Texas Fires: An Emergency?

Texas is experiencing severe wildfires in 2011 with the worst months yet to come. So far about a million acres have been destroyed. Gov. Rick Perry has declared a state of emergency and requested the White House to do the same, but while the forest service has sent several firefighters to Texas, Washington is yet to respond to the emergency request. This has Perry fuming. What's going on here?

Going through the reporting the following points emerge:

1. Perry is accusing Obama of neglecting Texas while declaring emergency in Alabama due to the tornado damages. The not so subtle innuendo being that Obama is letting Texas burn due to political considerations. It's not clear to me why Alabama would be any higher than Texas on Obama's love list. It's more likely that the human deaths in Alabama played a bigger role.
2. The main game seems to be about money. Declaration of emergency would allow 75% of the costs to be covered by the federal government. Texas has already run up a tab of $23 million with the federal government and now they want more. And meanwhile (from the CS Monitor) "The state legislature, meanwhile, recently proposed slicing $34 million out of the Texas Forest Service's $109 million biennial budget, with most of the cuts coming from training and equipment grants for volunteer crews who deal with wildfires."

But there has been no response from Washington so it's not clear what is the thinking from the administration.