FEMA pulls grant from B-CC Rescue

‘‘This money was going to help us go above and beyond what we would normally do,” said Ken Yazge, president of the squad.

The volunteer squad, which is located on Battery Lane in Bethesda, serves Bethesda and Chevy Chase, as well as Cabin John, Glen Echo, Kensington, Potomac and Rockville. It has about 150 active volunteers — 64 are certified firefighters — who responded last year to 102 large-structure fires, 75 house fires and more than 10,000 other emergency calls including ambulance runs.

Grant money would have gone toward recruiting and retaining new volunteers.

According to FEMA spokesman James McIntyre, the issue is simple: The squad did not provide a ‘‘formal written agreement with any locality to provide first-due fire suppression.” In other words, FEMA was not convinced that the volunteer squad is beholden to one area for firefighting purposes.

‘‘I don’t know how they can figure that we don’t have a formal arrangement,” Yazge said.

Yazge argued that FEMA need only look at county code references to Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service as part of a local network. ‘‘We’re an integrated system,” Yazge said in an interview.

‘‘I must say that it’s disturbing that FEMA spent so much time and energy looking for reasons to deny this grant rather than looking to protect communities, which is their mandate,” said U.S. Rep. Christopher Van Hollen Jr. (D-Dist. 8) of Kensington, during an interview.

Van Hollen plans to ‘‘push very hard” against ‘‘bureaucratic nonsense” in seeking a reversal of; FEMA’s decision. He plans to take up the issue with Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

‘‘It seems that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing here,” Van Hollen said, adding that he believes this is symptomatic of a greater administrative issues at FEMA.

Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue Squad usually receives more than 80 percent of its funding, or about $1 million in fiscal 2006, from individual donations. The squad devoted less than 5 percent of its fiscal 2006 expenses to training and recruitment, which the grant would have supported.

The squad appealed FEMA’s decision, and FEMA requested the formal written agreement to no avail, McIntyre said.

‘‘Whatever they provided was not considered a formal written agreement, and that’s the issue here,” McIntyre said.

FEMA awarded the grant to three other recipients in Maryland during the fiscal 2007 round: Montgomery County Volunteer Fire and Rescue Association, Hagerstown Fire Department and Kensington Volunteer Fire Department.