The St. Louis Beacon and the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting have concluded “Ten Years Later: Are We Safer?” the homeland-security series produced in part with provisional support from the Press Club of Metropolitan St. Louis.

Mike Sherry and Margaret Wolf Freivogel wrote:  

Our series provided good news to taxpayers in at least one sense: Given records made available, we could find no instances of waste, fraud or abuse in the application of homeland security funds.

 But our series did raise a question about how the money is applied. Much of the anti-terrorism money allocated in Missouri, and throughout the country, is purposely used for equipment or training that applies to any number of contingencies – be it a terrorist attack, natural disaster or chemical spill.

So here is a key issue for readers to consider and policymakers to debate – one that was unlikely to surface without our coverage: Do you buy a bunch of sophisticated stuff that sits unused until the relatively unlikely event of a terrorist strike, or do you stretch the bounds of “homeland security” and spend the money for seemingly routine first-responder-type activities?

Taking their cue from the federal government, Missouri authorities have opted for the latter approach. Time and again, our series identified equipment and programs geared toward uses that are more mundane than waiting for al-Qaida to blow up the Gateway Arch. Emergency response officials told us that preparing for – and responding to – ordinary situations makes them that more ready to respond to a terrorist attack or even the once-in-a-lifetime earthquake in the Bootheel.

That being said, as the series also noted, it’s hard to know if Missouri localities have always put the homeland security funds to good use. Federal and state auditors have both knocked the oversight efforts of the Missouri Department of Public Safety, which earlier this year adopted a new monitoring policy aimed at addressing some of the deficiencies.

Project highlights include:

·         Seven stories that ran periodically in the St. Louis Beacon from July 7 to Sept. 9. The stories are also posted on the Web site of the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. An explanatory box ran with each story noting the funding support of the Press Club of Metropolitan St. Louis. Here are the links to the stories:

·         An Aug. 30 appearance by reporter Jason Rosenbaum on KWMU. He and Nick Gragnani, executive director of the St. Louis Area Regional Response System, were guests on a “St. Louis on the Air” segment examining the state of emergency preparedness 10 years after 9/11. A link to the podcast is below.
·         http://www.kwmu.org/programs/slota/archivedetail.php?date='2011-08-30'

·         A line-item review of homeland security expenditures in the city of St. Louis from 2004 through 2009. The data, provided in a spreadsheet from the Missouri Department of Public Safety, represented the first time the department had provided data to the public from its Electronic Grants Management System.

·         A comparison of the St. Louis data with similar expenditures in Kansas City and elsewhere, including more than 3,000 line items in a spreadsheet from the Iowa Homeland Security & Emergency Management Division.