With the Utah National Guard low on available troops and even lower on equipment, some in the Beehive State are reacting nervously to President Bush's call to place citizen-soldiers on the U.S.-Mexican border.

"Right now, if you had another catastrophic disaster, the Guard would not be ready," said Tom Panuzio, a former Federal Emergency Management Agency official. "Now, it appears the president wants to further decrease the readiness of the Guard, by federalizing more of them."

Panuzio, a Utah native who served in the disaster relief agency in Florida following Hurricane Andrew in 1992, is now an outspoken critic of federal and state disaster preparedness. He contends military and private sector resources are being mishandled by disaster planners.

"I just would hate to see another situation like Hurricane Katrina, where you just didn't have enough troops on the ground quick enough," he said.

More than 3,000 Louisiana National Guard members were in Iraq when Katrina struck - a fact critics say contributed to a slow emergency response there.

The president's proposal would place thousands of troops along the 2,000-mile Mexican border - but comes at a time when Western states are preparing for summer wildfires and Southern states are bracing for hurricane season.

It's unclear how many troops will be used and there is yet no indication of the states from which they will be drawn.

But at a time in which more than 1,000 Utah Guard members are deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, even those expressing support for a border-enforcement plan stressed caution.

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. said Monday he wanted assurances that the border enforcement plan would be temporary and that Utah would maintain enough Guard troops to handle problems at home, such as forest fires or flooding.

Huntsman, who along with 13 other governors has called for comprehensive immigration reform, says the troops serving on the border should come from the usual summer call-up of two to three weeks for soldiers.

Bush's nationally televised address may be a move to shore up support among members of his own party.

Jeff Hartley, executive director of the Utah Republican Party, said the immigration debate is driving a wedge between Republican loyalists. Some, like Bush, support a guest-worker program; others want all undocumented immigrants deported.

"There is only one issue the party is united on and that is we need better border security," he said.

The call comes at a time when National Guard members, once making up more than 40 percent of combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, have a decreasing presence in forward-deployed posts. Army officials recently announced intentions to reduce the number even further.

But defense experts note that troop number alone does not equate to preparedness.

The head of the National Guard Bureau, Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, said in February that his U.S.-based units have just about a third of the equipment they are supposed to keep on hand. Guard officials have more recently placed the figure as low as 26 percent.

"The equipment sent to Afghanistan and Iraq includes satellite phones, generators, equipment that would be vital in an emergency here," Panuzio said.

Another potentially important tool for home front missions: Black Hawk helicopters. Utah's entire reserve of the multipurpose aircraft, used extensively during times of disaster, is currently with an Army Guard unit training in Texas. The unit and its helicopters are scheduled to be shipped out to Iraq at the end of the summer.

Pete Adams, executive officer of the Utah-based 2-211th Aviation Battalion, said the state has been loaned two Black Hawks, one from South Dakota and another from Wyoming, to use in the interim.

"We definitely would like more, but we understand that the two we have is probably all we're going to wind up with for a while," Adams said. "We're drawing most of our contingency plans around these two helicopters."

Looking back on past disasters - only one or two Black Hawks have been called upon in the most recent of Utah's fires, floods and winter storms - Adams said the two aircraft should suffice.

In a greater catastrophe, he said, the state would turn to its neighbors for help.

And that may be the way things work out for some time to come. Federal-level Guard officials say re-equipping state-based units to ensure they may accomplish their various home-front missions will not be quick or cheap.

"We're talking about a program that is going to take years to realize and billions of dollars," said Guard spokesman Mark Allen.

The Bush administration has stressed that properly trained, well-equipped and immediately available Guard troops are essential to homeland security and disaster response.

But a Government Accountability Office report released hours before Bush's speech said the military's ability to respond to future catastrophes "may be limited if it cannot involuntarily mobilize reserve component members - particularly if large portions of the active and National Guard forces are unavailable due to other mission requirements."

Homeland Security officials in Utah, meanwhile, say they are continuing to count on the availability of Guard members and equipment.

"Going back, and talking to several people here, there has not been any instance that anyone could think about when we asked for help and the National Guard wasn't able to provide it," said Derek Jensen, spokesman for Utah's Division of Homeland Security. "This isn't the first time that foreign conflicts and other things have required their support outside the state. We have a lot of confidence in the Guard's ability to continue to help us when we need."

Rep. Jim Matheson, Utah's lone Democrat in Congress, noted that he has voted to allow Guard troops to help with Homeland Security concerns, but "it needs to be in a temporary context," he said, echoing the sentiments of several of his Republican colleagues.

"What we really need to do is give the border security what they need to do their job," Matheson said.

He added that his reaction to the president's proposal is that "we're asking a lot of the National Guard and I want to make sure the National Guard is in a position that this [request] can be met."

mlaplante@sltrib.com

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Tribune reporter Matt

Canham contributed to this report.