House Finance advances fire station grant program after rejecting rural aid amendments

The House Finance Committee advanced a fire station grant program Friday after rejecting amendments that would have lowered match requirements for small off-road communities.

The committee voted 7-4 to reject an amendment that would have reduced the local match requirement from 50 percent to 25 percent for communities under 500 people off the road system and to 40 percent for off-road communities with populations between 500 and 1,000. A second amendment that would have allowed funding for firefighting equipment instead of just buildings also failed on a 7-4 vote.

The bill establishes a grant program through the Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development that would cover up to 50 percent of fire station construction or renovation costs. With the equipment amendment's defeat, the program remains limited to station construction or renovation and cannot fund firefighting tools or equipment.

Rep. Nellie Unangiq Jimmie, who sponsored both amendments, said small communities lack the tax base to meet a 50 percent match requirement.

"I grew up watching people, men fight fires with honey buckets, and 99.9 percent of the time the houses are lost because they cannot fight the fire quick enough," Jimmie said. "This amendment would help many villages be able to get firefighting tools, equipment, which is a lot better than buckets."

Rep. Alyse Galvin supported the amendments, questioning whether existing programs like Community Assistance actually help rural communities.

"I felt like CAPSES, to say just go use the CAPSES program is a little bit off-putting for me. I've been here 4 years, and I've never seen that work for any community," Galvin said.

Rep. Jeremy Bynum opposed the amendments, noting the bill already includes evaluation criteria that would give preference to rural communities based on public safety need. He said communities can use Community Assistance Program funds as their local match.

"There are other programs out there to help our rural communities with things like this that they can use as their match to then go compete for the fire station money," Bynum said.

Rep. Will Stapp said lowering the match requirement would concentrate all available funding in the smallest communities, leaving nothing for larger fire departments. He noted the bill requires board members to recuse themselves if their department has a pending application, which would effectively exclude urban fire chiefs from the evaluation process if rural projects dominated the program.

"If you go to 75 percent or 60 percent, I know we flipped the numbers backwards in the conceptual amendment. You are just going to have this program, if you do allocate money, it is just going to soak it all up to those ones," Stapp said.

Rep. Sara Hannan said the grant program is designed for communities with the capacity to provide ongoing maintenance, not as a replacement for state-funded programs like Code Red that serve the most remote areas.

"I think there's sort of two or three streams of ways we should be addressing fire safety. And a grant program, I think, by its design and nature of this grant program, is for communities where you say you got to have a local buy-in to both the funding and then the ongoing maintenance," Hannan said.

Co-Chair Neal Foster supported the amendments, noting the legislature has not provided discretionary capital funding to communities in recent years, making the Community Assistance Program less accessible than in the past. Foster said CAPSES usually works when lawmakers provide discretionary capital money to communities, but "we have not done discretionary funding this year."

Margo Youngberg, staff to bill sponsor Sen. Bert Stedman, told the committee the sponsor did not necessarily support Amendment 3 and viewed CAPSES as an available option for communities with greater needs.

The committee advanced the bill as amended with individual recommendations and an attached fiscal note. The House Finance Committee authorized legislative legal to make technical and conforming changes as necessary.