On Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security's Office for Domestic Preparedness announced the grant application period and posted program guidelines for the SAFER grants. Applications for the SAFER grants will be accepted May 31-June 28.

An online tutorial and frequently asked questions will be posted by the middle of next week, according to Assistance to Firefighters Grant program office staff. The grant application form will go up on the site on or about May 31. All will be posted online at www.firegrantsupport .com.

The SAFER (Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response) grants program has $65 million this year to provide direct grants to help career, volunteer and combination fire departments with staffing shortages. Specifically, the grants will provide federal funding for hiring firefighters and incentives for volunteer recruitment and retention.

Although the grants are new this year, any department that has applied for a FIRE grant will find the process very familiar, said Brian Cowan, director of the AFG program, and Glenn Gaines, an AFG consultant. The online applications for SAFER grants will have the same look and feel, and even have many of the same screens, as FIRE grants applications. These new grants will also follow the same peer-review and technical-review process that the USFA successfully used to award the FIRE Grants since 2001. Departments will even be able to use the same login and password used for FIRE Grant applications, said Gaines.

For hiring firefighters, SAFER provides five-year grants with a maximum federal contribution of $100,000, spread over four years. Each year, the federal contribution will decrease and the local matching requirement will increase, tapering to zero federal money in year five. According to program guidance, the funding is spread out this way:

Year 1: 90% of the actual costs or $36,000
Year 2: 80% of the actual costs or $32,000
Year 3: 50% of the actual costs or $20,000
Year 4: 30% of the actual costs or $12,000
Year 5: No Federal share -- all costs borne by grantee

For volunteer recruitment and retention, SAFER provides four-year grants, and there is no requirement for matching funds. There also is no cap for individual grant requests and the grants are available to volunteer and combination fire departments and to associations that support volunteer firefighters, including state associations.

The goal of SAFER program is to help the departments increase their cadre of frontline firefighters. “Ultimately, the SAFER grants’ goal is for grantees to enhance their ability to attain 24-hour staffing and thus assuring their communities have adequate protection from fire and fire-related hazards,” the program guidance states.

The yardsticks for “adequate protection” by fire departments seeking staffing, for the purpose of SAFER grants, will be NFPA 1710 (Organization and Deployment of Fire Suppression Operations, Emergency Medical Operations and Special Operations to the Public by Career Fire Departments) and NFPA 1720, the volunteer version of the deployment standard. “Departments applying for the grants will need to state in their applications whether they are seeking to meet the requirements of 1710 or 1720, according to Cowan. Combination fire departments may elect to meet either 1710 or 1720.

The SAFER grants focus only on the staffing sections of these two standards. The NFPA has established a special link to provide access to the standards at www.nfpa.org. Gaines also notes that the online tutorial will contain a hyperlink to the specific sections of the standards that apply.

Some other key points from the program guidance:

• Volunteer and combination fire departments are eligible to apply for both the hiring of firefighters and the recruitment and retention of volunteer firefighters activity on the same application. Career fire departments may apply for funding only in the hiring of firefighters.
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• Organizations that support volunteerism or otherwise have an interest in volunteer firefighters, such as state volunteer firefighter organizations, may apply only for recruitment and retention of volunteer firefighters.
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• There is no funding limit for any individual application or any limit to the number of positions eligible for funding per application. However, applicants requesting large numbers of firefighters must make a strong case for their request.
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• If funded by SAFER, the position must remain filled until the end of the five-year grant period. Failure to fully fund positions in the fifth year will be considered as defaulting on the grant agreement and may require the return of all or a portion of the federal funds disbursed under the grant.
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• SAFER grantees must also maintain their staffing at a level "equal or greater than their staffing level at the time of application.”
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• Only full-time positions will be funded; part-time positions will not be funded unless they are combined to equal a full-time position (i.e. job-sharing is allowed).
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• Call volume will be factored into the initial evaluation. Departments that respond to a high number of incidents will receiver higher consideration than departments from similar communities (urban, suburban, and rural) that respond to few incidents.
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• Departments that have had their budgets severely cut in recent years may not be eligible. “Potential applicants must be aware that eligibility is contingent upon a stable budget. Grants will not be awarded to a municipality or other recipient whose annual operational budget has been reduced below 80% of the average annual funding in the three years prior to the date of application. Such a condition will be an automatic disqualification,” the guidance states.
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Peer reviews from members of other fire departments organizations and technical reviews of the grant applications are scheduled for July. The AFG staff plans to begin awarding the grants in August.

For more details, see www.firegrantsupport.com, call the AFG Help Desk at 866-274-0960 or e-mail firegrants@dhs.gov.