” a finance director promised in response, “but also from any identified waste and inefficiency in Bedford County government.”

Also discovered were allegedly fraudulent invoices forwarded to the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, which oversees federal anti-terrorism and preparedness grants for the entire state, to cover purchases of safety gear and services. Auditors were unsure how much money was involved, but the county stated it would review records for an answer.

The report does cite one $37,000 payment to a company called Cybercats Computers for surveillance cameras that emergency response leaders planned to mount on towers. The equipment had never been received, however.

Nichols was indicted by a grand jury in late 2008 on 44 counts of theft and 26 counts of forgery. He pleaded guilty to embezzlement during the spring of 2009.

Meanwhile, the Tennessee Emergency Management Agency had its own trouble in recent years.

Some staffers at the state agency were required to hold hazardous materials certifications as part of their day-to-day jobs, and under federal mandates, certain responders participating in emergency drills at nuclear facilities needed to attend annual courses.

But beyond those rules, according to an Oct. 2007 report from the state’s comptroller, TEMA had few training requirements for its own staff and no formal policies or procedures outlining them, such as specific classes and hours of continuing education. While some training existed, auditors found, it was not monitored by the agency “to ensure [personnel] have the skills and information needed to act in an emergency.”

State officials said in response to the finding that requirements would be articulated and added to the emergency management agency’s strategic plan.

The report also found that funds from one federal homeland security grant were not distributed to counties based on which of them faced the greatest risk and that there was no formal process for prioritizing the money. Instead, the cash was allotted in accordance with regional wish lists. Counties “do not formally apply for the grant” but rather hold “informal discussions” with state officials, auditors added.

Government watchdogs since Sept. 11 have emphasized the need to determine risk and other factors for awarding readiness grants, because the likelihood of disaster and levels of preparedness differ around the country.

“There is little documented objectivity on record to support TEMA’s decisions or to suggest that the grant funds are being disbursed most effectively to meet the state’s emergency management goals and needs,” the report concluded. Counties were scheduled to receive $2.6 million from that one program during 2006 alone. The state answered by vowing to create an assessment tool that would allow it to rank counties based on past performance and risk.

When it comes to Tennessee’s use of homeland security grants, we hit an unanticipated roadblock after trying to obtain records from the state showing how the money’s been spent since 2001. We submitted an open-government request under the state’s Public Records Act, but a spokesman informed us that only Tennessee citizens were eligible to use the law for receiving such records. Our letter was sent from California.

In response, we pointed to a 2006 federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision known as Lee v. Minner that declared a similar law in Delaware unconstitutional, which also, in turn, made a related provision in Pennsylvania’s right-to-know laws unenforceable. The spokesman, Jeremy Heidt, countered that the Minner ruling did not apply to Tennessee, because it was located in a different federal court district.

We have uploaded accessible audit documents here, including a third that examined the Homeland Defense Equipment Reuse Program at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office in Tennessee.

George W. Bush signed Homeland Security Presidential Directive 3 in March of 2002, which established a color-coded system for notifying the country of increased dangers from terrorist threats. But critics raised doubts about the terror alert’s effectiveness: It seemed politically impossible that world events could ever cool long enough for officials to adjust advisories downward to green (low) or even a step up above that to blue (guarded).

In fact, the system has never reached either of those colors. State-level homeland security and emergency preparedness offices still dutifully post the current threat level on their Web sites, including the South Dakota Department of Public Safety. But advisories are typically maintained day-to-day at yellow (elevated) meaning national security authorities believe there is a “significant risk of terrorist attacks.”

After Barack Obama appointed Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano to take over as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, she convened an advisory panel to evaluate the usefulness of color-based threat levels. The bi-partisan group had 60 days to report back, and representing rural, less-populated areas of the country on the task force was Michael Rounds, governor of South Dakota, with help from his state’s homeland security director.

“The committee agreed unanimously that the system was good at the time it was established, but it needs to be changed,” Rounds told us in an e-mail response to questions. “Committee members were evenly split on continuing with an updated color-code system or using a verbal system of elevated, high and severe alerts.”

