The Quest for Hometown Security

"I've known Hal for 33 years," Davis said in a recent interview. "I don't care much for politics. I'm just a friend to him. We're just like brothers."

Rogers became a director of the bank and bought the institution with Davis and other local businessmen in the 1970s.

In financial disclosure forms filed this year, Rogers reported that he receives between $100,000 and $1 million a year on holdings of up to $5 million in Citizens Bancshares, the holding company for Citizens bank. Federal election records show that the bank also holds HALPAC's money. The bank's Web site lists Rogers as "Director Emeritus."

Davis also is a founding director of the Center for Rural Development, which was started in part with federal funding arranged by Rogers. The center houses the Southeast Kentucky Economic Development Corp., which also got its start thanks to Rogers.

The organization now works closely with Rogers's district office, along with several other lawmakers from Kentucky, on development deals and loans for homeland security contractors and companies seeking to move into the area, state records show.

The center's chief executive, Lonnie Lawson, initially told The Washington Post that up to 45 percent of the center's $20 million budget this year will come with Rogers's assistance. But Rogers later said in an interview that the center received the money on its own through a competitive grant process.

After speaking with Rogers recently, Lawson downplayed Rogers's role in arranging the center's funding. "We compete just like everyone else," Lawson said. "Obviously, we try to keep [Rogers's staff] in the loop where we are going for funding, but there is no undue influence."

Millions of dollars from the center and some of its occupants is kept at Citizens National Bank, Lawson said. Rogers said he has no control over where entities he helped create do their banking.

Lawson said that guiding companies to the region and finding federal funding for local development groups "is what any good congressman would do."

The center also is home to the National Institute for Hometown Security, which Rogers set up last year. The institute, along with the Kentucky Homeland Security University Consortium, also set up by Rogers, are at the heart of "Silicon Holler."

"These two organizations will put Kentuckians on the frontline of the war against terrorism while also helping to boost our economic development efforts by providing a platform to advance homeland security research and development," Rogers said in a Nov. 4, 2004, news release.

Rogers was joined at a news conference that day in Somerset by Tom Ridge, then the head of the Homeland Security Department. Ridge said the projects were funded with the "unique notion that the homeland is not secure until the hometown is secure."