This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Sept. 9, 2011 - Until about five years ago, the on-scene communications hub for first responders during emergencies in Franklin County was just radio equipment in a cluster of SUVs.
Then homeland security money from the federal government became available, and regional planners used about $250,000 of it to buy a "mobile command vehicle" for the county, complete with a conference room, computer hookups and technology that allows various first responders to communicate on radios that would otherwise be incompatible.
Like those in Franklin County, other St. Louis-area first responders are better equipped today thanks to federal funds allocated since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to state data analyzed by the St. Louis Beacon and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting.
The same can be said across the state, according to data from the Mid-America Regional Council, which coordinates homeland security efforts in and around Kansas City.
But, with Sunday marking 10 years since the terrorist attacks, questions remain about how effective the spending in Missouri has been.
State and federal auditors have found holes in the oversight efforts of the Missouri Department of Public Safety. And congressional auditors have found that federal emergency management officials could not prove that one of their signature programs -- the Urban Areas Security Initiative, which includes the St. Louis and Kansas City areas -- has improved the nation's ability to counter a terrorist attack.
Scott Amey, general counsel with the Project on Government Oversight, is one observer who wonders what the nation's investment in securing the homeland has achieved.
"Obviously the reaction to 9/11 was, 'We need to bolster homeland security,'" said Amey, whose Washington-based organization champions government reforms and conducts its own investigations into federal spending in areas that include housing, national security and natural resources.
"But the real question is," he continued, "in an effort to do that, did we spend money wisely, or did we just spend money?"
Nearly $570 Million Since Sept. 11
Missouri has received nearly $570 million in federal homeland security funds since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. For the most part, the money has passed through the state's Department of Public Safety to localities. Roughly a quarter of the state's funding, or about $144 million, has flowed through the Urban Areas Security Initiative to the St. Louis and Kansas City areas.
Overall, the federal government has spent roughly $649 billion on domestic homeland security since 2001, according to a study released in June by Brown University's "Costs of War" project (PDF). That figure is more than three times the amount the federal government would have spent on homeland security since 2001 if the Sept. 11 attacks had not occurred, the report concluded, using the historical growth rate of such expenditures in the 1990s.
The increased spending has created redundancies, the report said, such as the seemingly overlapping duties of the Office of Health Affairs in the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But first responders say the opposite is true for the federal homeland security funds spent locally. They said the equipment and gear purchased with federal money actually serves a dual purpose: enhancing everyday security while providing important capabilities during catastrophes, whether they are natural disasters or terrorism attacks.
Abe Cook, Franklin County emergency management director, said that just because the county would not have had the money to buy its mobile command vehicle without Washington's help does not make the purchase superfluous. Better equipment can save lives, he said.
"Can you make do with a pickup truck as a fire truck?" he asked. "Sure you can, but the community is not going to be as well served."
For instance, he said, Franklin County routinely deploys its command vehicle to walks, runs and other planned events. It's there in case something goes wrong, such as the Aug. 13 stage collapse at the Indiana State Fair, which killed seven people.
"At all these events there's a chance a stage is going to fall," Cook said, and the command vehicle would allow supervisors to "immediately get their teams, know exactly where they are, deploy them to the right locations, and keep everyone safer."
Plus, Cook said, the truck can deploy throughout the region and around the state, such as down to the Bootheel in the event of an earthquake around the New Madrid Fault. Cook said authorities did not request the vehicle in the aftermath of the tornado that struck Joplin in May.
The data provided by the Missouri Department of Public Safety covered expenditures in the city of St. Louis from 2004 through 2009, and one of the largest line items was $353,520 for 1,600 voice amplifiers that attach to gas masks. Each amplifier cost about $221.
Police spokeswoman Erica Van Ross said in an email that the amplifiers allow officers voices to be heard through the face masks. "It's difficult to understand an officer's verbal commands without it," she wrote.
Who Was Minding the Money?
Amey has scrutinized Department of Homeland Security spending practices, and he wondered about the expenditures in Franklin County and St. Louis.
For instance, he asked, could purchasers have bought the voice amplifiers for $150 each as opposed to $221?
"Was anybody minding the store when all this money was being spent," Amey added, "to make sure that, in an effort to make the homeland more secure, that we did so and got the most bang for our taxpayer dollars?"
Meanwhile, as far as the Franklin County command vehicle is concerned, Amey said, a want can easily become a need when someone else is paying the bill.
