Cities spending extra $70 million a week on security, survey says
Leaders want more money from Washington
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Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, center, talks at a recent news conference.
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- American cities are spending an additional $70 million a week to beef up security because of the heightened national threat alert from the war in Iraq, the U.S. Conference of Mayors estimates, based on a survey released Thursday.
At that rate, the organization said, a war lasting six months could cost cities $2 billion above the money already being spent to boost security since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The cities will use the survey as ammunition in their effort to get more homeland security funding from Washington.
"Mayors need direct homeland security funding and we needed it more than 18 months ago," Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley, who chairs the Mayors' Homeland Security Task Force, said in a statement. "Our domestic troops -- police, fire, and emergency medical personnel -- must be well funded just as our troops in Iraq must be."
President Bush has proposed adding $1.4 billion to this year's budget to aid local governments, but the mayors say more is needed, and it should go directly to the cities, rather than through state bureaucracies, as most of the money in Bush's plan would.
"Cities urgently need direct, flexible financial assistance to meet their homeland security needs," Boston Mayor and Conference of Mayors President Thomas Menino said in a news release.
In a 15-month period after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, American cities spent more than $2.6 billion on additional homeland security costs, the Conference of Mayors said.
The organization surveyed 150 cities across the country with populations greater than 30,000 and used that data to estimate the total spending of all 1,185 such cities.
The survey asked only about direct costs, not indirect costs, such as reassignment of police officers from routine tasks to homeland-security-related tasks.
At the top of the list of cities in the survey is New York, spending an extra $5 million a week for security since the war started, according to the survey. San Francisco, California is next at $2.6 million, followed by Los Angeles, California, $2.5 million; Atlanta, Georgia $2.25 million; and Fresno, California, $1.5 million.
Some major cities reported relatively little extra spending for the heightened security alert. Phoenix, Arizona and Houston, Texas reported spending only about $154,000 extra a week, while Dallas, Texas reported $74,000 and San Antonio, Texas a mere $15,000.
Among smaller cities, Frederick, Maryland -- with a population of 52,767 and outside Washington, D.C. -- said it is spending $206,958 extra a week, or about $3.92 per resident, compared to San Antonio's 1.3 cents for each of its more than 1.44 million residents.
No extra spending was reported by 15 cities, including Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Rockford, Illinois, and Fort Collins, Colorado.
