The Department of Homeland Security's Office for Domestic Preparedness will accept applications for the SAFER grants under the Assistance to Firefighters Grants program through June 28.

The SAFER (Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response) program has $65 million this year to provide direct federal 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.

The same Web site that has been the nexus for the AFG program (www.firegrantsupport.com) is the center of support materials for SAFER, including grant program guidelines, an online tutorial, frequently-asked questions and applications. No on-site workshops are planned for SAFER.

Although the SAFER 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 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. 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,” said Cowan.

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 comply with 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 posted a link on its Web site to specific sections of the 1710 and 1720 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.
• 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. The peer-review process will provide checks and balances to ensure that funding is distributed. The grants are competitive and based on need.
• 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.
• SAFER grantees must also maintain their staffing at a level "equal or greater than their staffing level at the time of application."
• 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).
•  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.
• “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.
  

Cowan said his understanding of the language of that last bullet point was to protect existing fire department budgets, which are already suffering a lot of shrinkage. “What they’re getting at is if a municipality or other grant recipient has been the victim of budget reductions that are significant in the three-year period, then clearly their grant proposal could be intended to supplement what should already be the fire department’s budget,” Cowan said. “We have that issue, as you know, in the FIRE Grants as well, on the maintenance of expenditures.… The simple intent is to make sure that you’re not using federal funds to supplant or supplement what would in other circumstances be the municipality or jurisdiction’s budgetary requirements.”

Cowan said there’s no cap on the amount of individual applications because that’s the way fire service organizations – who participated in meetings to help draw up the grant guidelines -- wanted it.

So what’s to keep one big-city department from soaking up a larger-than-fair share of the already small $65 million pie? Cowan said peer-reviewers are very mindful of the cost-effectiveness of the proposals that come in. “My experience in the last five years has been that when we go into the peer-review process there will be an evening out. Generally, peer-reviewers don’t like large proposals. If you had two extremely worthy proposals -- one for $10,000 and one for a million -- I’ll bet you a paycheck the peer review would rate the $10,000 one higher.”

Peer reviews 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.

Obviously, with only $65 million available this year, the funding available won't go nearly far enough to meet the needs of understaffed fire departments across the nation. Do the math: The $100,000 maximum federal contribution for hiring each firefighter will fund about 650 positions.

Fire service organizations are urging their members to press their Congressional representatives for more funding for the SAFER program in DHS fiscal year 2006 appropriations, which will be decided in coming months.

Congress authorized the SAFER program to receive up to $7.6 billion over the first seven years.