To the editor:
In the past couple of days, I have been able to peruse a couple of Yachats Facebook sites. Some of the comments I have seen on Measure 21-214 – the local option levy for the Yachats Rural Fire Protection District — make no sense.
What some people have indicated is they plan to vote yes on this measure with no regard for how the YRFPD board and administrators got the district into this financial mess. Some residents are worried about our continued ambulance service if we don’t take care of the debt. Why? We have another ambulance service in the county that wasn’t even considered in the contract renewal process.
As I have said before, the YRFPD board members and the chief, owe us citizens and taxpayers at the minimum the cause, corrective actions, and preventative actions of this debt. At the same time that we have been asked to approve this levy, we have seen since the start of Covid-19, price increases in our gasoline, food, home/car insurance, and others that as consumers, we can’t do anything about.
In this case, we can vote no on this measure and all others, until the citizens and taxpayers, get some acceptable answers. Besides, our property taxes already have an automatic yearly inflation guard of a 3 percent increase, as approved by the Oregon voters. So our taxes go up every year, without levies.
Any good business or practice will have done the homework about this indebtedness but there is no objective evidence that the YRFPD, has done this. It is time to pull the plug.
— John Bonnar/Yachats
You’re absolutely correct in your terminology “pull the plug” by voting no this time on your Yachats Fire District.
Voting no, as you suggest, will reduce our two person 24-hour staff to one firefighter per day.
One firefighter/paramedic cannot run an ambulance, and Yachats Fire will soon be forced to give up our locally controlled advance life support ambulance.
Your suggested solution of “just use the other company” shows your complete disconnect with how ambulances work in Lincoln County. Ambulances locally use a staffing pattern called “system status” where they are redistributed equally around the whole county. A call goes out and ambulances shift to the center of the county leaving outlying areas without one.
What value is a one-man fire engine in a two-man game? OSHA requires firefighting be a team sport. One man staffing means no entry into structures, period.
It is unwise to underfund your department while you look for answers that were at meetings you didn’t attend.
Pulling the plug on your own public safety team, in a remote area, is foolish, and will eventually and inescapably have dire consequences.
I just got my property tax statement and am already paying for three different tax levies for YRFPD. They can’t manage their finances because they overspent on that behemoth of a fire station. They could have built something more scaled down and had money to build a substation up the Yachats River for what was spent. The ambulance needs to be farmed out to a different contractor that isn’t connected to the fire chief in any way. The continued mismanagement gets a no vote from me.