According to a later report, half of the task force’s membership believed “the concept of color-coded alerts is sufficiently clear, powerful and easily understood to be retained as one element in the secretary’s alerts to the nation.” On the other hand, an equal number argued that the system “has suffered from a lack of credibility and clarity leading to an erosion of public confidence such that it should be abandoned.”

Some Bush detractors, moreover, insisted that the colors were elevated to higher threat levels at times during his administration to benefit the White House politically. When the task force met for its assessment, the nation’s first homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge, had only recently suggested in a book that he felt pressured by other cabinet members to raise the terror alert just before the 2004 reelection of Bush. That action, press materials for the book claimed, led in part to Ridge’s later decision to step down in November of 2004.

Bush administration officials vociferously denied that such a thing occurred, and Ridge began to back away from the claim slightly some time later.

Panelists on Napolitano’s task force determined that the alerts could too easily move up rather than down and argued that the system shouldn’t remain elevated without specific information that a threat exists. Since it is “institutionally difficult” to lower the threat level, they recommended creating an objective standard that would force it down, such as a 15-day deadline for intelligence that demonstrated a credible risk.

The report also called for fuller transparency over threat information, the identification of regions most affected, a list of who was involved in raising alerts and “the complete absence of political interest in the decision process.” While deadlocked over whether colors should be used, the task force suggested reducing threat levels to three and lopping off the safer green and blue designations with yellow to be the new baseline of “guarded.”

“I favor a three-color system, using traffic-signal colors of green, yellow and red,” Rounds said. “These colors are universal, and they cross language and cultural barriers.”

As for homeland security grant spending in South Dakota, the Gannett News Service reported in March of 2007 that it was one of a handful of states refusing to cooperate with open-government requests a reporter had sent looking for information about how the funds had been used. The news service was seeking information from about 15 states for articles at the time.

We had similar experiences with South Dakota. Our goal with each state was to retrieve the records electronically, such as in spreadsheets containing individual grant transactions. But many states like South Dakota only have piles of hard-copy documents, and an official there said no matter how we obtained the material it would still cost about $800 to process our request. We were welcome to travel there and examine records, but doing so wasn’t practical since we were aiming for data from all 50 states and Washington, D.C.

There are some audits of grant spending at the local level in South Dakota that are publicly available and point to bookkeeping issues with the funds. Those reports are available for download here.

As of 2009, the federal government had distributed a total of $29 billion over 8 years in anti-terrorism and preparedness grants across the country with the goal of making the nation more secure and better prepared for natural disasters.

The 2010 homeland security appropriations bill also provides hundreds of millions more in cash for urban area security, railroad security, public transportation security, port security, driver’s license security, emergency communications, buffer zone protection, regional catastrophic preparedness and more.

In addition, Washington lawmakers managed to deliver gifts back home to constituents in the form of unregulated earmarks that don’t come with the same restrictions and oversight federal grant programs do.

The most popular earmarks stuffed deep in the 2010 homeland security budget were for the construction and expansion of “emergency operations centers” – $60 million worth spread across dozens of cities. And tiny Rhode Island made sure to get its share.

Democratic Sen. Jack Reed of the Ocean State, who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee, put out a press release when the bill was approved in committee noting how he had secured $980,000 for an emergency center in the capital city of Providence.

“This critical expansion will enable Rhode Island's emergency responders to protect the public and coordinate their efforts to prevent or respond to natural disasters and other emergencies,” the release stated.

But Reed’s colleague and party brethren from Wisconsin, Sen. Russ Feingold, was not pleased. The legendary government reformer joined Republican John McCain of Arizona, himself a ceaseless critic of earmarks, in attempting to clean up the homeland security spending bill through an amendment. Their proposed changes would have at least required a competitive process for allotting the funds that took into account actual risks faced by local communities.

The duo’s plan was rejected by the Senate in July of 2009, however, with just a dozen other Democrats voicing their support. A perturbed Feingold told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the funds should be merit-based and complained that the Democratic Party was repeating the same mistakes made by Republicans when they controlled Washington during the Bush era.

“The shamelessness of earmarking is getting out of control,” the paper quoted Feingold as saying. “I’ve warned the Democratic leaders already that I think there is a new fanaticism about earmarks and a willingness to intimidate senators who want to limit them. I think it’s the same cancer that affected the Republicans, and we better nip it in the bud, because this is the kind of thing the American people see as obscene.”

