“This funding is essential to protecting the Bay Area from the radiological and nuclear events we all hope never occur,” said Mary Ellen Carroll, the executive director of the Department of Emergency Management, which manages and oversees the Bay Area’s regional Securing the Cities program. “When cities can no longer count on consistent administration of homeland security funding, our public safety suffers.”
San Francisco is considered the fourth-highest urban area of risk, vulnerability and consequence, just after New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, according to the DHS.
Since 2020, the Bay Area program, which represents 17 jurisdictions across Northern California and western Nevada, has been in a nine-year DHS contract to provide around $1 million a year in support of counterterrorism efforts. But according to the city attorney’s office, more than $400,000 in reimbursement requests submitted by San Francisco in April of this year have gone unpaid.
Reimbursements from DHS have traditionally come within a matter of business days, according to Chiu’s office.
The Bay Area Urban Areas Security Initiative, which oversees the program from San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management, was informed on April 29 that all DHS grants were “paused” as part of a freeze on the federal government’s payment management service. Weeks later, in mid-May, DHS said that its Securing the Cities’ funding for radiological nuclear detection equipment and supplies purchases was on pause, and it did not indicate if or when it would be restored.
