"When the orange alert goes on, it rings at City Hall, not at the State House and not at the White House," says Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, the outgoing president of the United States Conference of Mayors.
The conference estimates that when Washington raises the threat level to Code Orange, it costs the nation's localities $70 million per week. Menino figures that in Boston alone, Code Orange costs about $100,000 per day. "We have to put police on alert," Menino said in an interview. "We have to put fire on alert. We need more EMTs. People go on overtime. We have to staff emergency centers. All that is coming out of your operating budget."
"The most fundamental reason we have a federal government is to provide for the common defense," said Mayor Martin O'Malley of Baltimore, chairman of the conference's homeland-security task force. Yet the common defense against international terror has become a local burden. "When we're threatened by foreign attack," he said in an interview, the cities provide "the front-line troops."
It's easy to be cynical about money battles among levels of government. But there is something amiss when the cost of providing homeland security requires mayors to move police away from their normal crime-fighting duties. And it's troubling that the financial burdens may force these mayors to lay off some among the very cops and firefighters who are carrying the domestic burden of the battle. As O'Malley says, financing the struggle against international terror "off firehouse bingo proceeds and the local property tax" seems a strange choice for the world's only superpower.
Can the Republicans handle money? Inquiring minds want to know.