URBANA - Police spent nearly 10 hours trying to persuade Roger Adams of Alton not to shoot himself in the head.

He had already doused his own home with gasoline, driven to Schneider-National trucking in Edwardsville around 2 a.m. and slammed an 18-wheeler through a warehouse. Just before noon on Jan. 28, the 52-year-old pointed a gun at his own head, pulled the trigger and died the next day.

In the intervening hours, about four dozen police officers from other parts of the state converged on the Edwardsville warehouse where an armed man had holed up. They were equipped with tactical gear, bomb robots with night vision capabilities, armored vehicles topped with turrets and a state-of-the-art mobile command trailer with antennae reaching into the sky.

The sophistication of the equipment is a remnant of richer times, and the response was far from a last-minute improvisation. It had been coordinated long in advance by the Illinois Law Enforcement Alarm System, an inconspicuous, post-9/11 agency housed in the old Champaign County Nursing Home building in Urbana.

"It's a very sporadic thing," said Alton Police Chief David Hayes, who is in charge of his region's tactical response team. The team was called out 39 times in 2010 and 14 times last year.

ILEAS (pronounced "eye-lee-us") technically calls the group a WMD Special Response Team, and there are nine of them under the agency's oversight throughout the state. The acronym stands for weapons of mass destruction, a phrase that helped spawn a war in the Middle East following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

But just like the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, enthusiasm for ILEAS is sputtering out. The agency depends on funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and Congress' interest in spending money to fight terrorism is waning as other priorities overtake the federal budget, ILEAS Executive Director Jim Page said.

"The politicians say, 'We've spent $30 billion on homeland security. We should be prepared by now,'" Page said. "To a certain degree, they're probably right. The problem is, preparedness is a daily thing. You don't prepare one time, then you're prepared forever, because if that's true we'd all still be wearing Civil Defense stuff from the '50s."

In flusher times like 2004, ILEAS received $13.3 million for assistance to local police agencies throughout the state. The funding took a hit in 2005 but spiked to $14.6 million in 2006 — just after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and the federal government decided the nation needed to prepare for all kinds of disasters, natural or unnatural. The theory was that a response to a natural disaster is similar in many ways to a response to a terrorism-related disaster, Page said.

At the southern tip of Illinois, Massac County Sheriff Ted Holder had 10 deputies working under him in spring 2011 when the Ohio River flooded. Holder put his deputies, six dispatchers and seven jailers on mandatory 12-hour shifts, and they were still short-handed.

"The people over there (at ILEAS) asked me what I needed," Holder said. "I told them I needed more deputies, more dispatchers, more jailers. Then they asked me how many I needed and how soon I needed them there."

The first reinforcements showed up hours later. It was ILEAS' mobile field force, a prearranged unit comprising officers from all over the state. Page describes it as a portable police department.

Holder estimated that there were 15 to 20 people needing rescue from the floodwaters.

"We didn't have any of the equipment to go out and do it," Holder said.

But the ILEAS team did.

In the past, responses to natural disasters in Illinois were more disjointed, Page said. He was a lieutenant with the Urbana Police Department when a tornado tore through town in 1996, and he was working the phones during the first night shift.

"We were begging for help," Page said. "Sheriff's office couldn't come because they were dealing with Ogden (which had been hit by a tornado too). U of I sent some people, Champaign sent some people, but we needed more people than we have here locally."

The response was largely improvised, he said.

"That's how it was," Page said. "You just made it up as you went along.

"Now, one call."

ILEAS officials are already preparing a team similar to last year's Massac County reinforcements to help the Chicago Police Department in its response to the NATO and G-8 summits this May. Hosted in a different city each year, the events have a history of provoking protests and, in some cases, violence. Page said it is likely that officers from Champaign-Urbana will travel to Chicago to assist.

Those teams and their equipment were assembled when ILEAS had money to spare. But when the recession tightened its grip on the economy in 2008, the agency's funding was cut nearly in half to $6.9 million. The cutting continued, and last year ILEAS was informed it would have $4 million available to distribute to local police agencies throughout the state. It is the first time funding has dropped below the $6 million mark, which Page believes the agency needs to stay alive.

Last week, a bill was introduced in the General Assembly that would provide a steady source of funding for the agency from criminal cases.

The disappearance of ILEAS would have a profound impact on the Champaign County economy. ILEAS brings in thousands of visitors every year through its training sessions, and Page estimates the out-of-town trainees have injected $9.9 million into the local economy in 10 years.

A hotel manager who gets much of that business declined to comment for fear of tipping off competitors.

The agency also pays more than $400,000 annually in rent to Champaign County to use the old nursing home which, among other uses, officials have turned into administrative offices, a training center and an auxiliary hospital in case other medical centers are overwhelmed or rendered uninhabitable during a disaster.

Now, a lot of the money ILEAS receives goes to reimburse local departments for the overtime pay for officers who come to train at ILEAS. The agency does not have any money for new equipment, other than to replace items that break, Page said.

But with the benefit of hindsight and knowing that some post-9/11 scares never came to be, Page readily acknowledges that some items may have been purchased in haste.

"There's always the fear that you've bought the wrong things, that you prepared for the wrong things or the money gets wasted," Page said.

When anthrax scared the nation, ILEAS focused on preparing for chemical threats. The agency bought 24,000 gas masks, one for every police officer in the state, and 17,000 replacement filters. The original gas mask purchase cost $6 million, and the agency has spent $80,000 annually for seven years to keep the program going.

When bird flu was in the spotlight, ILEAS bought 100,000 face masks — a $30,695 expenditure in 2006.

Now, most of the gas mask filters are expiring, and the face masks are sitting on pallets, waiting for the unlikely outbreak of an infectious disease.

"Some things, under the pressure of post-9/11, that we bought and did were framed in that reference," Page said.

A yellow Geiger counter stamped with a Civil Defense logo on his shelf is a reminder of that. Page found several of them while cleaning out a Champaign County ESDA garage a few years ago. The county must have bought the Geiger counters in the 1960s or 1970s and stored them in the garage, he speculates, and there they sat for 40 or 50 years.

Homeland Security funds in Illinois came under scrutiny last month when the federal department's inspector general audited spending in Cook County. The money in Cook County is managed separately and differently from ILEAS, but the report found that officials wasted millions on faulty equipment without proper oversight from FEMA.

Page said ILEAS is much more careful with its money and clears all purchases with its oversight boards before it spends a dime.

In 2006, ILEAS paid $221,685 for each of nine Lenco Bearcats, heavily armored vehicles used for SWAT operations. They are impenetrable to bullets, and they can be sealed so SWAT teams can enter contaminated areas. In active-shooter situations, police can drive the truck to an injured person lying on the ground, drop out the floor and evacuate the victim.

"There were those that thought that that was kind of a luxury," Page said. "But to be quite frank, it has been one of the best things we've ever bought."

Hayes, who leads the tactical team that responded to last weekend's potential shooter in Edwardsville, said he does not think it is a luxury at all.

"This guy with the gun, you can't put police officers out there where they're in the line of fire," Hayes said. "When you're in a ballistic vehicle, you can drive right up to where a guy is holding a gun and know your officers won't be harmed."

Page said Bearcats all over the state are pocked with bullet marks.

"I would argue that it is not a luxury but a necessity in today's tactical environment," Hayes said. "If you do not have ballistic armor you're behind the times."

It might seem excessive until there is a disaster in someone's hometown, Page said.

"You don't need it until you do," he said.

This story appeared in print on Feb. 5.