Texas Fire Department Grant: Get Up to $3,000 Back on Station Clipboard

All field notes Texas Fire Department Grant: Get Up to $3,000 Back on Station Clipboard

If you run a volunteer department in Texas, you already know the drill. The budget meeting where somebody asks why the training binder is three years behind. The audit request that turns into four evenings of digging through spiral notebooks. The certification that lapsed because nobody was watching the date.

You also know the other half of it: the money to fix that has never been there. Trucks come first. Turnout gear comes first. Software comes last, if it comes at all.

That just changed.

Station Clipboard is now a reimbursable purchase under the Texas A&M Forest Service HB 2604 Rural Volunteer Fire Department Assistance Program — up to $3,000 per department.

If you qualify, the state can cover your records system.

The short version


$192M	approved by the 89th Texas Legislature — the largest single allocation in the program's history
20	or fewer paid members, and your department may qualify
$3,000	Station Clipboard is reimbursable up to this amount
1	portal to apply through — FireConnect

Why now, and not next year

House Bill 2604 isn't new. The 77th Legislature passed it back in 2001, and it created the Rural Volunteer Fire Department Assistance Program — the program that has put more than half a billion dollars into Texas fire departments since.

What's new is the size of the pot.

The 89th Texas Legislature approved a historic $192 million appropriation to Texas A&M Forest Service through the program. It is the largest single allocation in RVFDAP's twenty-five-year history, and it was written specifically to clear the backlog — the requests departments had already filed and that had gone unfunded for lack of money.

That money has been moving in rounds. $164 million went out first, largely for apparatus: 558 fire trucks and 321 slip-on units. Later rounds have addressed personal protective equipment and training aids.

Here's the part worth sitting up for. Appropriations like this don't repeat. They happen when a legislature decides, once, to catch up on a backlog. Departments that get their paperwork in while the money is on the table get funded. Departments that wait for next session are applying against a normal-sized program again.

There has genuinely never been a better moment to fix your department's records problem.

What we actually do

Let's be specific, because "fire department software" means a hundred things and most of them aren't what you need.

Station Clipboard is the administrative side of a department in one place, built for the way volunteer and combination departments actually run.

The part that matters most for a Training grant:

Training records that survive an audit. Schedule a training event, take attendance, award hours and CE credits, attach the certificate, and export the whole thing as a PDF or CSV when somebody asks. No spiral notebook. No spreadsheet living on a home laptop.
Certification tracking with expiration reminders. Every member's certs, with the dates, and an automatic nudge before one lapses instead of a phone call after.
Compliance and requirements monitoring. Set what your department requires, then see at a glance who's short and by how much.
Instructor and course management, so the person who taught it and the people who took it end up on the same record.

And the rest of the department, because paperwork doesn't stop at training:

Personnel roster — one current list of who's on the department, with the custom fields your department actually tracks, and role-based permissions so an officer sees what an officer should see.
Scheduling and availability — shift building, availability, trades, pickups, and time off.
Time Clock — station kiosk and clock-in with auditable time records.
SOPs and policies — a document library with versioning, audience targeting, and signature/acknowledgement workflows. You can prove who read the policy and when.
Truck checks and SCBA checkoffs — daily, weekly, and monthly checklists per apparatus and per member, with failed items alerting the right people.
Assets and inspections — equipment tables with barcode capture and automated expiration reminders.
Incident reporting, NERIS-compliant — guided report builder, validation engine, officer review and approval workflow, and a real server-side NERIS integration. Station Clipboard is a NERIS vendor.
Announcements, tickets, and a station display board for everything else.

The goal is simple: the chief's evening goes back to being an evening.

Who qualifies

The HB 2604 program is aimed squarely at rural volunteer and combination departments. In broad terms, you're likely eligible if:

You are a recognized, non-profit volunteer fire department operated by its members, located in Texas; or
You are a part-paid / part-volunteer (combination) department where the number of paid members is 20 or fewer;
Your department serves a county-designated primary protection area (protection areas cannot overlap); and
Your department is in good standing with the State of Texas and with Texas A&M Forest Service.

If you read that list and thought "that's us" — it probably is. Most volunteer departments in Texas qualify. A surprising number have never applied.

How the grant actually works

This is the part where people usually give up, so let me make it plain.

RVFDAP is a cost-share program administered by Texas A&M Forest Service, and it's organized into program elements — buckets of what the money can be spent on. Firefighting vehicles. Fire and rescue equipment. Protective clothing. Dry hydrants. And training, which is split into Training Tuition and Training Aids.

Training Aids is not a small or obscure category. In FY 2025 alone the program funded 103 Training Aids grants and 2,292 Training Tuition grants. Recent rounds of the $192 million have gone specifically toward PPE and training aids, with individual departments receiving five-figure awards for training aids alone.

Software and computer packages that exist to deliver, track, and document your department's training fall under that Training umbrella. That's the line Station Clipboard sits on, up to $3,000.

Everything goes through one place: FireConnect. It's the Texas A&M Forest Service portal for fire department assistance programs — training tuition, apparatus, equipment, and emergency grants all live there. If your department already has a FireConnect account, you're most of the way there. If not, setting one up is the first step, and it's worth doing today regardless of what you end up buying.

What to do this week

Log in to FireConnect — or create your department's account if you don't have one. Confirm your department record and primary protection area are current, because a stale record slows everything down.
Check the open funding rounds and the current Training program element requirements, cost-share percentage, and caps. These move round to round, so read what's posted rather than what somebody told you last year.
Get your quote from us. Email the Station Clipboard team with your department size and what you need. We'll send back a formal, itemized quote written to attach directly to a FireConnect application — not a sales PDF, an actual grant document.
Ask us for help with the application. We've been through this. If you want a second set of eyes on the narrative or the line items before you submit, we'll give it to you — and we'll do it whether or not you end up buying from us. A department that gets its records in order is a win regardless of whose software does it.

If you have questions about the program itself, the Texas A&M Forest Service grants staff are genuinely helpful: (979) 458-6600.

The honest fine print

We'd rather you hear this from us than find out later.

Eligibility is not an award. Station Clipboard being a reimbursable purchase means it can be funded. Whether your specific application gets funded is Texas A&M Forest Service's decision, made against the current round's criteria and the money available.
RVFDAP is cost-share. Depending on the program element and the round, your department may carry a share of the cost. Confirm the current percentage in FireConnect before you budget.
Caps and requirements move between rounds. The $3,000 figure is what Station Clipboard is reimbursable up to. What a given round will actually fund is set by TFS.
We are not affiliated with Texas A&M Forest Service. They administer the program; we're a vendor whose product is eligible under it. Nothing here is official TFS guidance — always go by what's posted in FireConnect.

One more thing

We built Station Clipboard because volunteer departments were being asked to meet paid-department standards on volunteer-department time. The tracking, the compliance, the reporting — all of it landed on people who were already giving up evenings and weekends to run calls.

The tools that solve that have existed for years. What hasn't existed is a way for a department with a $40,000 budget to afford them.

For the moment, in Texas, there is one.

Don't let it close without your department's name on an application.

Ready to start? Get a grant-ready quote — tell us your department size and we'll send an itemized quote you can attach straight to your FireConnect application, plus a hand with the paperwork if you want it.

Station Clipboard is department management software for Fire and EMS — training records, personnel, scheduling, SOPs, checklists, assets, and NERIS-compliant incident reporting. Learn more at StationClipboard.com.