170 The purpose of an emergency budget is not to hit the numbers, but to ensure that when a major emergency strikes, funding is in place for rescue and repair.

Deadly Twisters Renew Questions About Pressure on Emergency Budgets

By KEVIN SACK

ATLANTA — Emergency management officials in Southern states said recent budget cutting did not limit their ability to respond to the scores of tornadoes that touched down in six states on Friday and Saturday, leaving at least 44 people dead, injuring hundreds and causing devastating damage to houses, businesses and farmland.
But the officials said the punishing string of storms, and the anticipation of hurricane season, would bring renewed scrutiny of whether emergency preparedness and response was being compromised by fiscal pressures at all levels of government.
Nationwide, even as states have slashed their budgets in consecutive years, spending on state emergency management systems has actually increased slightly, according to the National Emergency Management Association. The accumulated budgets of those agencies in the 50 states and the District of Columbia totaled $316.8 million in the 2010 fiscal year, up from $294.3 million in 2009.
While some of the affected states have trimmed their emergency response budgets in recent years, officials there said they had managed the reductions by reducing spending on travel, training and public education, not on direct disaster response efforts.
In North Carolina, which was hardest hit and where there were at least 22 deaths from storms that hit Saturday night, damage assessment teams of federal, state and local workers began touring 11 counties on Monday, said Patty L. McQuillan, a spokeswoman for the state’s Division of Emergency Management.
A spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it had dispatched 12 damage assessment teams to North Carolina, three to Mississippi and one to Alabama. A team was in Oklahoma over the weekend.
Ms. McQuillan said North Carolina’s emergency response agency had lost two positions to budget cuts last year — an administrative assistant and an emergency planner — leaving the agency with 176 employees. The reductions did not diminish the state’s response, she said.
This year, Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat, and the state’s Republican-led legislature are considering proposals to merge all of the state’s public safety, corrections and emergency management agencies into a single department.
State Representative Leo Daughtry, a Republican who is chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee for those agencies, said the storms would give lawmakers a reason to further study that move. But he said he did not anticipate they would change the sentiment toward reorganizing departments to save money and simplify lines of command.
Ms. Perdue said on NBC’s “Today” show on Monday that she had spoken to President Obama and met with officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She said she expected a federal emergency declaration by the end of the week.
In Alabama, where there were seven deaths, Gov. Robert Bentley recently ordered 15 percent cuts from all state agencies for the current fiscal year in order to close a $100 million shortfall. Art Faulkner, the director of the state’s Emergency Management Agency, said he had eliminated 4 positions in recent months, leaving 103, and would most likely cut two more.
But he said the reductions primarily meant that his staff was communicating with local officials more by telephone and video conferencing, rather than traveling the state.
“We made cuts in the areas that were the least critical to our ability to respond to these types of storms,” Mr. Faulkner said.
Despite the devastation in places where the tornados touched down, insurance officials said property insurance rates were unlikely to rise as a result.
Insurers can’t arbitrarily raise rates” after a string of destructive storms, said Loretta Worters, a spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute. Only if a new trend were to emerge over several years would companies then go to that state’s regulators and argue a rate increase was justified, she said.

Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta, and Mary Williams Walsh from New York.