Requesting Money from the AFG

Quick Question for the experts:

Our quint is in excess of 22 years old and needs to be replaced (open cab, no pump, etc., etc.). We will be submitting an application for this years AFG to replace it with a new quint, and my question is this:

If a new tower ladder (quint) costs in the neighborhood of $750,000, would it be better for us to ask for say $500,000 and incur the rest? Obviously, $500,000 is far better than a Dear John letter.

If anyone has any experiences with this type of dilemma please let me know.

Woah there cowboy! You better first look at how many trucks over $300K even got funded at all last year; 18 out of 660 and I only think one was over $500K. Are you urban or suburban? You better be running in the thousands of calls per year and have a population in the 500K range to even think about that big a truck.;)

Keith, if you have $250K to put towards a truck, on average that's 3-4 years worth of payments, so that begs the question of why you haven't bought it yet.

And to back up the esteemed gentleman from Florida, you have a better chance of getting your $1 back from a scratch off ticket than getting over $700K for a truck. Only happened twice so far.