December 28, 2004

GIVEN BOSTON'S population density, airport location, working port, and long list of potential targets, it makes sense that city officials would coordinate certain federal homeland security funds for the immediate region. But with that power comes the responsibility to distribute the funds in a fair and timely fashion as well as build the kind of regional capacity needed to respond to threats or actual incidents of terrorism.

A Globe report yesterday revealed that Boston officials have been slow to fund homeland security initiatives in Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Somerville, Quincy, Revere, and Winthrop, where public safety officials have received just $939,000 of the $3.6 million due them from a federally funded urban areas security initiative. This is hardly the time for Boston officials to be holding back on their neighbors.

'No local government can respond to a major terror attack by itself,' warns Edward Flynn, the state's secretary of public safety. 'The capacity of its local partners is as important as its own.'

The slow distribution may have as much to do with the inability of vendors to keep up with the demand for protective suits, special respirators, and antidotes for dangerous agents needed by first responders as it does with bureaucratic entanglements. Carlo Boccio, director of Boston's office of homeland security, predicts that 95 percent of the funds -- including Boston's $11.8 million share -- will be expended or encumbered by the coming summer.