Gov. Josh Shapiro pledged Tuesday to continue fighting to get $30 million in competitive grants for fire departments included in the state spending plan.

“We’re not quitting on our firefighters,” he said at the Dickson City Fire Department in Lackawanna County.

Shapiro proposed the funding last year but it wasn’t included in the budget deal he signed in November. His renewed call for additional funding came during comments at the fire department where 77 patients were rescued from a blaze last Wednesday at the Lehigh Valley Hospital. The governor said that while he’s always appreciated the efforts of first responders, his respect was deepened by the work of Harrisburg fire crews who responded in April 2025 when an arsonist set fire to the governor’s residence in Harrisburg.

“We were rushing out and they were rushing in,” Shapiro said.

Shapiro announced Tuesday that his administration is releasing a round of $37 million in grants for fire departments around the state, including just over $16,000 for the Dickson City Fire Department.

State Fire Commissioner Tom Cook said that the competitive grant program would allow the state to provide much larger grants to departments that demonstrate they have unique needs. Those needs would include equipment purchases, facility upgrades, efforts to create regional fire protection agencies and programs to recruit and retain firefighters, he said.

As a result, instead of getting $16,000 grants, like Dickson City received, the departments would be in line to get grants worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, Cook said.

“When I travel the state, I hear two strong themes,” Cook said. “We need people and we need money.”

Cook said the governor’s competitive grant would help address both those things. “By going to competitive grants, we can make transformational investments,” Cook said.

Roughly 90% of the state’s almost 2,500 fire companies rely on volunteers, and fire companies around the state have been struggling with shortages of personnel. While there were about 300,000 volunteer firefighters serving in Pennsylvania in the 1970s, there are now only about 37,000.

Officials blame some of the volunteer shortage on the strain of fundraising to help pay the bills for fire companies.

That’s why the type of grants proposed by Shapiro would be so welcome, said Dickson City Fire Chief Rich Chowanec.

Chowanec said that the fire truck serving as the backdrop for the governor’s press conference was purchased by the fire company a few years ago at a cost of more than $800,000. The state provided some of the funding but the local fire department had to come up with the rest. The same piece of equipment now carries a price tag exceeding $1 million.

“We can’t flip enough chicken” to fundraise sufficiently to cover that kind of purchase, the fire chief said.