The Kenai City Council passed an ordinance that would accept and appropriate a volunteer fire assistance grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service passed through the state Division of Forestry for the purchase of forestry firefighting equipment. Ordinance 3203-2021 states that additional equipment will be purchased with grant funding to improve response capabilities in the service area and assist Division of Forestry on incidents as cooperator, according to the city of Kenai Fire Department.
Fire Chief Tony Prior in the Wednesday night meeting, “As you may notice Mayor Gabriel and members of the council, that it’d be a drop this year from the previous five years. With funding shortages everywhere, this one is limited to $5,000 this year and we’ve had $7,500 for the past five-six years. It did drop this year, however with partnership with them, we continue to put in, they support us every year. We’re grateful for everything that they do for us. We’ve already completed our training as you’d see in the mid-month reports. Our forestry partners comes in and does our annual training for us and refreshers and we’ve already completed that just kind of getting ready for the year. We’d like to kind of get on top of this and have our stuff ready before May hits.”
The Volunteer Fire Assistance grant is in the amount of $4,974.92. The grant will fund the purchase of forestry firefighting Personal Protective Equipment, along with equipment to place on the designated forestry response apparatus. Chief Prior states that the gear and equipment will enable them to appropriately respond with the tools needed for forestry incidents. A total of $159,026.60 was awarded in Volunteer Fire Assistance Grants throughout the state.
Volunteer Fire Assistance is an award of Federal Financial Assistance with funding from the USDA Forest Service. In order to be eligible for a 2022 VFA grant, compliance documentation is required to be submitted to the nearest Forestry office at the time of, or prior to, submitting a 2022 application.