Reed of Rhode Island had his own take on the nearly $1 million earmarked for Providence pointing to his state’s high unemployment rate and arguing that the center would “help a little bit in terms of getting our economy moving forward,” according to the Journal Sentinel.

The operations centers serve as a central command for emergency officials from different agencies to coordinate their response to catastrophes. News stories describe the center in Providence as packed with projector screens, LCD televisions, satellite phones, more than three-dozen computer workstations, high-tech public safety radios, as well as a dedicated office and conference room for the city’s mayor.

Emergency operations centers nationwide are not to be confused with so-called “fusion centers,” where law enforcement agencies swap intelligence about possible terrorist threats. Approximately 70 of those now exist across the country and have been constructed with hundreds of millions of dollars in federal homeland security grants. The Rhode Island State Police established one in March of 2006.

As for how Rhode Island has used homeland security grants otherwise since 2001, authorities at the state’s Emergency Management Agency turned over several electronic spreadsheets of expenditures and cash totals in response to an open-government request after months of insisting that the records only existed in voluminous hard copies.

While the computer files aren’t as richly detailed as actual purchase invoices, you can still download them here for a look at the amounts local communities in Rhode Island have received between 2004 and 2008. It’s also possible in many cases to see individual investments.

For example, the police department in Hopkinton, estimated population 7,959, bought a $40,000 Ford Explorer using 2004 grant funds. Charlestown picked up two laptops totaling $4,600. A grants manager in Rhode Island said that to her knowledge, we were the first news organization to seek and obtain the records.

For a period after Sept. 11, it seemed that every facet of public safety in Pennsylvania was under fire – not from terrorists but from investigators and auditors exposing ineptitude, abuse and neglect. Report after report raised questions about whether mismanagement and other problems posed more of a threat to the Keystone State than an assault from Mother Nature or Osama bin Laden.

In 2006, auditors said a regional emergency response group covering northwest and central Pennsylvania spent $700,000 on training programs using federal homeland security grants without competitively bidding contracts out to consultants making certain taxpayers received the best deal. “Failure to follow any procurement policies shows a serious disregard for the proper use of grant funds,” a special investigation from Pennsylvania’s auditor general said.

The task force also paid $650 a month for two cell phones and $150 on “appetizers” at a state symposium that turned out to be alcohol, according to the report.

Counties that together formed the response team answered in a letter that they selected training proposals from consultants most compatible with their needs and compared prices to determine if they were reasonable. But auditors countered that they were shown no evidence this was done. State grant overseers from the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency admitted the cell phone charges were “excessive” and promised that the issue was rectified in addition to calling the “appetizers” bill a “mistake” that was later paid back.

In early 2007, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell openly condemned the “total breakdown in communications” that occurred among state officials in charge of responding to a severe winter storm that year. Emergency managers didn’t tell the governor how serious things had become, and he had to learn about it from stranded residents who called his office. Rendell sought an outside investigation of the response effort from a consulting firm headed by James Lee Witt, the revered former chief of FEMA under Bill Clinton.

A subsequent report said the storm was not the first evidence of problems with response and recovery in Pennsylvania and that previous events illustrated ongoing problems.

“The commonwealth government has not fully adopted emergency management as a core principal and cultural priority,” the report said then. “There is a remarkable lack of awareness and understanding of Pennsylvania’s emergency management system, including the emergency alert levels, even amongst senior agency leaders.”

In the report’s wake, Rendell ordered immediate changes that aligned with Witt’s conclusions and emphasized that the state was only saved during past storms by the exceptional performance of some responders, which “overshadowed systemic failings and lured us into a sense of complacency.”

Later that year, investigators from the Pennsylvania General Assembly criticized a decade-long effort to establish an “interoperable” public safety radio system that enabled emergency responders to communicate with one another across the state. Policymakers committed an initial $179 million to the project during the 1990s, but $132 million more was later needed “due to cost overruns in selecting and establishing tower locations.” An assembly report also cited problems with contractors and said another $57 million may be required for completion.

