73-year-old Yachats Rural Fire Protection District is at a crossroads as voters weigh whether to approve new, large tax levy to fund operations

 

By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com

YACHATS – The 73-year-old Yachats Rural Fire Protection District is at a crossroads.

Do voters approve a district operating levy request of $1.59 in the Nov. 8 general election and continue operations as usual, or do they vote no to force difficult conversations by its five-member board on possible other ways to provide services.

In a Lincoln County voters pamphlet statement, the fire board said if voters reject the levy it will be forced to lay off three of its six firefighters and possibly cause it to end service by South Lincoln Ambulance. But, if voters reject the levy, the district also has the opportunity next May to try again in time to collect property taxes in November 2023.

The request is the second by the district in the past 12 months. A similar request was defeated 566 to 729 in November 2021, the first levy rejection in the district’s  history.

The rural fire district stretches from the very south edge of Waldport, down seven miles of U.S. Highway 101 and through the city of Yachats, 10 miles up the Yachats River valley and then just past the Lane County line to the south. The district employs six firefighters/medics, two administrators, a half-time office clerk, has a yearly budget of $1.33 million and responded to nearly 1,000 emergency calls in 2021 – the bulk of them for medical reasons — and twice the number as 12 years ago.

The district is asking for a big levy increase because it never sought smaller, incremental increases for either of its two other levies that started 15 and 25 years ago. Meanwhile, the cost of everything from firefighter pay, insurance, fuel and equipment has increased more than 30 percent.

In addition to poor financial planning, there are other factors affecting the district, including:

• The changing demographics of a district spread over hundreds of square miles with newcomers who know little to nothing of its history, how it operates and only hears of it when there are sirens or when property tax bills arrive each October;
• A community full of aging retirees, people busy working, or with little interest or ability to become a volunteer responder, which now requires dozens of hours of regular, rigorous training. Outside its two administrators, who are also classified as volunteers, the district has just one;
• An aging board and twice-monthly meetings rarely attended by people interested in operations or policy, an only recently-upgraded website and little use of social media to publicize what it is doing, no outside, public support group to help with campaigns, and little board or administrator knowledge of how to reach its constituents;
• Financial missteps like using yearly operating funds to pay for land where the new fire station was built, having to take out bank loans since 2019 to make ends meet during the spring and summer, or the lack of equipment reserves, forcing it to accept an $8,000 donation last year to buy a 28-year-old engine from the city of Newport for its “first out” response;
• The district’s subsidizing of South Lincoln Ambulance, a longtime, private nonprofit organization controlled by fire district administrators Frankie Petrick and Shelby Knife, by having its firefighters/medics staff the ambulance in return for $1,500 a month in rent. It is the only such relationship in Oregon;
• The future of Petrick, 76, the longtime administrator who also serves as the volunteer fire chief, and her ability to lead a district among a changing community and an evolving firefighting/emergency services industry;

How the fire finances work

The district’s current general fund operating budget is $1.33 million a year and comes from a permanent tax base and two voter-approved levies. Here’s how the property taxes work:

• The district’s permanent tax base established in 1997 is 29 cents per $1,000 assessed property value;
• A three-year levy that started in 1999 and was last renewed in 2019 carries a tax rate of 61 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value;
• A three-year levy that started in 2008 and will expire in June is 59 cents per $1,000; the district is asking voters to replace it with the $1.59 levy;
• In total, the three current levies add up to a tax rate of $1.49 per $1,000 assessed property value or $447 a year on property assessed at $300,000.

The district also has a voter-approved building bond for its new fire station just north of Yachats that carries a tax rate of 68 cents per $1,000 assessed value. That costs the owner of property assessed at $300,000 an additional $204 a year. But bond money can’t be used for year-to-year operating expenses.

So currently, the owner of property assessed at $300,000 pays $650 a year via the tax base, two levies and building bond to support the fire district.

If voters approve the Nov. 8 request for a $1.59 levy, the effective tax rate would be $1 more per $1,000 assessed property value. The district’s total tax rate – with the new, larger levy – would be $2.49, costing the owner of $300,000 worth of property $747 a year. With the addition of the building bond, the total yearly cost would be $951.

The district estimates the new levy would generate $1.02 million in fiscal 2023-24, rising gradually to $1.17 million in 2027-28 when it would expire or have to be renewed.

Between the tax base and a second levy, the district projected this summer it would have total revenue of $1.58 million in fiscal 2023-24 and leave the district with a cash carryover of $242,000 its first year. Its current cash carryover is $146,000. But even with the new levy, the cash carryover slowly declines and goes negative in 2026-27.

