From a well-guarded location that the city keeps secret, police will monitor Baltimore's bridges, ports, stadiums, streets, highways and harbors on a bank of $20,000 plasma screens. An undisclosed number of surveillance cameras costing up to $60,000 each are being installed on buildings and streets, and many already feed live video to this new $1.3 million "Watch Center" - a vast, comfortable room resembling the big-screen seating at ESPN Zone.
When finished this spring, the center's two walls full of monitors will transform with the touch of a finger from 16 larger screens to a checkerboard pattern of 128 smaller ones for more details and angles of everything from the west side to sweeps of the Bay Bridge. Baltimore Intelligence Unit Commander Maj. Dave Engel calls his new eyes on the city a "force multiplier."
It's one more gift of 9/11.
In the past four years, Maryland - like other states across the country - has been on a buying spree with its $322 million cut of federal homeland security grants. Public officials have outfitted their commands with million-dollar mobile police centers, half-million-dollar bomb trucks, new sport utility vehicles, and a computerized disease alert network linking hospitals, health departments and schools - public and private, Catholic and Jewish. They have spent millions of dollars to upgrade emergency radio systems used by firefighters and police to enable first responders to talk on the same frequency.
To date, grants from the Department of Homeland Security have totaled about $13 billion nationwide. The amount showered on cities and counties is unprecedented in its abundance and in how little guidance Washington gives. As a result, in the scramble to spend this new money, officials are able to afford expensive equipment that otherwise would have been unavailable.
In some cases, the 9/11 grants are buying equipment that is unlikely to fight terrorism, more likely to fight everyday crime.
"After 9/11, action preceded thought. We were throwing money at the problem because ... we didn't know what else to do," said James Carafano, a defense and homeland security research analyst for Washington's conservative Heritage Foundation. "It is excusable in 2003. It will not be excusable in 2006."
Four years into the new funding, Congress is close to adopting national standards for emergency preparedness, Carafano said. Defining minimum standards of readiness for 15 varied threats and hazards, such as a nuclear attack or food poisoning, Carafano said, would force Washington to discipline itself and stop pork-barrel spending on homeland security.
Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley says the new standards could someday lead to Washington's requiring cities and counties to be certified as safe or risk losing federal aid. "And, frankly, I welcome it," O'Malley said.
'We have much to do'
In those first apocalyptic days, as Ground Zero smoldered, President Bush warned of the rising cost of safe sanctuary: "We are planning a broad and sustained campaign to secure our country and eradicate the evil of terrorism," he said in a radio address on Sept. 15, 2001. "We have much to do and much to ask of the American people."
Billions of dollars aimed at making America safe began passing like a bucket brigade from federal to state to county and city governments without standards for what was required to prepare for terrorism. And the money from Washington keeps coming.
Maryland has received or been promised $69 million in fiscal year 2002, then in succeeding years, $101 million, $90 million and $62 million. This doesn't count $192 million awarded specifically to the National Capitol Region, which includes Montgomery and Prince George's counties and is considered a high-profile target.
Significant grants have also trickled into unlikely outposts on the Eastern Shore, where Kent County Emergency Management Agency Director Robert Rust Jr. admits that al-Qaida is not a threat. The rural farming county has found itself with an extra $702,000 to spend or lose.
In the past three years, Kent County has bought an $8,800 hand-held chemical warfare detector - more likely to be used on overturned trucks to detect toxic spills. Officials there bought 398 high-frequency emergency pagers costing $287 each, and are spending $254,000 to equip a new communications tower intended to fill in scratchy stretches of police radio coverage on rural Highway 301.
Without 9/11, probably none of this would have been possible. "Our population is just under 20,000. We don't have the tax base," Rust said.
The bulk of preparedness is funded through grants from the Department of Homeland Security, but grants from the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Resources also feed into the stream. Within two years after 9/11, federal grants for domestic preparedness had swelled more than thirty-fold, from $91 million to $2.7 billion.
