The head of a construction agency overseeing the dismantling of a ground zero skyscraper wrote a memo three months before a fatal fire there warning its state owners that more resources were needed to take down the building safely.

The executive director of the Lower Manhattan Construction Command Center at the time, Charles Maikish, said in a May 25 memo that the state owners needed to add staff at the dilapidated former Deutsche Bank tower, where two firefighters were later killed in a blaze.

“We assumed this role on an interim basis in order to be good soldiers,” Mr. Maikish wrote to the chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., the state agency that owns the building, Avi Schick. “However, we also made it very clear that we could not perform it safely or efficiently without being provided the necessary resources.”

In May, Mr. Maikish also included a copy of a letter that he said he drafted in December addressed to the LMDC but never sent at the request of the office of the governor at the time, Governor Pataki. It expressed similar concerns about staff and funding for the project.

A spokesman for Mr. Maikish said the letter wasn’t sent because of assurances that more funding would soon be available from the administration of Governor Spitzer.

Excerpts of the memos appeared in yesterday’s New York Post.