The Department of Homeland Security has unveiled a new urban funding formula that will see regions at the highest risk of terrorist attack or natural disaster receive an increased share of grant money. A number of lawmakers and private groups have been asking for the change for years. So why isn’t everyone happy?

According to the Washington Post’s Dan Eggen, DHS secretary Michael Chertoff announced the changes last week. Eggen says the department has been under fire for years over complaints that “sparsely populated states such as Wyoming were receiving a proportionally greater share of homeland security money than populous jurisdictions, such as New York and Washington, that are much more likely to be attacked.”

Eggen says that for the fiscal year 2006, 35 metropolitan regions will be eligible to compete for the $765 million contained in the DHS’s Urban Area Security Initiative, its largest grant program. Eleven other urban areas that have received grants in the past, including Indianapolis and Toledo, may still compete but Eggen says they “are being warned they may be dropped if they cannot show a compelling need.”

The smaller list, according to Eggen, is partly because of a funding cut by Congress, which slashed $90 million from the program this year. Chertoff, however, also says the changes are part of the department’s broader effort to distribute money based on measurable risk factors, and said that such grants are “not party favors to be distributed as widely as possible.”

“We’ve looked at what happened in the hurricanes, we’ve looked at what happened over in London with the terrorist attacks on the rail lines, and that has reinforced the idea that we have to consider consequences, vulnerabilities and threats,” Chertoff told reporters at a news conference.