TITLE
The Mayor and City Council shall discuss and possibly take action to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the City of Peoria, the lead agency, and the other 15 City Fire Department partners on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Assistance to Firefighters Grant to provide regional education/training grant in collaboration with Mesa Community College (MCC) and its Virtual Incident Command Center (VICC). Approval provides the City Manager with the authority to sign MOU and all applicable grant documents associated with the MOU. Discussion and Action.
AGENDA ITEM DESCRIPTION
Assistance to Firefighters Grant (AFG) is a suite of competitive grants comprised of three interconnected programs (Operations and Safety, Vehicle Acquisition and Joint/Regional) for awarding direct financial assistance to fire departments, non-affiliated EMS organizations and state fire training academies.
The AFG program’s allowable costs support the efforts to build and support core capabilities across Prevention, Protection, Mitigation, Response and Recovery mission areas. Examples of tangible outcomes include planning, operational coordination, community resilience, long term vulnerability reduction, environmental response/health and safety, infrastructure systems and mass search and rescue operations.
Training and education are vitally important to the fire service. With the ever changing strategy and tactics associated with fire department operations, the job knowledge necessary to adapt to new theories, principles and advancements in many different fire service areas innovative and comprehensive training has never been more important. The current culture of fire service provision illustrates a costly area to city government’s budgets so development and implementation of joint/regional training is a cost effective and efficient manner of minimizing costs and maximizing benefits to all associated organizations and cities. The additional benefit to these joint training and education consortium ensures departments who routinely operate collaboratively through auto and mutual aid service agreements learn, understand and practice operational aspects consistent with all consortium member organizations.
As part of the MOU, Maricopa Fire Department is agreeing to pay the cost share portion of the training (up to 15%) that it receives. The cost share will be determined by the total funds being requested for training and backfill costs for MFD. Due to the November 15th meeting being moved, this MOU will be signed after the grant is due (Due date: Nov. 18th)
MFD is requesting a total of $46,316.56. The City would receive $40,275.27 in grant funds and our match would be $6,041.29. The match will come out of the training budget that has already been budgeted for in Fire's operating budget.
The item will be presented by Brady Leffler, Fire Chief and/or TJ Hansell, Grants Coordinator.
STAFF RECOMMENDATION
Staff recommends the Mayor and City Council enter into the MOU to provide additional training resources to Maricopa Fire Department through this partnership with other local agencies under the AFG grant.