Editorial: Why was Las Vegas bypassed?

Thursday, May 22, 2003 | 9:01 a.m.

In the days following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., the Sun reported that five of the 19 hijackers had spent time in Las Vegas. To this day law enforcement agencies have not been able to say definitively what they were doing here. Equally unnerving was the testimony of a government witness in a federal case in Detroit, who recounted how members of an alleged terrorism sleeper cell had talked about targeting Las Vegas. These two facts alone should have automatically placed Las Vegas on the Department of Homeland Security's list of 30 cities to receive a share of special preparedness funding for urban areas.

Yet when the list was announced May 14, cities such as Tampa, Pittsburgh, Denver, Honolulu, Long Beach, Houston and Dallas were there, but not Las Vegas. Also on the list to share in a $500 million allocation were obvious choices such as New York, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles. But Las Vegas was only conspicuous by its absence. The Department of Homeland Security said it took into consideration "threat information, critical infrastructure and population density."

We're not suggesting the other cities were unworthy of funding. But what city other than Las Vegas has documented visitations by Sept. 11 terrorists for unknown reasons? What other city has been named in a federal terrorism trial as a target? What city has infrastructure more critical than Hoover Dam on its doorstep? What city can claim a faster growth rate than Las Vegas? We wish the Department of Homeland Security had evaluated these questions. It also could have noted that McCarran International Airport serves 36 million passengers a year.

Sheriff Bill Young was right when he said he found it "incredible" that Las Vegas was bypassed for this funding. Emergency responders here are in critical need of the training and equipment the money could have provided, he said. Nevada's congressional delegation will be asking the Department of Homeland Security for an explanation. We can't imagine how any answer it provides could be justifiable.