Ohio got $493M from Homeland Security

Associated Press

CLEVELAND

Ohio’s largest county has received $72 million in the past decade to prevent and fight terrorism, and a newspaper analysis has found officials largely spent the money practically and avoided the types of purchases that drew auditors’ attention in other areas.

Agencies in Cuyahoga County used federal money doled out after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to buy items ranging from the simple to the high-tech, from traffic cones to a robot used to defuse bombs. Safety officials also put the funding toward an electronic fingerprint identification system in the jails and radios that will let all area police and fire departments communicate in emergencies, The Plain Dealer reported Sunday.

“It was never a shopping spree,” said Norberto Colon, the county’s deputy chief of staff for justice affairs. “We had legitimate needs in Cleveland. We never had to make up stuff to spend our money on.”

In total, Ohio has received Homeland Security Grants worth $493 million since 2002, and the Cleveland area was eligible for some of the biggest grants because it had high-risk factors, such as its large population, its airports and its location along the northern U.S. border.

The Ohio Department of Public Safety has increased its oversight of that funding since a pair of audits a few years ago found it didn’t sufficiently track spending. This year, the internal watchdog for the federal Department of Homeland Security determined a police chiefs group in Ohio mishandled more than $4 million. The money was properly spent but improperly documented, and the department is working with federal officials to account for it, department spokesman Joe Andrews said.

“For a while, the money was coming from the feds fast and furiously, possibly before we could get all our systems in place to efficiently audit the use of the funds,” Andrews said.

The purchases made in the Cleveland area were practical, helping it avoid the scrutiny faced by officials elsewhere, such as those who spent anti-terrorism funding on silk flowers through the Transportation Security Administration or on all-terrain vehicles found in county officials’ garages in Texas, the newspaper said.

The grants paid for a variety of vehicles, tools and other supplies in northeast Ohio, including radiation detectors, antibiotics and stockpiles of megaphones and first-aid kits. One police department got a bomb-diffusing robot. Cuyahoga and four other counties got 42 automated license plate readers to help search for stolen cars, and SWAT teams got a half-dozen armored cars.

“I think what we’ve tried to do is prioritize and fill gaps,” said Bedford Heights Fire Chief Ken Ledford, a co-chairman of a regional group that oversaw the spending. “People might look at it and say, ‘Why did we buy that?’ Maybe it will never be used; maybe that’s a good thing. But we didn’t want to be caught having something happen and say, ‘I wish we would have bought that.’”