Tulsa Fire Department will find out by June 1 if it’s getting a federal grant to pay for a July academy or if there won’t be one at all.
Chief Ray Driskell applied for a Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response Grant through FEMA, and it covers more than training.
"This is for their salaries for two years, and this is attrition. This is not new people," Driskell said. "By July 1, we'll be down 34 people, but at the time we applied for the grant, we were down 27."
The proposed fiscal year 2017 budget counts on the grant funding for the July fire academy.
"The general fund budget, at this point, does not have funding which would support an academy," said City Finance Director Mike Kier. "There is an academy scheduled in April out of the public safety tax."
The situation is a snapshot of a larger problem.
"We're kind of battling this whole revenue stream that's available to the city," Kier said. "It is not growing in all years, and is, in fact, shrinking in some years. That just makes it difficult to try and keep our operations going at the level they've been at."
The April academy would train 20 fire cadets.
