Arlington County Has Spent $50 Million on Emergency Preparedness
According to Dave Francis in today’s DC Examiner, “Arlington County has spent almost $50 million on emergency preparedness infrastructure since the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon. Of this, about $33 million came out of Arlington’s budget. Roughly $16 million came from federal grants.”
The newspaper reports “Since then, the county has spent $4 million to install new public safety radios in emergency response vehicles, $5 million on the construction of a new emergency operations center, $14 million on radios for the station, $5.5 million on technical equipment for the center, $2 million on fiber-optic cables linking sites around the county, and $1.1 million on integration of new and old systems.”
County residents know that “Arlington law enforcement, fire and emergency medical authorities were the first to respond to the Pentagon attack,” as the Examiner reports. Was the entire $50 million needed? Well it’s likely the $16 million in federal money required some matching funds on the county’s part. There was probably a need to upgrade some technology. Whether the rest was needed is a hard question to answer. Given Arlington’s location next to the nation’s capital, it’s hard to question most of the spending.