If we didn’t know it before, it should be painfully obvious by now that our future fire protection services, energy utility bills and many local special taxes will all cost us more in our immediate future — and forever.
We can blame it on the recent years of wildfires. Obviously, there were losses and direct expenses from the fires’ destruction. But the widespread disasters also exposed underlying problems, such as an insufficient disaster alert system, uneven fire protection coverage and too much residential development in wildfire-prone areas.
Whether we lost our own homes or not, we now know our PG&E bills will be going up and so will our home and property insurance rates. These added costs of living in Sonoma County look unavoidable, whereas some other expected outlays should be more closely examined.
For instance, this week the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors discussed increasing our sales taxes by a half-cent to raise as much as $50 million a year to fund a new countywide Fire Services Project. The project is only partly wildfire related. The countywide proposal has been percolating through county offices and local fireboard meetings since at least 1994.
Almost everybody agrees Sonoma County’s patchwork quilt of 39 municipal, all-volunteer and partial volunteer fire agencies of mixed sizes needs to be brought into the 21st century. But almost nobody agrees on how to pay for it or which agencies should be consolidated, enlarged or eliminated.
The Strategic Leadership Group (SLG) of the county’s Fire and Emergency Services asked the board of supervisors this week to endorse the goal of consolidating all 39 agencies into a single Fire Protection District. The SLG is comprised of seven fire chiefs from the Sonoma County Fire Chiefs’ Association. They admit creating a countywide district “may come at a loss of local control and identity.” They also identify a list of “thorny issues” among the current fire agencies of western Sonoma County.
Underlying all this discussion — both before and after the recent historic wildfires — is the uneven distribution of public funds and the “significantly more requests for funding than there is available funding.”
It’s no wonder this patchwork quilt has been much fussed over but never restitched with new needle, thread or binding.
Right now, half (17) of the non-municipal fire agencies impose a local parcel or district tax. Also, the county and state collect a portion of all homeowners’ property tax for fire services. Adding a countywide sales tax increase on top of that will only make living in Sonoma County even less affordable. As important as fire protection, disaster prep and public safety are, we need to find measures that make our government and public services more efficient and responsive without higher and higher price tags.
This will be difficult, but not impossible — even as we must continue to rebuild and add new resiliency from the wildfires. Just as households must adjust budgets to meet higher utility and insurance costs, so should government. Once again, we are witnessing the fiscal stranglehold that unfunded public employee pension costs have on our local public treasuries.
The county supervisors could fund most, if not all, of the SLG’s comprehensive system overhaul, added staffing and long-term equipment and fire station replacement by negotiating for reduced pension benefits. At the very least, they could avoid another sales tax increase this November.
Parts of the SLG’s proposal promises efficiencies and reduced duplication of services. In other places their lengthy document looks filled with new layers of centralized bureaucracy and more administrative overhead instead of more local fire protection.
It will be quite a test for the supervisors or the SLG to win the endorsement of the 39 local fireboards for a November fire services sales tax increase campaign. In an understatement, it would be historic.
-Rollie Atkinson
