CRANBERRY TWP — The Cranberry Township Volunteer Fire Company has been awarded an $836,046 Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response, or SAFER, grant.

Scott Garing, the township’s chief of fire and emergency services, told supervisors Thursday about the significant impact the grant would have on the fire company and the township.

“We’ve run a long road of several years of grant applications, but we finally got one,” Garing said. “And I’m excited to highlight what we can from this program.”

According to Garing, the SAFER grant is awarded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency “to help firefighting organizations maintain an adequate number of trained individuals, front-line firefighters, for their communities.

“It supports the fire company,” Garing said. “There’s a bunch of different ways we’re going to spend those funds.”

Amy Behun, the fire company’s administrative assistant and recruiter, said the grant would be used for the recruitment and retention of firefighters.

The fire company received funding for four categories, Behun said.

The first category, she said, was for personal protective equipment.

“We are allotted to be able to purchase 10 sets per year for every applicant that joins the fire department after our date of award,” Behun said. “So, the six people I currently have applications on that I’m working through, they will be eligible once they finish their training to be able to be outfitted through these funds available in this grant.”

The second category for the funds was a tuition assistance program for applicants in postsecondary education.

“This is very exciting to try and attract our young people,” Behun said. “We have received funds to distribute: 10 $5,000-tuition-reimbursement allotments per member.”

The third category would benefit site and staffing, Behun said, supplementing their current budget.

“And the last one is for an enhanced marketing program that we will work closely with our communications department to do,” Behun said. “It’s for digital marketing, a professional commercial, any print marketing that we may do to try and recruit volunteers to come to the fire department.”

Receiving this grant, Garing said, was an effort three years in the making.

“In May of 2020, Amy and I submitted an application,” Garing said. “I looked at it and I said, ‘This can’t get any better; there’s no way they’re going to say no to this thing.’”

In October, Garing said, they received a rejection letter.

“A ‘rejection’ is probably a harsh word — more or less like a ‘Hey, we ran out of money, we can’t fund you’ type of deal,” Garing said.

After a year of work on the application, they submitted it again in 2021.

And received another rejection letter.

They tried again in 2022, Garing said, this time with the assistance of a professional in California.

“He was able to take it and fine-tune it, and he kind of pulled all the ‘fluff’ out,” Garing said. “We had some things in there that were really like, ‘They’d be great to have, but we don’t need them that bad.’”

Earlier this month, they were notified by FEMA that they were awarded the SAFER grant.

“So, what happens next — the grant is for a period of four years, beginning on June 7 of this year, continuing through June of 2027,” Behun said.

Township manager Dan Santoro said the effort was a testament to the fire company’s persistence.

“We always look at grant programs and determine ‘what’s the level of effort that needs to go in, what’s the chance of success,’” Santoro said.

The effort, Santoro said, felt like it only had a “1%, half of a percent, chance of success.”

“And as much as we tried to dissuade Scotty and Amy about going after these grants for year after year, they put the time and effort in,” he said. “I really do think it reflects how important this was, how much they care about the volunteer fire company.

“This really is a significant win for the volunteer fire company, the township.”

The board voted Thursday to grant tentative approval for a 14-building residential development project, after a presentation on it last week.

The 13.9-acre Cranberry Ridge development will be located just north of the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex, via Cool Spring Drive.

The plan includes 308 one-, two- and three-bedroom apartment units, a community center, a swimming pool, tennis courts and a pet park.

The developer could start construction in late 2023, Ron Henshaw, director of planning and development, had said.