Local officials heralded Tom Ridge’s drop-in announcement last month that the region would receive as much as $65 million in homeland security funds this fiscal year. It is as much as L.A. has seen in the last three years combined.

They also say it’s nowhere near enough.

“If you compared us with the rest of the nation, we probably should have gotten about four times that amount, based on our critical infrastructure and the documented threats against Los Angeles,” said Cmdr. Mark Leap, assistant commanding officer of the Los Angeles Police Department’s counter-terrorism bureau.

While the region, referred to as the Los Angeles Urban Area, will receive up to $61.3 million from the federal government in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, funds cannot be allocated to what Leap said was the most pressing need manpower.

Still, the money can be spent on badly needed communications and intelligence sharing equipment, the sort of apparatus that allows first responders from disparate organizations to communicate during an emergency. The lack of that equipment hindered New York police and fire personnel from talking to each other soon after planes crashed into the World Trade Center’s twin towers.

“This new money is very, very needed,” said Terry Manning, the assistant chief heading the special operations unit of the Los Angeles Fire Department. “We know that gaps still exist in interoperability communications and in intelligence sharing. All the cities and all different agencies in the county must have access to accurate and timely information.”

While happy to have any financial help from the federal government, local law enforcement officials still feel the most pressing need is adding personnel.

The city of Los Angeles has channeled nearly $200 million from its coffers since the 2001 terrorist attacks for what has been broadly defined as homeland security. Most of that has been allocated to overtime police patrols around Los Angeles International Airport and the Port of Los Angeles, as well as first responder training and new equipment.

The latest grant, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security’s Urban Area Security Initiative, prohibits funding for personnel or other law enforcement programs that do not deal solely with anti-terrorism and first response.

“The federal government does not want to get into the business of hiring police officers, because at some point these grants are going to diminish or go away,” Leap said. “Then who is going to be paying for the salaries of these police officers?”

The initiative was designed to aid big cities whose needs were not met under the State Homeland Security Grant Program, which has been criticized for perceived inequities in the way it allocated funding. For instance, California is slated to receive $317.1 million, or $9.03 per capita, during fiscal year 2005-06. Wyoming’s $18.8 million allocation in the same period comes to $37.60 per capita, according to a Congressional Research Service Report.