October 2002

The More Things Stay
the Same:
September 11 and Its Wake

Ray
Suarez

As horrifying as it was, the killing of one
airline employee and one passenger near the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles
International Airport on July 4 this year served as a good illustration of how
antsy America has become. Multiple police forces responded, though the presumed
killer also was dead. One of America’s largest airports was shut down, flights
grounded, and arrivals delayed. What still at this writing is assumed to be a
random crime, the ineffective work of a lone gunman, had riveted the attention
of newsrooms across the country to TV screens while Americans barbecued and
played.

A murder in a public place—one of some 12,000
handgun killings expected this year across America—became national news,
launched interagency investigations, and brought the mayor of Los Angeles out
for a series of news conferences. In the midst of a war with clearly stated
goals but no predictable end, elected officials across the country can only
sympathize with the predicament James Hahn found himself facing on the Fourth of
July, as reporters fired their questions: What if this isn’t the extent of it?
How will we know . . . and when?

What’s Taken
Place?
Since last fall, we’ve run through any number of
“first-time sinces,” and they’ll continue long after the one-year anniversary of
the terrorist attack. New Year’s revelers flocked to Times Square in New York
City and tried to have an uninhibited good time while surrounded by heavily
armed, uniformed personnel. Patrons spinning the turnstiles on their way into
the Super Bowl were photographed. The National Mall in Washington, D.C.—a potent
symbol for decades of the right of free assembly—became more like an airport
concourse for the Fourth of July concert and fireworks.

Metropolitan infrastructure, already taxed to
enable hosting the Olympics, had to be ramped up even higher for the Salt Lake
City games. Local officials watched as the federal government extended every
possible resource to their community. The mayor told me of hardened perimeters,
cleared airspace over the city during the opening and closing ceremonies, and
some 7,000 law enforcement and National Guard personnel on hand for the
games.

Because he was overseeing a world showcase,
Mayor Rocky Anderson got more help than other mayors: “Since September 11, we’ve
had approximately an additional $35 million contributed by the federal
government to help out with our security effort. But, of course, it gets more
expensive for local and state law enforcement, too, because we’ve got to make up
for the increased needs throughout the rest of the community.”

Mayor Sharpe James of Newark says that
proximity to the World Trade Center towers, together with his city’s links to
Lower Manhattan’s financial industry, has not helped the city’s books. In fact,
the costs have overwhelmed the added economic activity brought to Newark by
firms formerly housed in the towers: “We are looking at cutting city services
and laying off people. . . . And we think that’s wrong. And we think that’s the
whole philosophical question.

“The U.S. Congress, rightfully, has rallied
behind President Bush to give him a war mandate to fight terrorism and any other
enemy. We agree with that. What we do not understand is, why Congress hasn’t
rallied to fight a war against poverty, a war against unemployment, or a war to
improve the quality of life in our communities? They’re the same dollars,
whether we’re dropping bombs on the caveman in Afghanistan or saving some of
those bombs and turning them into an infusion of federal dollars into our
cities.”

As of the summer, the White House had reported
transfers of more than $1 billion to states to help defray terrorist-related
costs. The federal government, too, is strapped, and the latest figures from the
Office of Management and Budget show a fast-growing deficit.

Managers, police chiefs, county supervisors,
elected officials, and state governors, in their National Guard capacity, have
had somehow to stretch to accommodate new demands on their people, as well as to
provide all the other services they did before the hijacked jets fell on their
targets. They have done this while revenue sharing from states has declined, tax
revenues have dropped in a slowed economy, and the public has been wondering if
any amount of spending can really keep them safe.

Recently, the president of the U.S. Conference
of Mayors, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, told a reporter that it was difficult to
keep a city on high alert. “I’ve only gotten one call from the Attorney General
saying that Boston was going to be under attack by terrorism. We checked with
everyone else. No one had any information. This was on a Friday. On Sunday, the
FBI says it cannot corroborate this warning.

“So what happened, it froze our city for an
entire weekend because they told the state and the city. Well, we weren’t
talking to anyone, [yet] it got out to the press, and the press was asking me
all weekend: What is going to happen to our city? Well, we had no information,
only our intelligence. We had a good task force working that included the Boston
police and the FBI during the past several years. So we had all the information
that was the so-called good information, turned bad. And so it is the warnings
that people get frightened about. I don’t know how you deal with
those.”

Are We Safe? Are Our Freedoms
in Danger?
In the midst of repeated warnings—and continued lack of
attack—who can blame the public for not knowing what to think about which
measures, or what spending, is really going to make them safe? Civil
libertarians who were quiet and compliant in the weeks following the attacks now
are wondering about measures like the Patriot Act, which loosens the laws of
evidence, the establishment of probable cause, and the rules governing the
jailing of suspects.

