City of Omaha secures SAFER grant
The grant will allow the city to hire 18 additional firefighters.
OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) - The City of Omaha released a statement Tuesday that they have been awarded the Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response (SAFER) grant to hire more firefighters.
The SAFER grant will provide $6.8 million to pay for the salaries and benefits of 18 additional firefighters for 3 years, from March 22, 2025 to March 21, 2028.
“We are grateful to FEMA for approving our grant application, which allows us to accelerate our plan hire additional firefighters and add equipment to provide excellent emergency services,” Mayor Jean Stothert said. “We must always provide the best fire and emergency medical response possible.”
OFD is currently budgeted for 687 firefighters, and currently has 645.
OFD has 246 potential candidates to be hired currently. The additional 18 firefighters will be hired from this pool.
With the extra crew members, the city said it will be able to add a medic unit somewhere in the northeast corridor. It will also allow them to bring Engine 2 back to downtown Omaha, which has been out of service since 2011.
“You can see all over downtown Omaha the growth that is happening, and this will allow our firefighters to maintain good response times,” Chief Kathy Bossman said. “We can see the call volume is increasing, and that increases stress for our firefighters. So putting those apparatus in place will definitely help on all of those accounts.”
Stothert said OFD is already well staffed, and that saying they don’t have enough crews downtown right now is inaccurate.
But she also said this grant helps with long-term goals.
“We are fully staffed,” she said. “In fact, we will be overstaffed for about six months. So this is not just for right now. It’s in the future.”
This comes after some disagreement between the mayor’s office and the Omaha City Council earlier this month.
The council had passed a resolution to add 18 more fighters by allocating just more than one million dollars from other sources. Stothert vetoed that, saying it would hurt the city’s chances of receiving a SAFER grant.
She had offered to add the additional firefighters to the 2026 budget.
This SAFER grant money can be spent starting March 2025.
After it runs out in three years, the city will incorporate the 18 additional firefighters’ salaries and benefits into the annual General Fund budget.
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