1. Hiring of Firefighters Activity.The goal of the Hiring of Firefighters Activity is to award grants directly to volunteer, combination, and career fire departments to help them increase the number of frontline, active firefighters with a goal of ultimately assuring the department has adequate personnel to respond to and safely perform at an incident scene, thus providing the community protection from fire and fire-related hazards. This activity provides 5-year grants to assist fire departments in paying a portion of the salaries of newly hired firefighters. These newly hired positions must be in addition to currently authorized and/or funded active firefighter positions. Grantees are required to match an increasing proportion of the salary awarded over a 4-year period; in the fifth year of the grant, the grantee must absorb the entire cost of any positions awarded as a result of the grant.
The Federal share of salaries and associated benefits is limited to a total of $105,425 per position over the course of the performance period. There is no funding limit for any 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.
2. Recruitment and Retention of Volunteer Firefighters Activity. The goal of this activity is to create a net increase in the number of trained, certified, and competent firefighters capable of safely responding to emergencies likely to occur within the fire department geographic response area... The primary focus is the recruitment and retention of volunteer firefighters who are involved with or trained in the operations of firefighting and emergency response. Volunteer, paid-on-call, and combination fire departments as well as local and statewide volunteer firefighter interest organizations are eligible to receive grants in this Activity.
While many different types of recruitment and retention activities may be eligible for funding, it is important to link the R&R activity being requested to an identified R&R issue or problem within the applicant’s department. With proper justification, applications for assistance in the Recruitment and Retention of Volunteer Firefighters could include activities that would require as many as four years to complete. There is no local match requirement for this activity and there are no maximum Federal share limits.