This year, of the 58 states or U.S. territories receiving homeland security funds - from New York ($298 million) to the North Pacific's Marshall Islands ($50,000) - Maryland's $62 million ranks 10th in the amount allotted. Of that, Baltimore's $11.3 million in Urban Areas Security money ranks 16th out of the grant's 50 metropolitan areas, just above Anaheim, Calif. ($10.8 million) and Portland, Ore. ($10.4 million); far behind New York City ($207.6 million) and Los Angeles ($61.2 million).
"Before 9/11, just to purchase a firetruck we were holding bake sales," said former Montgomery County fire administrator Gordon Aoyagi, director of the county's new Department of Homeland Security.
Today, the county owns a $965,886 police command bus - a Lynch Diversified Vehicle, the Cadillac of law enforcement, bought with a Department of Justice grant. The 46-foot-long bus is as large as a Greyhound and outfitted with infrared spotlights, video cameras that rise 62 feet on a boom, satellite telephones, seven flat-screen plasma computer monitors and televisions, high-speed Internet, DirecTV satellite news, and more cafeteria-size Bunn coffee makers than Montgomery County police Sgt. Bill Seidel expects his officers will ever use.
The county's old bus - used on stakeouts during the 2002 sniper killings - was 12 feet shorter and had one computer and no Internet. Coffee was ordered out.
"Management by crisis," Seidel said, meaning the Lynch bus would never have been purchased without federal money and a day as devastating as Sept. 11, 2001.
The Montgomery County bomb squad was also able to replace its 10-foot-long 1990 Ford ambulance truck that had 85,500 miles and a bumper sticker - "In Memory of Lost Brothers FDNY 9-11-2001."
Today, the squad drives an 18-foot-long 2004 International truck that cost $400,000. A six-year-old bomb-defusing robot that rides in the back recently had $67,552 of upgrades to improve its camera and maneuverability. Hung in the truck's closet are four new armor-laden bomb suits that cost $12,000 each.
"We all have equipment needs that far surpass local resources," Aoyagi said.
'Can you spend more?'
But the federal money flows so heavily that Aoyagi says it can be a challenge to spend it all within a grant's allotted time and rules. It was no surprise, then, that the Maryland Emergency Management Agency contacted its local jurisdictions before Christmas with a single pressing question: "Can you spend more?"
MEMA, the state's custodian of most first-responder grants, was rushing to spend the last $4.3 million of its fiscal year 2003 awards before a March deadline. In Baltimore, any purchases would need to avoid the months-long competitive bid process required for items exceeding $25,000, said Kristen Mahoney, a city grants administrator and the police department's chief of technical services. So she tied the city's requests to vendor contracts that had already been bid competitively and were open for additions.
In its bidding rules, the federal government defers to states. Maryland's rules tighten as items rise in cost from $2,500 to $200,000, and beyond that amount, purchases require state Board of Public Works approval.
MEMA's Christmas bonus was a kitty of leftovers from various emergency management directors who had overestimated their costs or underspent on their purchases. Local officials threw together wish lists and, this winter, Baltimore city and 17 counties were awarded extra money. The list read like a roll of lottery winners:
Baltimore got an extra $600,000 for communications equipment; Washington County $200,000 for communications equipment storage buildings; St. Mary's County $119,000 for new dispatch consoles; Allegany County $58,246 for a video surveillance system; Prince George's County $61,250 for 35 new hand-held police radios; Talbot County $25,000 to buy equipment for amateur emergency radio volunteers; and more.
MEMA never considered declining the excess.
"We have not dealt with grant programs like this ever in the history of state government or federal government. ... We are all learning as we go as far as to the best practices and how to do things," said John W. Droneburg III, MEMA's director. "One of our jobs here is to make sure all the spending authorization given to Maryland is spent for its intended purpose - and that all of it is used in Maryland."
That is why 428 grant writers and local officials from across the Washington-Baltimore region registered this year for the state's first-ever Local Government Grants Conference - a primer on how best to tap Washington's largess.
