Homeland security funds or the pork barrel.

Homeland security funds or the pork barrel.


Stop wasting anti-terror funds
Way up there, almost 400 miles north of Anchorage, sits a hamlet that goes by the name of North Pole, Alaska. With streets named Santa Claus Lane and St. Nicholas Drive, the 1,570 people of North Pole say their town is "Where the spirit of Christmas lives year round." That's for sure, as far as the federal government is concerned.When it came time to distribute homeland security funding - money that's supposed to help high-risk cities prepare for terror attacks - North Pole got a whopping $557,400, an amount equal to almost a quarter of its annual budget. Now the nation can breathe easier knowing that North Pole is ready to face off against Osama Bin Laden with the finest rescue and communications equipment.

That such a tiny, out-of-the-way ice burg (pardon the pun) received such an avalanche of money from the Department of Homeland Security speaks volumes about Washington's gross mismanagement of anti-terror funding. It's well known that states like Wyoming got far more funding per capita than high-risk terror targets like New York under pork-barrel formulas devised by Congress and the department. Now, though, a report by the American Enterprise Institute shows that the department also allowed recipients to waste huge amounts on nonsense.

While New York's Finest and Bravest went begging for money to protect, say, the Brooklyn Bridge, the institute found that:


The Tecumseh Fire Department in Lenawee County, Mich., spent $98,000 on training courses in incident management. No one showed up.




A volunteer fire department in Virginia spent $350,000 for a custom-made fireboat.


Lake County, Tenn., officials spent $30,000 to help buy a defibrillator for a high school basketball tournament.


Grand Forks, N.D., spent $1.5 million for two trailers equipped with gear to respond to weapons of mass destruction, a semi-armored van and more biochemical suits than it has police officers.


The Steamship Authority that operates ferries to Martha's Vineyard got $900,000 to upgrade facilities.


Washington State paid $63,000 for a decontamination unit that's stored in a warehouse because the state does not have a haz-mat team to use it.


Washington, D.C., a clear high-risk target, bought leather jackets for its cops and earmarked $300,000 for a computerized car-towing system and $100,000 to help fund its mayor's summer jobs program.Meanwhile, according to the report, the department's bureaucracy has tied up most of the $6.3 billion allocated to anti-terror funding since 9/11. Three years after the fact, the money is just sitting there. Considering the department's record of waste, maybe that's a good thing. In the end, it will be up to President Bush and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to clean up this mess. They know what the problem is. They've known for a long time. Now, they must act.