The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the United State Fire Administration announced Tuesday that they received 19,949 applications for the 2003 Assistance to Firefighters Grant program, amounting to a total request of about $2.5 billion.
There is $750 million available for this year's grant program, far less than the amount requested by the nation's firefighters, but twice as much money as was available last year.
The USFA Grants Program staff has completed their early review of the applications. The peer review process began last week and is expected to take three weeks to complete, with the first award announcement expected in early June.
"Fire service personnel have once again come together to identify the necessary equipment and resources they need to better serve their communities," said R. David Paulison, USFA Administrator, in a prepared statement. "Although we had a one week delay at the beginning of the application process, it now appears we will be making our first announcements almost a month ahead of the 2002 program. This positive pace is due to the efforts of the Nation's firefighters."
The requests came from all 50 states plus Washington D.C. and four territories: Guam, the Northern Marianas, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
The states that put in the most requests were Pennsylvania, with 1,660 applications and New York, with 1,245 applications. These were the only states to put in over 1,000 requests.
Pennsylvania requested the most money by far, asking for a total of $216,039,720. No other state even came close to asking for $200 million, but several requested over $100 million.
New Jersey requested a total of $160,484,820 followed by New York with $134,993,454; Illinois with $103,575,857; Texas with $105,572,477; and Ohio with $104,937,005.
California came in with an overall request of $95 million, close to the $100 million mark, from a total of only 589 applications, and New Jersey reached that amount with 509 applications. Each of the other states around the $100 million mark had at least 800 applications. Despite its large size and population, California had only a few more applicants than Alabama, which had 586 applicants, Iowa which had 587 applicants, and Wisconsin which had 585. These states asked for between $55 million and $63 million.
Most fire departments requested assistance in the categories of Fire Operations and Firefighter Safety, (53 percent) and for Vehicles (45 percent.) The Fire Prevention and EMS categories each received one percent of the applications.
The majority of applications, 71 percent, came from volunteer fire departments. Twenty percent came from combination/paid on call departments, and nine percent came from all paid/career departments. Volunteer departments asked for over a billion in grants, amounting to 63 percent of all the requests. Combination/paid on call departments asked for 24 percent of the requests, and Paid/career departments asked for 13 percent of the requests.
The average grant request of an urban fire department was about $146,000. For a suburban department it was $137,000 and for a rural department it was $97,000. As a group, urban departments put in a total request for $131,435,578, with a federal share of $261,264,355. Suburban departments put in a total request of $371,281,690, with a federal share of $445,364,937 and rural departments put in for $1,591,035,961 with a federal share of $1,782,122,075.
This year's application data is somewhat different from the application data of 2002. This year, slightly less was requested for EMS and fire prevention. There was a jump in applications for Fire Operations and Firefighter Safety and a drop in vehicle applications. Another difference this year is that urban and suburban applications went down while rural applications went up.
A complete state-by-state listing of application data is available at the USFA's web site, www.usfa.fema.gov
