The Pittsburgh region ranked among the top half of urban areas in the United States in terms of risk from a terrorist attack, but it was rated in the bottom 50 percent in ways it proposed to spend federal grant money, according to a U.S. Department of Homeland Security document obtained by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Federal officials this week slashed antiterrorism funding for the Pittsburgh region in 2006 by 49 percent, the fourth-steepest percentage cut in funds among 46 urban areas that received Homeland Security money through the Urban Areas Security Initiative. Only Phoenix, Denver and New Orleans received bigger cuts in percentage terms.

Local officials lamented the reduction in funds to $4.9 million in fiscal 2006 from $9.6 million in fiscal 2005 and are awaiting a thorough explanation from Homeland Security later this month. They are surprised and upset by the reduction, especially considering Pittsburgh's perceived risk for a terrorist attack.

The eight-page Homeland Security summary is a dry accounting of Pittsburgh's risk and the effectiveness of its proposals to address that risk. It offers nothing in the way of detailed explanations of the formula used to calculate the region's grant proposal relative to other cities.

"Quite frankly, it's disturbing to me how we ended up at that point," Chief Robert Full, Allegheny County's emergency operations director, said yesterday. "I still don't know what to say. It's a real mess. ... I have so many questions myself."

Chief Full is also chairman of the Region 13 Southwestern Pennsylvania Counter-Terrorism Task Force, a group of emergency responders from 13 Western Pennsylvania counties and the city of Pittsburgh.

The task force had requested $75.5 million in funds from the grant program -- a figure that officials acknowledge was unrealistic.

Also concerned with Region 13's allocation are members of Southwestern Pennsylvania's congressional delegation. A letter sent yesterday to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff by Republican U.S. Reps. Tim Murphy, of Upper St. Clair, and Melissa Hart, of Bradford Woods, decried the region's funding cut and requested an explanation.

"Preventing terrorist activities in Southwestern Pennsylvania is of utmost importance," the representatives wrote. "Cities like Pittsburgh deserve extra resources to defend critical infrastructure and protect a larger population."

Politicians and officials in New York City and Washington, D.C., which also saw double-digit percentage drops in funding, have lambasted the Homeland Security Department for the cuts to their cities.

New York, which is considered to be the nation's riskiest target, and Washington, D.C., will both see their allocations cut by 40 percent from last year; New York, which still gets the largest amount of money, will receive $124 million, while the Washington area will get $46 million.

This year, Homeland Security changed the formula it used to allocate the money, which funds a wide range of initiatives covering antiterrorism training, equipment and exercises.

Instead of looking at population size to divvy up the pot, the agency switched to a risk-based analysis.

Two-thirds of the weight of a city's application went to risk, while one-third went to the effectiveness of the proposed initiatives.

"I strongly support allocating Homeland Security grants to U.S. cities on the basis of relative risk, but from what I know today, it appears highly likely that the [Bush] administration did a pretty poor job of evaluating the relative risk facing cities across the country," Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Forest Hills, said this week.

A spokesman for Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum said the senator and a bipartisan group of colleagues championed the shift to a risk-based assessment.

However, said Robert Traynham, the fact that both the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia areas received less money this year indicated that the funding mechanism was flawed.

"You would assume that Pennsylvania and other states would have received more money," Mr. Traynham said. The funding formula "needs to be changed again so that it's allocated based on risk."

Chief Full said Region 13 staffers scrambled to meet tight deadlines, waded through a massive amount of complex information over a few short months and received little guidance from Homeland Security. A team of reviewers drawn from around the nation evaluated applications; the reviewers' identities are being kept secret by the federal government.

"I don't know if we presented our strongest case for some of those things in writing," Chief Full said.

"All I would say is it came down extremely fast and had to be absorbed in a very short period of time with short deadlines, with massive amounts of paperwork and documentation," Chief Full said. "It was very complex. It was also very cumbersome, where folks had to drop their normal day-to-day duties to meet all their deadlines."

Mr. Doyle questioned the wisdom of slashing funds based on the quality of a grant application or proposals.

"If these counter-intuitive allocations are the result of badly drafted applications, then I think [Homeland Security] should have worked with high-risk targets like New York and D.C. to put together better plans rather than simply cut funding for the places it's needed most. I don't think the administration's doing a 'heck of a job' when it makes it easier for terrorists to blow up the Statue of Liberty," Mr. Doyle said.

In some cases, Homeland Security did ensure that cities received assistance on their applications, said Jarrod Agen, the agency's deputy press secretary. However, he added, reviewers took into account factors other than how the proposal was presented. Mr. Agen said he could not be more specific.

Nationally, there were 478 initiatives proposed among the 46 urban areas; three of the dozen programs proposed by the Pittsburgh area were ranked in the lowest 15 percent. They covered plans for mass evacuations, dealing with a surge in patients at hospitals, and complying with a national emergency management system.

The Homeland Security document noted that those three initiatives were scored so low that funds cannot be used for them without the agency's approval.

Chief Full said he was baffled by the low rankings of the proposals. Pittsburgh, he said, is in the midst of requesting proposals to write a mass evacuation plan for the city, but Homeland Security funds have already been allocated; this year's proposal would expand the plan to cover a larger area.

Chief Full said it was unclear what effect the special funding condition imposed by Homeland Security would have on creating a mass evacuation plan.

Pittsburgh Fire Chief Michael Huss, who is also the city's emergency management coordinator, said he noticed one apparent glaring error in Homeland Security's risk assessment.

Risk is based on many factors, such as the number of critical infrastructure facilities, population, military bases and suspicious incidents. One of the variables is the number of financial institutions with more than $8 billion in assets. Region 13 was not credited with any such institutions, but Chief Huss said that is not the case.

"We know that these banking institutions do far more transactions and have far more assets than that," Chief Huss said. He added that the omission's impact on funding was unclear.

Chief Huss also noted that in the evaluation of Region 13's proposals, not one initiative scored "below average" or "needs improvement," the two lowest of the five categories. He said he could not square that information with placing Region 13's proposals in the bottom 50 percent.

With overall funding for homeland security cut by Congress, the Urban Areas Security Initiative felt the pinch, too.

"What I can say is Pittsburgh has gotten, through the life of the program, a little over $33 million, so there has been a substantial amount of funds going to the area," Homeland Security's Mr. Agen said.

"As we look at it nationwide, we're only as good as the weakest link. And if there are urban areas that have gotten low amounts and we're getting an understanding of the risk in these areas, there would be cause to increase the funding in those areas," Mr. Agen said.