NYC Mayor Bloomberg Says Security for Terror Trial to Cost $200 Million a Year

In a letter obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, Mayor Michael Bloomberg put the cost at $216 million for the first year after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other suspects arrive in Manhattan from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After that, the mayor said it would cost $200 million annually for as long as the men are detained in the city -- mainly overtime for extra New York Police Department patrols.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly had given an initial estimate of $75 million a year but later warned it could be higher. A recent NYPD analysis came up with the totals cited by the mayor.

City officials and Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., have called on the federal government to foot the bill.

"As 9/11 was an attack on the entire nation, we need the federal government to shoulder the significant costs we will incur and ease this burden," Bloomberg wrote in the letter dated Tuesday to the Office of Management and Budget in Washington.

Schumer has asked the Obama administration to include the trial security costs for the NYPD, the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service as a separate item in the proposed 2011 federal budget.

"Not a nickel of these costs should be borne by the New York taxpayers because terrorism is a federal responsibility and this is a federal trial," the senator said Wednesday in a statement.