"It really does boil down to, when it's not your money, it's a lot easier to spend it in a manner that is not as conservative as may be required," he said.
Cook in Franklin County acknowledged that, in what they now view as a tactical mistake, first responders did not deploy the command vehicle during the tornado outbreak that hit the St. Louis region last New Year's Eve.
But if the truck sat unused during such a serious event, Amey said, the expenditure seems questionable.
"That sounds like, for something that may or may not be used, and is sitting there, maybe that wasn't the best buy at the time or even now into the future," he said.
Still, countered Cook, just because safety equipment might be used relatively infrequently does not mean it's unimportant. For instance, he said, homeowners don't buy fire extinguishers and fire alarms hoping that one day they will use them.
"In our area," he added, "we don't really use our ladder truck every day, but it's necessary, and if we need it, it will save lives."
Comparison Shopping
In reviewing homeland security spending in the St. Louis and Kansas City regions, the Beacon and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting compared spending in those cities with communities in Iowa and Arkansas.
In Little Rock, emergency management officials found no comparable expenditure to the voice amplifiers purchased for the St. Louis Police Department.
A spreadsheet provided by the Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management Division, which detailed line-item expenditures in communities throughout the state from 2004 through 2007, included voice amplifiers in several purchases. But they were not listed as single items, only as components of much larger purchases.
Among several mobile command vehicles listed in the Iowa spreadsheet was one in Pottawattamie County, which includes Council Bluffs. That vehicle cost about $200,000, or about 20 percent less than the one in Franklin County, which is newer by two years.
Cook said the equipment in the trucks seemed comparable, based on a description in the spreadsheet, though it appeared Pottawattamie's lacked a component in the Franklin County truck, which facilitates communication between personnel using different radios.
Little Rock said it had a mobile command vehicle that cost $450,000. "The price for this item will vary depending on the specifications and needs identified by that particular jurisdiction," Matt Burks, the city's emergency management administrator, wrote in an email.
Data provided by the Mid-America Regional Council, the Kansas City regional agency, included a mobile command vehicle that cost nearly $630,000, which was one of the single largest purchases from May 2004 through the end of last month.
Officials with that agency and its counterpart in the St. Louis area, the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, both said they purchased the larger ticket items through a competitive process to get the best possible price.
At East-West Gateway, for instance, items costing $10,000 or more are advertised in two publications and competitively bid on its website for a minimum of 21 days.
Are the Purchases Good Ones?
But even if all the rules are followed, and the sign-offs are collected up the chain of command, Amey said, that still doesn't mean all the layers of government have approved a defensible purchase.
Certainly a terrorist could strike at a fair in suburban St. Louis, he said, and it would definitely improve the response to have a mobile command vehicle. But is such a scenario likely?
"That's where I wish the federal government had a much keener eye on money that is going out the door," Amey said, "to ensure that the money is truly being spent for national needs and programs and missions rather than something that, in essence ends up being a handout to a state or local government."
Once the money is spent, the state is responsible for ensuring that the equipment is used wisely. And, that has been a challenge for the Missouri Department of Public Safety.
For instance, in the lead up to a report issued in May 2006, the Missouri state auditor sent staff out to 43 public safety agencies around the state.
According to the audit, local officials told investigators they had not opened some shipments of protective gear because they had not received training on how to use it. One supervisor, according to the report, said his team did not even know how to assemble the components.
Insufficient training was cited by the St. Louis Police Department as the reason much of the protective equipment it had received sat unopened in a warehouse. In Kansas City, according to the report, police officials said unopened boxes of equipment sat in its warehouse because personnel in charge of the gear had not distributed it.
Four years later, in January 2010, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security again found fault (PDF) with the Missouri Department of Public Safety's department's oversight of federal homeland security funds between the 2005 and 2007 fiscal years.
Due to a lack of manpower, the report said, Missouri's Department of Public Safety had not started conducting on-site visits until March 2008.
And even then, according to the report, "the number of monitoring visits conducted was inadequate."
For instance, the report said, the state department had retroactively visited just 27 sites that had received grants in 2005, a group made up of 594 first responders distributed throughout 110 counties.
Additionally, federal auditors found no plans for on-site monitoring of the programs in the St. Louis or Kansas City regions run by the urban security initiative
"We agree that on-site monitoring should have been instituted from the beginning," Missouri homeland security coordinator Paul Fennewald said in a written response included in the audit.
