AUGUSTA – Maine’s ability to respond to a possible terrorist attack or natural disaster will be devastated if Congress adopts President Bush’s fiscal year 2005 budget, say both state and local officials.

“We are looking at funding for the personnel that would handle our response being cut more than in half,” said Art Cleaves, director of the Maine Emergency Management Agency. “It would set us back on the timelines we set back in 2002 for training and equipment by about, I would say, by five years.”

Cleaves said training for first responders would take longer, and the equipment needed by police, fire and other emergency personnel would delay federal officials’ goals. He said the ability to respond to any sort of disaster would be severely lessened, with his staff cut from 18 to just eight.

“And I think we will lose almost all, if not all, of our 16 county directors,” he said. “Those are the people, the positions that we used to coordinate during the (1998) ice storm and would use in a terrorist event.”

It is not just state funds that would be cut in the president’s proposed budget. Federal grants to local fire departments are cut from $750 million this year to $500 million in the proposed budget. The money has been crucial to fire departments across the state, 90 percent of them staffed by volunteers, to get equipment needed to handle such potential disasters as a train derailments or terrorist attacks.

“I am very disappointed,” said William Hussey, chief of the Peru Volunteer Fire Department. “He is not supporting the firefighters of the United States like he did after 9-11 when he stood up there on the fire truck and said how much he was going to help.”

Hussey, president of the Maine Fire Chiefs Association, said many departments hold bake sales and other fund-raising events to buy and maintain the equipment they use. He said with the terrorist threats, firefighters are clearly on the front line and need proper equipment to deal with the situation, and local governments do not have the resources to buy the equipment needed.

Police officials are also unhappy with the cuts.

“I cannot believe they eliminated the money for interoperable communications,” said Robert Schwarz, executive director of the Maine Chiefs of Police Association. “Everybody knows we have communications problems and they need to be fixed. In a disaster, we need to have reliable communications between all the agencies.”