That same month, a report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, Richard Skinner, reviewed a sample of purchases made by Pennsylvania with federal anti-terrorism and preparedness grants. Skinner questioned more than $720,000 worth concluding that “various warranties, maintenance agreements, spare parts, and other unauthorized expenses” were not allowed under grant guidelines. The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, which is in charge of overseeing such grants for the state, responded that its procedures for handling the funds were being modified to correct the findings.

There were other questions raised in Skinner’s audit, but the inspector general also praised as a best practice the state’s use of regional task forces for preparedness. Each is made up of several counties with one of them managing overall homeland security initiatives for the combined jurisdictions, a concept that could serve as a model for the rest of the nation, the report said. It also stated that by directing a centralized team of professional buyers to handle safety equipment purchases, Pennsylvania received volume discounts and ensured gear for responders was standard across the state.

The following year, however, Pennsylvania’s auditor general released another public report evaluating the condition of hundreds of dams and levees throughout the state and criticized regulators for failing to enforce laws meant to protect the public.

For three years, dozens of high-hazard dams that required annual inspections did not receive them, and the owners of more than 100 dams during that time had not submitted to Pennsylvania authorities their own inspections, which must be certified by engineers. The state defines a high-hazard dam as one in which the loss of life is expected as a result of failure. The majority of Pennsylvania’s 3,174 dams are privately owned with the rest controlled by local, state and federal government agencies.

The state’s Department of Environmental Protection in part blamed a shortage of resources, which restricted the number of dams that could be inspected. Officials there also pointed to irresponsible dam owners who did not turn over inspection reports to the state. The department said all high-hazard dams had since been inspected.

But the auditor general also found that for nearly 60 high-hazard dams considered unsafe due to poor maintenance and other factors, state officials had not issued any formal enforcement actions or penalties against owners for noncompliance during the period examined. In some cases, the population at risk involved thousands of people.

One dam in central Pennsylvania’s Centre County had been deemed unsafe as far back as 1967, according to the report, but the owner was not compelled to make repairs. Another high-hazard dam in Luzerne County was classified as unsafe in 1980 due to a “marginally stable embankment,” but more than two decades later no enforcement order had been issued, and as of late 2007, “these unsafe conditions still have not been corrected.”

State authorities responded that leveraging big fines would drain funds needed to make costly fixes, which may take years to carry out, and that their enforcement strategy “ensures cooperation of all but the most blatant violators.” A penalty could become more counter-productive than anything else, they argued.

Additional significant reports were issued in recent years addressing other dimensions of public safety and emergency preparedness in Pennsylvania. They are available for download here.

We submitted a public-records request to the state looking for detailed information about how federal homeland security grants have been used there over the last several years. A spokeswoman told us, however, that none of the information had been loaded into convenient computer files like spreadsheets. Xeroxing the hard-copy records involved would be “too burdensome,” she said. We were welcome to travel there and examine redacted documents, but that was not practical for our project.

Explosives expert William Hakim of the Oregon State Police thought the device was merely a hoax. But that mistake on a December day in 2008 would become a tragedy no amount of money in homeland security grants could prevent.

Someone phoned in a bomb threat that morning to a Wells Fargo bank branch in Woodburn, Ore., warning that if the people inside didn’t leave, “all of them would die,” according to police. Hakim and an FBI bomb technician showed up to examine a cell phone the caller said would be located in a dumpster near the bank. The pair determined it was harmless. Other law enforcement agents continued to search the area, including a second bank close by.

They eventually found a green metal container that resembled a utility box, and a West Coast Bank employee contacted a landscaping company, which didn’t recall it being there days before when the hedges were trimmed. The bank employee opened it. Bomb specialist Hakim was dispatched back to the scene. He examined the box and even X-rayed it before determining that it posed no threat and could be dismantled as possible evidence.

Hakim took the device inside West Coast followed by two local police officers. As they began to probe its contents, the box detonated killing Hakim and Capt. Thomas Tennant. Woodburn Police Chief Scott Russell suffered the partial loss of his right leg, mutilation of his left, a shattered jaw and other injuries, according to court records.