The Governor's Grants Office was created last year with the expressed intent to "identify and win competitive federal grants." So on a warm day in January, the auditorium at the Johns Hopkins University campus in Laurel was full, and Maryland's homeland security director, Dennis R. Schrader, came to fire up the troops.
Schrader was appointed by Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. two years ago and is paid a salary of $130,000 from state general funds to lead a newly created Governor's Office of Homeland Security. He oversees state emergency preparedness and security strategy, reports directly to the governor, and is the state's liaison to the national Department of Homeland Security.
During the conference lunch, Schrader, 52, a former Navy captain who still wears his hair high and tight, took the microphone. Sounding like a military officer, he attempted to energize this base.
"We have not fought a war on our soil since 1865, and we are in the middle of doing that right now," he said, and then he stressed to his audience that they were the region's frontline of defense.
That presumes that four years of copious spending has made the state and nation relatively safe. Reports from the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Homeland Security inspector general have pointed to persistent holes in security at airports and ports. Departing Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson said in December that the imported food supply is vulnerable to terrorists.
Schrader, however, sounded more concerned with ceding ground to Washington than to terrorists. He evoked the Constitution's 10th Amendment - protection of states' rights - and warned that if Maryland doesn't "step up to the challenge" and secure its cities and counties, the federal government would surely encroach.
"Either you do it or they will," he said.
Even for former politicians like Schrader, a former Howard County councilman and the husband of Republican state Sen. Sandra B. Schrader, the authority of Washington can feel suffocating. Local officials lament the layers of bureaucracy that cause bottlenecks in grant awards and the rules that forbid using 9/11 money to hire most additional personnel. But for now, no one is refusing Washington's terms - or money.
Wayne Pryor, Ocean City's grants administrator, told the grant writers, "It is incumbent upon us to go after those federal dollars because if we don't, they will go to the next community over or the next state over."
Maryland divides its homeland security grants based on weighted factors such as population density, vulnerability and risk management plans - a formula that "only a computer can figure out," MEMA's Droneburg said.
Maryland's 26 jurisdictions are guaranteed shares of grant money by MEMA, sometimes as little as 1.4 percent (Ocean City) or as much as 15 percent (Baltimore). As the grants' administrator, MEMA keeps 15 percent to 20 percent.
In fiscal year 2002, the only year that its statewide accounting is complete, MEMA spent $85,892 on four new Chevrolet Trailblazers that respond to emergencies and $25,101 on a Ford Expedition to tow the emergency communications trailer.
On one occasion, MEMA spent $4,680 on a four-star waterfront resort for a weekend training exercise when a National Guard armory was unavailable.
"That was under the former director," MEMA spokesman Jim Pettit said of the bill from the Hyatt Regency Chesapeake Bay Golf Resort, Spa and Marina in Cambridge. "I believe it was the most convenient place available at the time."
He said the weekend brought together 75 people from state and local health departments to practice packing and distributing boxes of medical supplies used in emergencies. A previous exercise was held free of charge at the Hagerstown National Guard Armory, Pettit said.
As the state's homeland security chief, Schrader shows none of this excess. His office seems small and extraordinarily plain for a man charged with the task of protecting Maryland from terrorists. There are the perfunctory trimmings of a state building - portraits of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich and Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele, the American and state flags - and one guard is posted in the lobby, but the Annapolis headquarters of the governor's homeland security czar dares not reflect the extravagant gifts of an earlier day.
Schrader carries the governor's homeland security message to MEMA and local jurisdictions: It's one of thriftiness - the need to build a cost-effective fortress of security that will outlast the country's fears.
"As time goes by and we are successful, the dilemma is that the public will become less interested," he said. "It is really a Catch-22."
In other words, Schrader predicted, success could weaken homeland security because without acts of terrorism, the grant money from Washington will shrink.
"You have to think of the money as seed money," he said. "You could throw money at things and do just about anything, but then the story that would be written is that people wasted money on toys."