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The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) will receive $4 million in federal Homeland Security funds through the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) grant program this year.

The authority will use the funds to build an alternate operations control center (OCC) to replace WMATA’s current facility located at the agency’s downtown D.C. headquarters. Once the new facility is operational, the downtown control center will become a back-up OCC.

Building a new OCC has been a top priority for WMATA since 2002, when the Federal Transit Administration and U.S. Department of Homeland Security conducted risk assessments of the authority’s system and named the control center WMATA’s No. 1 security vulnerability.

WMATA also will use a portion of the grant to improve reliability of the radio system used by the region’s fire departments in underground Metrorail stations and tunnels.

For 2006, the National Capital Region, comprising the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia, received a total of $46.4 million in UASI funds, a 40 percent decrease compared with 2005’s $77.5 million allotment.