Police professionals with knowledge of explosives were baffled. No one attempts to manually take apart bombs anymore, they said. “An X-ray is just not 100 percent. You may miss something because there’s so many variables,” one told the Oregonian newspaper.

Officials couldn’t explain why critical safety equipment had not been deployed at the scene. The Oregon State Police spent $600,000 alone in 2004 from federal anti-terrorism and emergency preparedness grants on bomb-mitigation and armored-response equipment that authorities apparently did not use to ensure the three men were protected.

The Center for Investigative Reporting obtained records showing a number of equipment purchases police across the region had made with grants for gear designed to safeguard them during bomb threats. “Our response has been that we're not going to go into details at this time because we don't know all the facts about the equipment that was there,” state police spokesman Lt. Gregg Hastings told CIR then. “After a criminal investigation is complete, officials plan to ask the FBI for help in conducting an internal review.”

A computer file that contains transactions made by state and local agencies in Oregon with homeland security grants shows that among other things troopers paid $170,000 for a 28-foot ordinance-response vehicle that was based not far from Woodburn in Salem. They also purchased two bomb robots totaling $427,000 built by defense giant Northrop Grumman.

Such high-tech tools are designed to safely disarm an ordinance device by triggering it with a shotgun shell or spray of water. Other nearby jurisdictions had hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment for handling explosives, including bomb suits and response trucks, records show.

The Oregon Emergency Management office turned over the file in response to a public-records request when we were seeking similar information from every state in the country. It describes major investments made by Oregon with the grants between 2002 and 2007, although the details for some are limited.

You can download the Excel file here. Click on the red corner tabs when available in individual cells for a deeper explanation of purchases, e.g. “10 Panasonic Toughbooks” for the Marion County Sheriff’s Office totaling $54,000.

A father and son, Bruce and Joshua Turnidge, were eventually charged with numerous counts of aggravated murder but pleaded not guilty in the bank bombing. The family allegedly had a history of money troubles and was attempting to extort cash from the banks with threats, according to published accounts of government accusations. A Nevada rancher who knew the family before they moved to Oregon described them as “a little bit on the radical side,” “anti-government” and “anti-establishment.”

Federal law enforcement agencies disputed who would take charge of the case, something the public only later learned about. A report from the U.S. Justice Department’s inspector general criticized agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the FBI for quarreling about which agency had jurisdiction.

The argument was described in the report as one of many over several years that fueled acrimony between the two law enforcement offices and undermined the effectiveness of bomb-suppression and anti-terrorism investigations. Local prosecutors had specifically requested assistance from the ATF, but the FBI stepped in arguing that the fallen technician had been trained in its own Hazardous Devices School.

According to the report:

“These disputes can cause confusion for local first responders about the roles of the FBI and ATF during explosives-incident responses and delays in conducting investigations. Disputes between ATF and FBI personnel have affected working relationships, and in some locations have resulted in their racing to crime scenes to determine which agency leads an investigation. The disputes have also resulted in the two agencies declining to work and train together.”

It’s a world apart from New York City, different in almost every conceivable way. But Oklahoma City is essentially the only other place in America that’s experienced something comparable to the Sept. 11 attacks.

The incident is added almost as an afterthought in discussions about terrorism to remind us that the threat is domestic in nature, too. A bomb packed into a rental truck exploded at nine in the morning on April 19, 1995, and gutted the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building killing 168 people and injuring approximately 400.

The federal government executed Timothy McVeigh for the crime six years later. McVeigh identified with extreme right-wing causes and sought revenge for how authorities handled the 1993 siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Not necessarily the portrait of terrorism we imagine today.

After the Oklahoma City bombing, he reportedly possessed passages of the Turner Diaries, a racist and anti-Semitic screed written by an Oregon physics professor who founded the white supremacist group National Alliance during the 1970s. Oklahoma has been a home for neo-Nazis, skinheads, anti-government survivalists and religious doomsdayers who believe that a race war or Armageddon will occur in the immediate future.

The 1990s-era Oklahoma Constitutional Militia never made it far consisting of just a few people. Its Christian Identity leader, Willie Lampley, seemed even comically ill-suited to carry out any sort of catastrophe.

