Las Vegas to receive $5 million in counterterrorism funds under revamped DHS funding formula

Las Vegas will receive $5 million to help prevent terrorist attacks under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Urban Areas Security Initiative (UASI) grant program, reflecting an increase of $2.13 million from the previous year.

U.S. Sen. Dean Heller (R-NV) has been leading a push to reform the UASI funding formula used by DHS to better account the for risk profiles of various cities like Las Vegas, which has 43 million annual visitors. Heller has called on the last three DHS secretaries to revamp the funding formula in letters sent in 2016, 2017, and 2018.

“I have made it one of my top priorities to ensure that Las Vegas has the resources that it needs to protect its residents, visitors, and its tourism economy, and that’s why I am pleased to announce that Las Vegas will receive $5 million through the Urban Area Security Initiative program,” Heller said on Monday. “This is nearly double the amount in funding that Las Vegas received last year. For years, I have pushed the Department of Homeland Security to reconfigure its formula so that Las Vegas receives adequate funding to preempt and protect against threats. I’m pleased that Nevada’s needs were recognized, and I will continue to work to ensure that Las Vegas continues to receive the critical resources necessary to keep our community safe.”

In March, Heller noted that Las Vegas had suffered one of the worst mass shootings in the nation’s history in a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen. Heller wrote that DHS must “rely on data that fairly analyzes each city,” and the current formula “fails to accurately depict certain data that fairly analyzes each city.”

“As part of a locality’s risk profile, qualifying assets are determined as part of its assessment of both the vulnerability and consequence component,” Heller wrote. “Unfortunately, the Las Vegas strip is ‘clustered’ and considered one asset, despite the fact that there are more than 35 hotels along the Las Vegas Strip. That includes massive resorts with arenas, showrooms, clubs, hotel rooms, convention centers, shopping malls, and casinos. A single property can have over 70,000 employees and visitors on site at any given time; however, (DHS) clusters all of those properties as a single asset.”

As a result, Heller requested that DHS consider properties individually, not as a cluster, because “each one is a viable target for an attack.”