Paul Helmke, former mayor of Ft. Wayne, Ind., and past president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, is now chairman of SentryPoints, a provider of software, assessment and consulting services for emergency management and preparedness.

We asked Helmke about what state and local governments can expect this year from the federal government in terms of funding and coordination, and what can be done to help make cities safer.


Q: You compared the current homeland security funding situation to the 1990s when President Clinton pushed a stimulus package for cities to motivate the economy. Programs such as midnight basketball and skateboard parks were added to the package, causing its death. How can state and locals show they can use federal dollars efficiently and effectively?
A: In the context of homeland security, we've got the same sort of challenge -- to show that when we receive dollars, we're using them wisely, that cities are using them for things that would either prevent an incident or allow a quicker response to an incident.

What's tough is a lot of cities still haven't received that much in the way of funds. Or when they've received it, it's channeled through the state or somebody else who's already made a decision on what it's going to be used for.

At this stage, it's still sort of in the back and forth. The mayors still haven't had enough discretion yet on where they want to spend it. The money is starting to get through the pipeline a little bit better in the last few months, but the challenge still is how do you show that you've used it wisely.

My main point is you can show you've used it wisely if you can show it's an investment that fits with past investments and is likely to fit with new technologies that might come along in the next six months to a year -- that it can be used not just for terrorism but for the floods or the blizzards or the mudslides, natural disasters and could be used for a hazardous substance spill on the streets, or even day-to-day-type operations.

You need to show that it's both helping the response, helping prevent the danger, and fits with the other funds that have been spent.


Q: It's incredible that some locals haven't done vulnerability assessments.
A: I agree. One thing we recommend is before you take any major step, you ought to be doing a decent threat and vulnerability assessment that analyzes what's vulnerable, what's critical, what's been threatened in the past. We've helped some cities put together an R-score, risk-score-type thing and use that.

The catch, when I talk to some cities, is sometimes the state has done it for them. But sometimes these things are just checklists that get filled out and don't really help them design a true response and don't help prepare for where the money is going to go.

Sometimes cities have done them and they're decent assessments, but then the danger is it gets put on a shelf someplace or it doesn't really drive where the dollars are going. My sense in talking to locals and homeland security officials is that a lot of the money is going to start getting distributed not just based on population, but is going to be based on some well done threat and vulnerability assessment.

I was talking to the mayor of Las Vegas when I was out there. Part of their argument is it's a city of maybe 450,000 to 500,000, but when you count all the tourists and visitors, its threat level would be a little bit higher than perhaps a city its size would ordinarily have.


Q: You mentioned some cities are