Milford City Council approved a request from Carlisle Fire Company that will allow them to receive state funding toward the purchase of a new EMS vehicle. Lou Vitola, Finance Director, provided details on the request.
“As you may remember, fire companies in Delaware are not eligible for the state’s bond bill funding or CTF funding. CTF funding and what we call bond bill funding is really community reinvestment funding. So CRF and CTF funding through the state’s bond bill, fire companies are not eligible for,” Vitola said. “However, they do have a sponsorship process whereby a city or I suppose a county could serve as a pass-through grant organization to focus CTF or CRF funding to a fire company through a city.”
Vitola explained that the City of Milford had done this twice in the past.
“Once with CRF funding and most recently with CTF funding like this, that was $90,000 a couple years ago for a traffic vehicle, I believe,” Vitola said. “This time around, it is Representative [Bryan] Shupe and Senator [Dave] Wilson sponsoring the use of CTF funding to be passed through to Carlisle Fire for an EMS vehicle.”
Vitola stated that the request from the fire company to the legislators was $71,738.45 using state contract. He recommended council authorize this form of agreement to be approved for up to $90,000, just to anticipate any contingencies or anything unexpected once the state gets to the point of producing a purchase order.”
Because the state was unable to produce the full draft before the packet had to be sent to council, Vitola placed a template with standard wording in the document so that council would have an idea what they were voting to approve.
“The legislators, as I mentioned, are Representative Shupe and Senator Wilson, and the state will generate a contract number once they produce the final contract,” Vitola said. “But the final contract will be very much in the form of what you see on pages 79 to 81. And the finance department is always happy to work through the back-office items required to ensure that the fire company is able to be funded with this grant funding that it would otherwise be unable to take advantage of in the absence of our sponsorship.”
Council voted to approve the request with a vote of six to zero. Councilwoman Nina Pletcher was absent from the meeting and James abstained from the vote.
