Provincial cuts in the latest budget have affected firefighting training grants, which has some rural departments feeling the heat.

High River Fire Chief, Cody Zebedee says the grants that have been cut would have been used to pay for training new recruits and volunteers.

"So the one big one it'll affect is a group that our department is a part of called the CRESTG group. It's the Calgary Regional Emergency Services Training Group. It consists of multiple departments from around the Calgary area and we all get together and put an application in for this grant on an annual basis. Funding received goes to augment different training costs for different courses throughout the region."

The loss will be felt more thoroughly in smaller or volunteer departments says Zebedee who rely on CRESTG to help cover training costs.

"It will be interesting to see who is the most impacted by this. Some members of our CREST group are quite a bit smaller in nature as far as municipalities go and I could see this having a significant impact on them because they lean on the CREST group who gets the grant funding and training that they're able to put staff in. Those departments don't have significant training budgets."

Zebedee says it will also impact the High River Fire Department, but how much so?

"At this time we'll have to rethink and look at our training strategy over the coming year." He adds "The Town does allocate portions of it's budget to go towards our firefighters training so we just have to look at how the loss of this grant will potentially affect us in the future."

As for now, Zebedee says they have no plans to change up their staffing compliment, or how many volunteers they allow on the force.

"At this point we're just going to sit back and see where everything takes us and come up with a more solid training strategy. We need to ensure that we keep getting our staff the optimal training that they need."

Zebedee says they'll have more information once the CREST group is able to meet again and discuss group training.

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