“Lampley had poor organizational leadership skills: He was not a shrewd manager and he was unable to attract a wide following or engage leaders of other groups,” three scholars examining domestic terrorism described him in a 2009 Criminology & Public Policy study. “Most extremists who came in contact with Lampley shunned him.”

But he nonetheless threatened violence to those who disobeyed God’s law, and his brand of instability was viewed as highly dangerous. Following the 1995 bombing and subsequent increased attention from law enforcement to right-wing militias, Lampley and others were arrested for conspiring to use fertilizer bombs against abortion clinics, gay bars, civil rights and welfare offices, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. Police found multiple guns and semiautomatic weapons during the action.

Despite Oklahoma’s worrisome history with extremists, it’s still difficult to fathom the state as a serious battleground in the global war on terror.

That didn’t stop Blanchard, Okla., where the population is an estimated 8,000, from acquiring a $50,000 security system for its police and fire departments using federal homeland security grants, according to public records. Authorities in the city of El Reno, Okla., (home to the “world’s largest fried onion burger”) needed a $15,000 camera system for their water treatment plant, a $40,000 decontamination trailer, plus vehicle barriers and motion sensors for the local municipal building.

Police in Yukon sought a $28,000 GMC Sierra, $9,400 worth of bullet-proof glass and a $1,400 solid security door. Others picked up several Panasonic Toughbook laptops costing $3,900 each, dozens of chemical suits, multiple $4,100 ballistics blankets for protecting against explosives and a panic-alarm system.

Unfortunately, sometimes the equipment didn’t work. A $9,000 video surveillance system wasn’t operating when state inspectors showed up to the Alex Police Department for a look at grant-purchased gear, records show. Local officials couldn’t get the company they bought the cameras from to fix them. Alex police also used grants for $15,000 worth of steel doors and protective windows.

A $2,000 multi-gas detector in the town of Goldsby cost more to repair than to replace altogether, and eight portable radios there totaling $2,700 weren’t compatible with the communications system they had in place, according to an inspection done in the summer of 2008.

Officials from the Oklahoma Office of Homeland Security turned over an electronic spreadsheet to us with fairly rich detail showing how the state has used federal readiness funds since 2001. They’re available for download here. The state was still in the process of entering final spending data into a computer format when we contacted them, however.

Since grant recipients can technically spend funds for up to three years after they’re first awarded, we were only able to obtain reliable figures for 2002 and 2003. But it’s possible for you to examine the data by jurisdiction, quantity, price and explanation (e.g. $58,000 for a bomb robot in Tulsa).

The first tab indicates purchases made by individual communities, according to a spokeswoman. The second and third tabs describe gear that authorities divided among a fleet of emergency-response and hazardous-materials vehicles distributed to different regions across the state – decontamination showers, chemical boots, radiation detectors, night-vision devices and more. The final tabs explain what resources from the grants Oklahoma committed to training and exercises.

We also retrieved a batch of “site monitoring” reports that officials produced by visiting cities and towns to make sure equipment purchased with grant funds was in a “state of readiness.” You can also download those here. Oklahoma had conducted about 30 of them when we made the request, so more inspections have presumably been done since that time.

So-called “needs assessments” are critical for determining where a community is vulnerable to catastrophe or terrorism. The federal government has required them of states in order to justify how they planned to use the $29 billion in homeland security grants Washington has handed out since Sept. 11. What safety and law enforcement equipment might be necessary to fill known security gaps? Where would training improve the capacity of emergency responders?

Such measures may help prevent a mere spending spree on counter-terrorism gadgets that have only minimal relevance to security.

But a “comprehensive and time consuming” needs assessment done in 2003 led Ohio officials to conclude that the state “needed” an eye-popping $6.6 billion for new equipment. In the assessment’s wake, Ohio realized its “needs” were far too large and that local communities had created “wish lists” rather than focus on priorities.

So the state abandoned its assessment and instead distributed $142 million in readiness and anti-terrorism cash during the years immediately following 9/11 based on a flat amount each county was eligible for, with the rest apportioned according to local population.

“It did not attempt to determine if individual counties were using grant funds to meet their identified risks and vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks, or to satisfy the equipment shortfalls each county identified during the needs assessment processes,” a February 2008 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general, Richard Skinner, concluded.