He noted, however, that the department could not have initiated monitoring until calendar year 2006 when the funds were available.
The audit said the state had "taken steps to address" the shortcomings, including revisiting its audit policies.
In an Aug. 22 email, the Department of Homeland Security was asked to provide any updates or follow-up it had concerning the January 2010 audit. The department has not responded.
It also has not produced the detailed field notes from site visits it conducted as part of the audit, which the department has agreed to release in response to an open records request filed by the Beacon and Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. The two organizations sent payment for the documents on Aug. 12.
New Monitoring and Oversight
As recommended in the audit, the Missouri Office of Homeland Security has revised its monitoring procedure. Its most current policy took effect in March.
It says that the grants and training division will conduct site visits for each new separate participant during an initial performance period. Additionally, the division is to conduct regular on-site monitoring in the St. Louis and Kansas City regions.
According to the department, it has nine employees whose duties include compliance checks through administrative means or site visits. Division staff has conducted 90 on-site visits since March 2008, according to the department.
Gary Christmann, emergency management commissioner for St. Louis, has noticed stepped up oversight by the state in the wake of the audit.
Agency personnel, he said, have had "several meetings ... with them on their new procedures and also what is expected of us."
Christmann and other first responders, both in St. Louis and Kansas City, said they have made great strides in the past decade to coordinate and improve response capabilities throughout their regions.
But in a July 2009 report (PDF), the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress, concluded that the Federal Emergency Management Agency could not measure how the combined efforts of all regions in the urban security initiative had enhanced the nation's ability to respond to a terrorist attack -- despite having distributed $5 billion through the program since its inception in fiscal year 2003 through fiscal year 2009.
According to the GAO, its work included a telephone survey of all 49 urban regions that received funding through the program in 2008 and in at least one year prior to 2008. That would include Missouri, according to information from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Though the GAO found positive developments -- including 42 of the regions reporting using regional purchasing to lower costs through bulk orders -- it also found "conflicting missions, concerns regarding jurisdiction and control over resources, and incompatible processes or systems that can make reaching a consensus on strategies and priorities difficult."
Some of the urban areas, for instance, reported they lacked written authority and agreements to coordinate their work. More than a third of the respondents said that situation either greatly or somewhat impaired their abilities to plan well with their neighbors.
The GAO said FEMA needed to develop tools to measure better the return on investment of the urban security program. The report said the agency was "working toward addressing" the recommendation.
According to Cook in Franklin County, that effort has already begun, and he is working to ensure that federal money will help in a regionwide emergency.
The county's mobile command vehicle, he said, for instance, would be invaluable in vast search-and-rescue mission. It's all about allowing commanders to know exactly where their people are, so they don't waste any time finding victims.
"It doesn't do any good to have crew alpha search one block and then have crew bravo search the same block," he said.
What a Difference a Border Makes
When the St. Louis Beacon and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting requested computer records detailing homeland security spending, an initial estimate from the Missouri Department of Public Safety said the statewide data could be produced for a fee from about $4,200 to $7,000.
After more than five months of wrangling, the department charged about $220 for a 280-line spreadsheet that listed expenditures in St. Louis.
In contrast, the Iowa Homeland Security & Emergency Management Division took one day to send a spreadsheet with more than 3,100 entries detailing purchases in counties throughout the state. The cost: nothing.
Missouri's open records statute allows agencies to charge for the time it takes to research a request, and the law also allows agencies to charge for programming time needed to fulfill a request.
Iowa's law is similar.
Missouri's statute allows fees to be waived or reduced when the information is not intended for commercial use and "is in the public interest."
The Department of Public Safety denied requests for a fee waiver or reduction without comment.
The Beacon and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting also encountered a similar dichotomy among agencies in Kansas City and St. Louis.
Within three days of a request, the Mid-America Regional Council in Kansas City sent an email detailing five years' worth of homeland security spending. The next day, the council's emergency services director e-mailed three more documents.
Asked for similarly detailed documents, East-West Gateway Council of Governments in St. Louis emailed a couple of documents that outlined homeland security spending by category.
But to send anything as detailed as what Kansas City provided, it said in an email, "At a minimum, the costs to process the request is $803.28."
The Beacon and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting did not pursue the matter any further.
Mike Sherry is the executive director of the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting in Kansas City..