Public sentiment has not so far swung behind
those who worry about increased levels of surveillance and government access to
private information. It is impossible to know whether the long-threatened second
attack will harden a fearful populace, making people more likely to protect life
and limb than our individual liberties. If, after a second attack, none of the
new measures is proved to have outwitted those who want to kill large numbers of
innocents, how will the public and opinion makers react toward efforts by the
Bush administration to secure even more sweeping powers?

Cynics will point out that new federal powers
in the war on drugs, in immigration-control effects, border protection, and
computer surveillance are all things the Ashcroft-era Justice Department wanted
anyway but were unlikely to get before September of last year. But, at the same
time, elected officials are unlikely to fight against these new powers at a time
of national danger.

It’s a simple illustration of the
local-government conundrum: Should cities and counties accept federal
coordination, even when there’s no federal cash? For how long? Forever? If a new
terror attack happens, the new ways of doing business will seem fully justified.
If nothing happens, the new ways of doing business will seem self-evidently
successful.

In the first weeks after the September 11
attacks, architects and social theorists started to speculate about the future
utility of cities, of skyscrapers, of the whole modern array of built
environments making up modern American life. Conferences in New York and
Washington wondered aloud whether anyone would work—voluntarily—on the 75th
floor of a building, or would want to be in big crowds again. But, in more than
a dozen trips back to Manhattan’s skyscraper canyons, and during trips to
Chicago, San Francisco, Phoenix, Orlando, San Jose, and other metropolitan
areas, large and small, this reporter has come to believe that this hand
wringing is premature.

A longing for normal life has infused daily
life. Jalalabad and Kandahar seem far, far away. Fireworks displays have packed
parks, baseball games have filled stadiums, and airports have begun to fill up
again. The very relaxation that federal government officials warned us against
seems to be here. Despite the steady stream of alerts, only a minority of
Americans told a recent poll that they think another big attack is on the way.
People in shopping malls and on downtown streets tell me they’re more cautious.
Yes, but not in a way that’s radically changed their daily lives.

Despite goals announced for hiring new
personnel, for bag screening and for the assumption of responsibility for
airport security, federal agencies have not met their targets and may not do so
for many months to come. There have been some heated exchanges in hearings at
the Capitol over these shortcomings, but little public outcry has been heard,
even from the flying public.

Future
Measures
Nine months after the anthrax mailings that constituted
the most serious biological attack in American history, a trickle of federal
funds just started moving to localities to help pay for emergency measures in
case of bioterrorist attack. “This is only the first year, and in this context,
it’s going to take maybe five years to build the systems and capacity,” said
Thomas Milne of the National Association of County and City Health
Officials.

In the months since the first anthrax-laced
letters were detected at the Capitol, the ability of local agencies to deal with
such attacks appears to be little changed. The federal government, slow to
respond with one voice to the anthrax crisis, also has been slow in helping to
beef up local expertise in advance of another attack.

The president’s proposal to create a new
Department of Homeland Security has started to run into its first interference
from elected officials, who have begun to question the grouping of so many
unlike functions into a single department. The Brookings Institution has
followed this criticism with a comprehensive report that advised a go-slow
attitude toward clustering so many disparate federal departments into one super
agency.

In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times,
former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan noted the lack of local involvement
called for in the future Homeland Security Department. Riordan and his coauthor,
Professor Amy Zegart of UCLA, wrote that the federal government’s message to
cities and counties is clear: Help will not be coming any time soon. In this
absence of federal guidance, local agencies have gotten moving anyway, beginning
the work of coordinating their local response in case of attack.

After decades in which localities have been
told not to wait for the federal government to solve their problems, the lesson
appears to be hitting home. Only the federal government can put a navy to sea,
long-range bombers in the air, and a national strategy together to fight any
threat. But, to use the hard-earned parlance of the early 21st century, “first
responders” are local people. Local people will set the agenda for change close
to home and will reach, on the one hand, a level of accommodation to new
security measures or, on the other, a level of comfort with the risk of keeping
things as they were.

Sure, plenty has changed. As I write these
words, late one Washington, D.C., night, a military jet is unleashing its roar
over my neighborhood, a little more than a mile from the vice president’s house.
My mayor and city council are wrestling with an unexpected austerity budget,
after finding that extensive federal spending after September 11 will not make
up for the losses from tourism, conference business, and the dot-com
meltdown.

But as I talk to people around the country, I
am struck by how little has changed and by how determined Americans are that
change come only on their own terms. It’s a reassuring thing to find so little
panic. Citizens might be a little more panicky if they saw local governments’
budget meetings for next year.

Ray Suarez is a senior correspondent for
the television program The NewsHour with Jim Lehre Washington, D.C. He
was a keynote presenter at the ICMA 2002 Annual Conference in
Philadelphia.

Copyright © 2002, the International
City/County Management Association
(ICMA)