Six Smith County volunteer fire departments receive $170,000 in grant money for equipment and training aids

Published 5:40 am Monday, February 23, 2026

Six Smith County volunteer fire departments recently received a total of $170,000 in grant money from the Texas A&M Forest Service through the Rural Volunteer Fire Department Assistance Program (RVFDAP), a part of the largest single state allocation in the program’s history.

“Where we do a lot of our work is in that wild and urban interface,” said Hunter Rath, assistant fire chief at the Flint-Gresham Fire Department. “These grant funds from the Forest Service really help us keep that under control and protect the citizens of Smith County.”

The 89th Texas Legislature approved a historic $192 million appropriation to Texas A&M Forest Service through the RVFDAP, with the first round of awards issued on Oct. 15, 2025. The six Smith County departments received their awards in the third scheduled distribution, supporting personal protective equipment (PPE) and training aids that were requested before November 2024.

The Flint-Gresham, Chapel Hill, Bullard and Winona Volunteer Fire Departments received $25,000 for PPE each and the Arp and Whitehouse Volunteer Fire Departments also received an additional $10,000 for training aids on top of the PPE.

Rath said the Flint-Gresham Department plans to purchase TECGEN, which is a type of lightweight suit equipment used for wildland firefighting, such as forests and grass fires, and technical rescue, such as vehicle extrication, for around 15 out of the 23 firefighters in the department.

“Our primary intention is to get that kind of dual certified equipment,” Rath said. “If we have some additional funding leftover after we do that for our members, then we will probably purchase a few sets of structural firefighting gear.”

Structural firefighting gear protects firefighters from chemicals put off by a building where the fires are extremely toxic from burning synthetic materials, helping better protect firefighters from cancer later, Rath said.

The first two rounds of the funding in October 2025 awarded $164 million for 558 fire trucks and 321 slip-on units, which are mobile water systems, and an additional $17.6 million in December 2025 for rescue equipment and dry hydrants.

“With this funding from the Legislature, we’ve been able to expedite the awards schedule to cover the list of unfunded requests,” said Jason Keiningham, Capacity Building Department head for Texas A&M Forest Service, in a press release. “This provides support to some fire departments that may have been on waiting lists for years.”

Recognizing the ongoing need for critical equipment at the local level, the RVFDAP was also appropriated around $88 million in base funding for the fiscal years 2026 and 2027 in the legislative session.

“This additional base funding allowed us to increase reimbursement levels in certain categories to better reflect rising equipment costs, while also reducing the financial burden on departments by lowering cost‑share requirements,” Keiningham said.

Rath explained that while career fire departments employ full-time, paid personnel with 24 hour station coverage and receive tax dollars directly, volunteer fire departments rely on unpaid firefighters that provide service to the Emergency Services District (ESD) and are supported by donations, shared equipment and grants.

“We supply trained certified firefighters to the ESD to supplement their paid staff,” Rath said. “Most of the volunteers in Smith County ESD 2 respond when a call happens, so we have pagers and when the pager goes off you leave your home, your family, you go up to the station, you get into a fire truck and you go take care of the situation.”

Rath said many people in Smith County do not know there are still several volunteer fire departments in the area.

“You may never know if the person that’s helping you out of that car right now or helping your sick grandmother or whatever it might be is doing it on their free time or for really no compensation at all,” Rath said. “At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter who’s providing the service as long as the service is good.”

Rath said his department remains incredibly grateful for the RVFDAP grant, but said community donations help fund the department’s technology and firefighter recognition programs.

“At the Flint-Gresham Fire Department we have a drone program that is currently completely funded by the volunteers themselves,” Rath said. “We don’t have any tax dollars or grant funding going towards that program, but we use that drone in search and rescue missions, monitoring wildfires and providing situational awareness on structure fires. So, those types of things we have done out of our own pockets to enhance our capabilities and we are always very happy to receive any kind of donations. ”

Rath said many individuals who went through the Flint-Gresham Volunteer Fire Department are now paid career firefighters and that the department is always looking for people to help serve the community.

“The volunteer fire department is an excellent place to start your fire career,” Rath said. “It’s a way to get experience, to get your foot in the door and through some other grants that we get from the state, we can actually pay for people to go through fire academy to get their fire certification and pay for their way towards a lifelong career as a firefighter.”

Rath said the department is set to meet with the equipment vendor next week and get firefighters sized and place the order for the new TECGEN suits, which are then expected to arrive around two months afterwards.

“These grants really allow the VFDs to beef up their capabilities and make sure that our staff on the VFD side have all the equipment that they need that maybe the ESD doesn’t have in a budget year,” Rath said. “So we are just grateful for all the great funding coming out of the Forest Service and they really do help these rural or suburban type departments like us.”

For the full list of Round 3 Texas A&M Forest Service RVFDAP grant recipients visit, https://tfsweb.tamu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/FY26-Equipment-Round-3-February-13-2026-Funding-Summary.pdf.