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Senate Legislation Reauthorizing AFG/SAFER Introduced, Reported Out of Committee

• Guarantees 25 percent of AFG funds each to career, combination, and volunteer fire departments, respectively. “Paid on-call/stipend” departments would be considered combination departments for the purpose of applying for AFG.
• Increases from five to 10 percent the funds set aside for the Fire Prevention and Safety (FP&S) grant program and increases the maximum award amount through FP&S from $1 million to $1.5 million.
• Makes state fire training agencies eligible to receive up to three percent of AFG funds.
• Allows FEMA to waive the matching requirement for fire departments that can demonstrate financial hardship.
• Establishes new maximum award amounts:
  • $9 million for departments serving a population of 2.5 million or more.
  • $6 million for departments serving a population of between 1 million and 2.5 million.
  • $3 million for departments serving a population of between 500,000 and 1 million.
  • $2 million for departments serving a population of between 100,000 and 500,000.
  • Departments serving a population of 100,000 or less will continue to have a grant cap of $1 million.
• Allows for the creation of fire safety research centers, which would be joint projects between a national fire service organization and a university and would focus on firefighter health and life safety.

• Makes national organizations eligible to apply for SAFER recruitment and retention funds.
• Eliminates the $100,000 cap per-firefighter hired using SAFER funds.
• Allows FEMA to waive the matching requirement for fire departments that can demonstrate financial hardship.

• The local matching requirement through AFG for departments protecting communities of 50,000 or more is 15 percent in the Senate bill compared with 10 percent in the House bill. The local matching requirement for departments protecting communities of 50,000 or less would remain the same as current law in both the House and Senate bills (10 percent for communities of 50,000-20,000 and five percent for communities of less than 20,000).
• The Senate bill establishes a five percent matching requirement for FP&S grants while the House bill eliminates the matching through FP&S. Under current law, nonprofit organizations have no FP&S match while fire departments have to put up the same local match as they would through AFG. The NVFC is advocating eliminating the match for fire departments through FP&S in order to encourage more applications and to provide parity with nonprofit organizations.
• The House bill reduces the length of a SAFER hiring grant from four years under current law to three years. The Senate bill does not alter current law.
• The House bill sets the local matching requirement for SAFER hiring grants at 20 percent per year while the Senate bill reduces the requirement to 25 percent. Under current law, the match starts out at 10 percent and increases each year.
• The Senate bill specifies that peer reviewers of AFG applications from career, combination, and volunteer fire departments as well as nonaffiliated EMS organizations be primarily drawn from the ranks of the same type of agency. The Senate bill also allows for the inclusion of non-fire service-based EMS representation on criteria development panels. The House bill would not alter the peer review or criteria development processes currently in place. The NVFC believes that the AFG peer review and criteria development processes have been extremely successful and do not need to be altered legislatively.
• The House bill allows for up to two percent of AFG funds to be available for grants to non-fire service-based volunteer EMS agencies. Under current law, which is not altered by the Senate bill, volunteer and career EMS agencies are eligible to receive up to two percent of AFG funds. 
• The Senate bill would authorize AFG and SAFER at $950 million per year, respectively, and allow the authorization level to increase at the rate of inflation. The House bill extends the existing authorization levels of $1 billion for AFG and $1.05 billion for SAFER through FY 2015.
• The Senate bill sunsets at the end of FY 2015, which means that all of the changes in the bill would expire if they are not extended. In such a scenario, the U.S. Code governing AFG and SAFER would revert back to their current incarnation. The House bill has no sunset provision, which means that it would remain in the U.S. Code even if the program is not reauthorized.
• The Senate bill limits individuals AFG awards to no more than one percent of the overall appropriation in a given fiscal year. The House bill has no similar limit. Under current law, awards cannot exceed .5 percent of the overall appropriation.

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Kimberly Ettinger

Director of Communications

202-887-5700 ext. 19

kettinger@nvfc.org

David Finger

Director of Government Relations

202-887-5700 ext. 12

dfinger@nvfc.org