County Ballot Measure

Whatcom County Proposition No. 1 Sales and Use Tax for Counties and Cities

Imagine this…. Someone in your family suddenly stops breathing. You immediately call 911 for help, only to be told a Medic One paramedic unit is unavailable to respond to your emergency. Could this happen in Whatcom County? Yes, without additional funding and support, this could soon be reality. For over 30 years, county and city governments and fire agencies worked together in providing a unified, cost effective and quality Whatcom Medic One paramedic program. However, reduced revenues, increasing service demand and increasing operating costs jeopardize the stability of this life saving program.

County and city officials, realizing they face a potential crisis in health care due to two failed EMS levy attempts, have spent several months developing a long-range county EMS plan. During this process, key issues were addressed to ensure this life saving program continues:

1. Medicare/Medicaid patients account for over 60 percent of the total number of patients served by Medic One. Changes in federal funding support for Medicare/Medicaid programs are projected to reduce our ability to collect revenue by over $500,000 per year.

2. Calls for emergency medical services are increasing over 6 percent per year due to an increasing and aging population.

3. Operating costs are increasing faster than any potential increase in revenues through user fees.

4. The program must adapt to focus on the limited paramedic resources for the most critical medical emergencies.

The new county EMS plan addresses all of these issues, charting a course for continuing the Whatcom Medic One program into the foreseeable future. This new plan has been unanimously endorsed by the county and city councils and fire districts.

The plan is as follows:

•Maintain four medic units to respond to serious medical emergencies throughout the county.

•Require dispatcher phone “triage” to identify the most appropriate medical resource to send.

•Introduce the use of existing fire district basic life support ambulances to transport less critical patients to the hospital.

•Require continued general fund contributions by Whatcom County and city of Bellingham to help stabilize funding.

•Identify the future need for additional paramedic resources to meet the increasing emergency call load.

•Identify the immediate need for additional funding, a one-tenth of 1 percent sales tax to keep the program intact for the next six years.

The one-tenth of 1 percent sales tax is seen as the most impartial way to fund EMS because it taxes all of the potential users of the EMS system, citizens and visitors alike. State law requires that one-third of the tax revenue be used for criminal justice activities, such as the methamphetamine eradication and increased court capacity. The remaining funds will be dedicated solely to fund EMS.

When faced with a medical emergency, you expect fast, effective and expert response and treatment no matter where you are in Whatcom County. Voting in favor of County Proposition One will ensure this response will be available when you need it.

Statement prepared by:

Our most accepted form of governmental budgeting should identify all of the services needing funding, prioritize them, and allocate available monies. Arguably, that’s how EMS should be handled. If important enough to be funded, each item should have a high enough priority that county government doesn’t tell us, as they are now doing, “...after funding everything else, we don’t have any left for EMS....” So, with government knowing the real facts, apparently it’s not important enough to allocate from the current increasingly fat tax receipts to cover EMS, yet we’re supposed to believe it’s important enough to saddle us with another hefty tax increase? Many citizens do not agree!

Let’s just try to ask some of the questions that our government should be asking:

•Did the voters really mean NO on those previous occasions that such questions were overwhelmingly defeated?

•Do we really need another $2.3 million per year now, when government told voters a couple years ago that the annual need was $5 to 7 million, and the system didn’t fail when the levy was turned down?

•When Whatcom County already has some $16 million in excess “rainy day” funds, why ask for more? Has county government been good stewards of citizens’ interest when the county and city have jointly funded, trained, staffed and equipped the current EMS on an almost equal dollar contribution basis, yet the city can apparently “take” our existing system for themselves, leaving the county “unserved?”

•Is the citys, oft described as “illegal ordinance” controlling the provision of ambulance service, the real culprit in this touted EMS problem? When said city ordinance disallows any private ambulance operating in the county from transporting, at every incident, to the hospital without express permission of the city, doesn’t this violate the “competitive” requirements of multiple RCWs? Is the purpose of the city’s ordinance to insure that private competition does not have the opportunity to provide service (as in most other communities of our size) for less than is currently being spent by government, even without a tax increase?

•If this city ordinance is even a minor contributing factor, what has county government done to eliminate its negative impact?

And while we’re asking the kind of questions our government should ask, how about:

•Why pick a tax that gives 2/3 to EMS and 1/3 to law enforcement? Is this wise when our county (rural Whatcom) already has perhaps the largest per capita police force (including security, small town police, sheriff, state patrol, FBI, ATF, homeland security, etc.) of any venue in the world? Does a county that currently has some 140 sheriff’s vehicles and imposed an additional jail tax earlier this year, really need to create another tax that causes more law enforcement spending?

•Are allocations to the rainy day fund, in excess of projected EMS needs, consistent with the counties claim of “shortfall?”

As citizens, we know we are short of money, and wonder why. Those in government know why! In the past 10 years, we’ve been “nickeled and dimed” to death with “a few 10ths of a cent for WTA,” permit fee bumps, more for the jail, increasing Real Estate Excise tax, higher recording costs, more gas tax, etc. The net increase in government cost is arguably about 1 cent more each year.

Statement prepared by: