Las Vegas has received $5 million in federal security funding, an increase over the $2.8 million the region received last year.
“This grant is an important investment in the safety and security of the residents of Southern Nevada and the more than 43 million visitors who travel to Las Vegas for work and for play,” said Rep. Dina Titus in a release.
On Oct. 1, a gunman opened fire from a 32nd-floor window of the Mandalay Bay into the Route 91 Harvest music festival, killing 58 people — the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
It was not immediately clear if the increase was a result of the Oct. 1 shooting, according to Titus’ office. A number of communities saw increases and a few saw decreases. Some communities did not receive funding this year, including Salt Lake City, Utah, Indianapolis, Indiana, Cleveland, Ohio and Honolulu.
The funding comes after the entire congressional delegation and Gov. Brian Sandoval wrote to Department of Homeland (DHS) Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in March, calling on her to adjust the distribution formula for urban security grants to reflect the tourist population. Southern Nevada gets nearly one million visitors a week.
Titus said she’d continue to push for those changes.
“Although I am pleased to see an increase in the level of funding for Las Vegas from previous years, the fact remains that the risk validation process used to distribute funds needs to be modernized to recognize the unique threats we face as a world-class destination,” said Titus. “I’ll continue to push DHS Secretary Nielsen and this Administration on the necessary changes to this important security program.”
The DHS program in question is the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI), which is designed to help metropolitan areas prevent, mitigate, respond to and recover from acts of terrorism. The funding is distributed under the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Relative Risk Profile formula, which ranks the risk of a terror threat in the nation’s 100 most populous urban areas, also known as metropolitan statistical areas.
The issue has long been the focus of Nevada lawmakers. Titus, a Democrat, wrote to Nielsen in late October just after the DHS chief was confirmed by the Senate, similarly citing the recent shooting. Before that, she wrote a UASI letter in 2013. In 2015, Republican Sen. Dean Heller and former GOP Reps. Joe Heck and Cresent Hardy wrote then-DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson on the issue.
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