Support Senate Bill 2353 (Now Senate Bill 231)
Protecting Firefighters from Adverse Substances Act
Support Senate Bill 5034 - Behavioral Health Crisis Services Expansion Act
Better Equipment Needed
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Firefighters are often the first line of defense against disasters in the community. They’re charged with protecting your homes and memories, saving your family, and making sure that your neighbors aren’t affected. With the recent fires in California, the importance of firefighters and the danger they face cannot be understated. Our mission is to make sure the government provides firefighters with all the equipment they need to protect you, protect your family, and protect themselves. That involves getting underfunded and overlooked agencies the tools, safety gear, and survival equipment necessary to perform their jobs.
The push for increasing funding for our firefighters has proven to be substantially effective, with the amount of injured and killed firemen reducing slightly every year. Despite this, dozens of firemen end up killed on the job, many of them volunteers, and all succumbing to the various hazards associated with the profession. Not only do firemen have to address deadly situations head-on, but local departments are often volunteer-led and run, and many of them don’t have the resources to pay for training and equipment expenses. Our goal would be to give all fire departments the ability to maintain their equipment and training standards so they can continue to provide for their neighbors year after year. Our government should be able to take care of the people who protect entire communities from being burned down and the ones who fly out to areas that have been turned into a burned-out shell of what it was. Let’s get our brave firefighters the equipment they need to stay alive! Increase in Line-of-Duty Death Benefits NeededIn their effort to protect the communities they reside in, firefighters, paramedics, and other first responders often make the ultimate sacrifice, leaving their families and loved ones behind in the pursuit of helping others. Those men and women take an oath to serve and protect their fellow citizens with the full knowledge that it may cost them their lives. Bravery and honor like that can be hard to come by in a community, but those shoes are always filled.
First responders, whether they be paramedics, firefighters, EMTs, or others, deserve to be alleviated from the fear that their families will suffer financially if they pass away on the job. There have been instances where firefighters with a newborn or children pay the ultimate sacrifice doing their duty, with their spouse left alone and with funeral bills and children to take care of. Our firefighters shouldn’t have to worry about the future of their families. Municipalities and states already offer benefits to the families of fallen firefighters and first responders, but we need to work on expanding the breadth of those programs with help from Congress. The Public Safety Officers’ Benefits Program already goes a long way when combined with the Hometown Heroes Survivors’ Benefits Act, which act together to provide care not only for first responders that died on scene, but also those that died of a heart attack as a result of their manual labor. However, it has several shortcomings. The fact that the PSOB program provides a one-time payment isn’t necessarily helpful to the families that relied on the former first responder’s income, which also makes the higher education credit moot. The PSOB program needs to provide enough payments to provide for a family long enough to ensure they can get back on their feet. We owe that to fallen first responders and their families. |
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Paid for by Firefighters Support Association PAC, an independent expenditure-only committee,
and not authorized by any candidate or candidate committee. A copy of the committee’s report is filed with the Federal Election Commission, Washington, D.C. 20463. Not printed at government expense. |