HOW HE SEES IT Terror attack still haunts New York

By ROBERT STEINBACK
KNIGHT RIDDER/TRIBUNE
NEW YORK --You'll forgive New Yorkers, won't you, for being a tad upset about the federal government proposing to slash anti-terrorism funding for this city by 40 percent in the coming year's budget?
After all, this is the city that stood literally in the shadows of two enormous monuments to human industry, where a population larger than the capital of Missouri worked every business day prior to Sept. 11, 2001, represented now by a 16-acre cavity in the earth. New Yorkers, you'll understand, are still a bit sensitive about their loss.
"They're probably trying to protect people in red states," groused John Brady, who was having lunch in City Hall Park with a co-worker, both of whom watched from their office windows as the World Trade Center buildings collapsed after being struck by terrorist-piloted airliners nearly five years ago. "New York is a Democratic city. They're trying to punish New York City."
"We go to war, but we're leaving the door open here with no one to protect us," said James Jacobs, a Brooklyn Conservatory of Music professor who interrupted his reading on the Battery Park City promenade -- two blocks from the World Trade Center site -- to hold forth on post-9/11 policy. "The administration has really shown its cards about what it thinks of New York."
Counterterrorism funding
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced May 31 that New York City's federal counterterrorism funding would tumble to $124 million in 2006 from $207 million last year, outraging city officials and local politicians of both parties. Seaford, N.Y., Rep. Peter King, Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security committee, called the cuts "a declaration of war on New York." GOP Rep. Vito Fossella called them "shameful."
Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Denver and New Orleans -- goodness, hasn't New Orleans endured enough already? -- lost nearly half of their prior allotments. Washington was cut by 40 percent. Meanwhile, Louisville, Ky., Omaha, Neb., and Charlotte, N.C., received boosts of about 40 percent.
Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff blamed New York's cutback in part on shoddy paperwork with New York's funding application, and confirmed a published report that the feds had concluded the city had "no national monuments or icons" and few financial institutions of note -- an astounding assessment of a city that is home to the New York Stock Exchange, a major Federal Reserve depository and at least a dozen major banks, not to mention the Statue of Liberty, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Empire State Building and Yankee Stadium.
Oh, yes, and a subway system that carries 4.5 million terrorist targets every day -- which, for the record, is greater than the populations of Kansas and Nebraska combined.
Rebecca Ditsch, a publishing company employee who was also enjoying lunch in City Hall Park the day I visited, called Chertoff's excuses nonsense.
"This is something too important to say, 'You didn't fill out the paperwork right,"' Ditsch told me. "This isn't like filling out a home loan."
"Security is an issue everywhere, but it's hard to imagine the excuse given that New York doesn't have any landmarks," said Ditsch's co-worker and lunch companion, Dan Sherman.
"It smacks of disingenuousness," Ditsch said.
Police overtime
Indeed it does. New York with no icons? Bad paperwork? Come on. According to The New York Times, the federal government also wasn't pleased with New York spending so much money on such things as police overtime, rather than "semi-permanent" expenditures -- the type, presumably, from which well-connected contractors could profit.
Having grown up in New York, I was shocked -- pleasantly -- to see how many city cops patrolled Penn Station and the 34th Street Eighth Avenue subway station. It might have been overkill for midday Manhattan -- but I'd much prefer that kind of overkill to the kind terrorists might seek during the busiest hours of the work day.
Aside from a few cracks about "protecting corn instead of people," the New Yorkers with whom I spoke understood that other areas have valid security concerns. The problem is the priorities we set. Congress earlier this year cut the total allocation for counterterrorism funding by $100 million. Yet over the last four years, Bush-GOP tax cuts have cost the treasury over $1 trillion, which would rise to $3.3 trillion by 2016 if the tax cuts become permanent, as Bush wants.
X Steinback, a former columnist for The Miami Herald, is on a one-year sabbatical. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.