That audit is one of many Skinner has done in recent years looking back on how states managed their grant funds, notably in the time period leading up to 2005 when the cash reached a high-point in the amounts appropriated by Congress. The state “never developed measurable goals and objectives,” Skinner found, to determine how much the money was having a positive impact on Ohio’s preparedness.

Authorities responded that in 2006, the federal government initiated a more competitive grants process calling on states to thoroughly and meaningfully identify capabilities and gaps. As a result, “counties [in Ohio] were then required to focus their grant expenditures and budget worksheets on the state’s highest priority” – improved public safety communications, Nancy Dragani, executive director of the Ohio Emergency Management Agency said in a letter to the inspector general.

An advisory committee of professionals now makes recommendations for Ohio’s homeland security strategy, she wrote, and an independent contractor was hired to develop a yardstick for showing objectively how the state is more secure, something government auditors have emphasized repeatedly since the grant programs began.

Skinner’s findings in Ohio and other states nonetheless illustrate how disorganized homeland security grants tended to be right after the hijackings when the nation rushed to improve its resistant and resilience to terrorist attacks.

The report also revealed that Ohio had not complied with federal purchasing rules on large-ticket items, a problem also faced by other states pressured to buy safety gear as quickly as possible. In cases where businesses were not required to compete with one another for taxpayer money and received sole-source contracts, local grantees in Ohio didn’t look into the prices quoted to make sure they were reasonable, according to Skinner.

One case involved $1.3 million in communications equipment. In another, Ohio tried to competitively hire a consultant who could coordinate statewide terrorism exercises. Officials only received one bid but didn’t do a cost analysis before signing a $259,000 contract, which was later expanded without competition to $3.6 million.

Dragani’s letter vowed that the state would carry out price evaluations of high-dollar contracts in the future.

But the state in addition struggled to track all of the equipment it purchased, and some county bureaucrats had to recall from memory, during the audit, the location of gear so Skinner’s staff could confirm it was being used appropriately.

One new county emergency director was forced to “completely reconstruct the previous grant history to determine what had been purchased, where it was located, what it cost, and how it fit into the county’s approach to using first responder grant funds.” The former head had “mismanaged the county’s grant program and had not documented how the grant funds were used.”

A second county justified buying a $23,000 four-wheel drive vehicle by saying it would be used to pull equipment trailers. In fact, the automobile had no trailer hitch and a manager was relying on it for her commute. That also occurred in two other counties, but local officials ceased after the state found out about it. Grant guidelines have long prohibited “general-use” vehicles from being purchased.

Otherwise for Ohio, Skinner determined, “there was no assurance that millions of dollars of personal property procured with federal grant funds was adequately safeguarded or used for authorized purposes.”

According to Dragani’s letter, local grant recipients now must present equipment tracking sheets to the state showing where gear is located, and her office emphasizes the mandate at annual state conferences. As for the improperly used vehicle, it now has a hitch and is appropriately utilized.

We filed a request under Ohio’s Public Records Act but weren’t able to obtain detailed information showing specifically how grant funds have been used there since 2001. They were only available in hard-copy form, and Xeroxing the documents would involve 20,000 pages of material, an issue with many other states where purchases couldn’t be examined in convenient computer files. Other relevant records are available here, however.

Since the grant programs began, policymakers in Congress have been known to quarrel with the Department of Homeland Security over proposed cuts or changes to the formula for how they’re awarded – anything to keep constituents back home from losing out.

In the most recent clash, Democratic Rep. Steve Driehaus of Cincinnati, Ohio, wrote to homeland security officials opposing an October 2009 policy announcement that states would need to find their own money for maintaining grant-purchased equipment long term so the burden wouldn’t remain on Washington indefinitely.

Another Ohio representative, Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy, who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, joined Driehaus by launching a bill that month called the Strengthening and Updating Resources and Equipment Act aimed at nixing the new policy. Within a short period of time the legislation had 23 co-sponsors, including Driehaus.

Congresswoman Kilroy invited one of her own constituents, an emergency manager from Ohio’s Franklin County named Kathy Crandall, to testify on the matter during a homeland security committee hearing. Crandall warned that limiting the funds would harm the county’s homeland security investments, including systems for sharing intelligence data with the FBI, licenses and user fees for communications gear and devices for detecting dangerous chemical and biological agents.

