WASHINGTON — Maine will receive about $11.4 million in federal homeland security funding for 2011, a decrease from what the state got in 2010, according to figures released by the Department of Homeland Security.
In 2010, the state got a total of about $16.5 million, including $2.4 million in homeland security grants to local fire departments, according to federal figures.
The fire department grant total for 2011 has not yet been announced and is not part of the 2011 total for Maine announced this week, but that pot of funding, too, is expected to drop nationwide.
Also included in the 2010 total is money for several programs, including $500,000 for an emergency operations center grant and $267,000 to improve the interoperability of different agencies’ communications gear, that was not granted at all to Maine for 2011.
The overall decrease is part of the federal budget crunch and is affecting states nationwide, but Maine came out relatively well, said U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
The $2.1 billion in homeland security finding distributed to states nationwide is $780 million less than what was handed out for 2010, a drop of nearly a quarter in federal homeland security grant funding, according to the homeland security department.
“This affects every state and territory,” Collins said in a statement Wednesday. “We can be pleased that Maine came out better than most.”
Some of the competitive grant funding formally announced this week was preliminarily released in May.
The money is for the federal fiscal year that ends Sept. 30; the federal funding disputes earlier this year over the 2011 budget contributed to a delayed announcement.
The major single pot of funding — $5.1 million — is Maine’s state homeland security grant, which the Maine Emergency Management Agency then hands out to county and local departments and agencies for such purposes as buying buy new equipment and shoring up first responder capabilities. The state got $6.6 million in 2010.
But the drop in state homeland security grant funding nationwide averaged about 37 percent, with 29 states down a greater percentage than Maine, according to Collins’ office.
The $3.3 million the state will get in 2011 for the emergency management performance grants program, money that goes to local emergency management agencies to upgrade their capabilities to deal with a crisis, is about the same as the 2010 funding.
In some areas, Maine is getting slightly more homeland security funding.
For instance, Maine gets $829,000 for a driver’s license security program, up from about $800,000 in 2010.
The $1 million for the port security program for 2011 is about the same as in 2010. Money for Operation Stonegarden, a northern border security initiative, was down slightly, to about $1.01 million in 2011 from about $1.1 million in 2010.
MaineToday Media Washington Bureau Chief Jonathan Riskind can be contacted at 791-6280 or at: jriskind@mainetoday.com Twitter: Twitter.com/MaineTodayDC.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
