FY 2011 UASI Awards Leave Many on the Sidelines

The FY 2011 UASI grant awards were announced Thursday.  The reduction from 64 to 31 UASIs caught many by surprise.  While I was predicting that the UASI list might go down to 40-45, 31 was a deeper cut than was expected.


"Eligible candidates for the FY 2011 UASI program have been determined through an analysis of relative risk of terrorism faced by the 100 most populous metropolitan statistical areas in the United States, in accordance with the 9/11 Act. Based on that analysis, the eligible candidates have been grouped into two tiers according to relative risk. Tier I includes the 11 highest risk areas and will be allocated 81.6 percent (81.6%) of the total UASI funding available; Tier II includes the other 20 candidate areas and will be allocated the remaining 18.4 percent (18.4%) of the total UASI funding available."




Click to enlarge
This compares the FY 2011 UASI grant awards (red) to 2010 amounts (blue). 


I plotted the 2011 awards against the 2010 awards to see how things changed.  DHS decided to keep Tier One cities whole so you will see that their funding was maintained at 2010 levels.  San Diego got promoted to a Tier One while everyone else took it on the chin.  Many cities dropped, all Tier Two cities lost funding. 


Note: I combined Miami and Fort Lauderdale for display purposes. Fort Lauderdale got cut for 2011 but is in the same MSA as Miami so the two areas are now in one UASI. 


Interesting to see the cities that stayed vs. those that dropped off. The funding skipped many cities that got more last year than the ones that stayed on.


This obviously has upset a lot of people and I understand that a lot of good work that was being done may need to be curtailed.  


Fortunately, these UASIs all have significant funding remaining in their pipelines from prior fiscal years and have some time remaining to continue their programs before the money runs out.


I expect more of this in FY 2012, Congress is already looking at proposals to cut the UASI list to only 10 cities. It will get worse before it gets better.

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