Temperatures reached brutal lows. Repeated blizzards shut down the highway system leaving road crews working 24-hour days. Motorists were trapped, and massive snow drifts virtually buried houses. Thousands of livestock expired.

Then snowmelt caused near-biblical flooding. More than 2,200 square miles of land were soaked in water, an area the size of two Rhode Islands. Sixty-thousand people had to be evacuated, and floodwaters crested at a history-making 54 feet.

Despite extraordinary destruction, experts consider the 1997 Red River flood in Grand Forks, N.D., to be an outstanding example of disaster response and recovery done right. Federally funded technical consultants convened a group of citizens and government officials to establish clear priorities that eventually became a comprehensive plan for overcoming the catastrophe.

Articulating specific goals and objectives and then adhering to them allowed coordinators to conceive of and execute projects across multiple layers of government – failed cooperation and bureaucratic bumbling being a frequent failure in mass-disaster scenarios. A team of engineers, urban development staff, FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers collaborated to create an inventory of significantly damaged buildings, for example. Each task had a set deadline.

The city erected Noah’s Ark, a commercial building that displaced small businesses in the region could temporarily use as office space. It later became an Amazon.com call center. Authorities bought out homeowners giving them enough to rebuild while overhauling land-use rules to block new construction in known flood zones.

“To help protect its residents from contractor fraud, the city established a required credentialing program for contractors,” a federal Government Accountability Office director testified to the House Homeland Security Committee in March of 2009 praising the Grand Forks effort. “This included a ‘one-stop shop’ that served as a mandatory clearinghouse for contractors that wanted to do business with recovering residents. State and local officials carried out a variety of functions, including checking that contractors had appropriate licenses and insurance and did not have criminal records.”

But not everything has gone perfect for North Dakota in emergency management since then. The state used homeland security grants for paying emergency personnel $300,000 in salary increases just over a two-year period after Sept. 11. Auditors later said that at least some of them violated state law or weren’t sufficiently justified. One employee received a salary hike of nearly 75 percent and several others benefitted from increases of over 30 percent, according to a 2005 report from North Dakota’s state auditor.

Officials admitted that a “detailed explanation for the increases was lacking” and pointed to greater workloads employees were forced to handle. Auditors still wanted the state’s attorney general to help determine whether the increases were legal.

The report also said a former emergency director for the state who appeared to single handedly authorize the increases “micro-managed” North Dakota’s recovery and public safety functions. Top executives didn’t communicate well with the rank-and-file, and the state had a “poor working relationship” with local preparedness coordinators.

Legislators in North Dakota complained about the salaries and eventually shook things up creating a new Department of Emergency Services and placing the commander of the North Dakota National Guard in charge.

Auditors returned three years later to determine how much had improved since the initial report. Several recommendations were implemented by then, but they still cast as mediocre a subsequent review of salaries paid to managers and continued to question them. Their report also found that phone companies had improperly withheld $61,000 from customers that was supposed to be used for operating the state’s emergency 911 system.

Critics in addition have panned North Dakota for being an unlikely target of terrorists yet spending federal homeland security grants on high-tech widgets for fighting Al-Qaeda. The state’s own former lieutenant governor, Lloyd Omdahl, even ridiculed officials for indulging in the funds.

“What would a terrorist strike? The only building we have that they could fly into is the state capitol in Bismarck,” Omdahl told the New York Times in a story about the purchase of a $200,000 bomb-disposal robot by Grand Forks. A police officer there defended the purchase arguing that insurgents in Iraq targeted local polling and police stations – its own town institutions could similarly be vulnerable “soft targets.”

State officials turned over to us four large PDFs showing how they’ve used anti-terrorism and readiness grants from Washington since 1999 after we submitted a request under North Dakota’s open-records laws. The files are available for download here. They show that beyond a robot, Grand Forks also bought radiation detectors costing $1,500 each, night-vision goggles at $3,100 a piece and nearly three-dozen Panasonic Toughbook laptop computers totaling more than $188,000.