The reality of rural emergency services

The reality of emergency services in a rural area is that they can be difficult to fund and not nearly as robust as in more populous areas.

In that, the Yachats district is not alone. Two residents of the Yachats River valley attended the fire board’s Monday meeting to complain and inquire about what they see as a lack of planning for fighting fires on property on the other side of 11 bridges in the valley while still being asked to pay property taxes to finance services. But that issue exists in all of the county’s fire district where houses or farms are tucked back into hard-to-reach areas of the Coast Range.

The Waldport-based Central Coast Fire & Rescue District is now thriving with strong leadership, active staff, stable board and community support — but only after dismissing a chief in 2021 and surviving board turmoil in 2021-22 that resulted in two recalls and a resignation. It is seeking a small tax levy increase in the general election – and anticipates having to ask voters within the next 2-3 years for a bond to remodel its downtown Waldport fire station.

The Seal Rock Fire District is going an entirely different direction by not replacing three of its four paid firefighters who left, trying to fill shifts with outside, temporary firefighting help and building up a cadre of volunteers.

The city of Newport only this year approved more funds to hire firefighters and the county’s largest district, North Lincoln Fire & Rescue, had to twice ask voters to approve a levy to add personnel.

So despite all their differences, responses by fire agencies and ambulance companies in Lincoln County are closely intertwined.

If there’s a medical call in the Yachats area, Petrick or Knife may respond in a command vehicle and two firefighter/paramedics respond in the South Lincoln ambulance. But if there’s a fire call in Yachats at the same time, then Central Coast responds from Waldport.

A PacWest ambulance will respond to a medical call in Yachats if the South Lincoln Ambulance is busy elsewhere, including transporting patients to hospitals in Newport or Florence. Meanwhile everyone else shifts south — Seal Rock personnel may stage in Waldport and Newport firefighters or PacWest ambulance may move to the Newport Airport to be ready to cover south county.

“We’re all running on minimum resources, at best,” said COCF&R Chief Jamie Mason, who is leading an effort to coordinate a new “automatic aid” agreement between COCF&R, Yachats and Seal Rock that would spell out those emergencies in which the other departments automatically help with a response.

Decision time

If voters approve Yachats’ new levy the district could just go back to operating as usual for at least three years.

Two of the newest fire board members – Donald Tucker and Drew Tracy – have said they want the board to discuss absorbing South Lincoln Ambulance into the fire department, but backed off that request until the results of the Nov. 8 vote are known. Petrick and two longtime board members Ed Hallahan and Betsy Johnston, have resisted that discussion.

There has been no effort to bring in an outsider to help the board with financial decisions, long-range planning or to talk about fire agencies and ambulance services.

If the levy is defeated and the board – as it said it might — were to relinquish the county-approved ambulance district, the service would likely fall to PacWest Ambulance, which already covers the four other ambulance service districts in Lincoln County.

But the likelihood of stationing an ambulance in Yachats is slim.

J.D. Fuiten, owner and president of PacWest’s parent company, told YachatsNews there are not enough medical calls in the Yachats area to justify PacWest stationing an ambulance there. It is more likely, he said, that PacWest would ask county commissioners to combine the Waldport-area ambulance service area and the Yachats service area, but station an additional ambulance close by.

“I really question the need,” Fuiten said. “The run volume there is just not enough that requires additional resources.”

But if there were two Yachats firefighter/medics on duty at the main station – instead of out somewhere in the South Lincoln ambulance — they would respond first with an engine or truck and medical equipment to do initial patient treatment while the PacWest ambulance is en route from the north.

The other option is an eventual merger with the Central Oregon Coast district, especially since the Yachats district stretches to the south city limits of Waldport.

While COCF&R may be better managed, have better equipment, more volunteers and public outreach and already trains and responds regularly with Yachats, it wouldn’t necessarily reduce Yachats district residents’ costs if there were a merger – which would have to be approved by both boards and voters.

If COCF&R voters approve a small increase in one of its levies Nov. 8, that district’s total tax rate would be $2.44 per $1,000 assessed property value – just five cents less than Yachats fire district voters would pay if they approved their district’s new levy request.  Yachats fire district residents – not COCF&R — would still have to pay the yearly bond assessments for the district’s main station.

So the question to voters Nov. 8 is if they want to continue paying for business as usual – or force more difficult discussions that the Yachats fire board and administrators have yet to have, possibly with the help of outside experts.

But, in the end, the costs to taxpayers will likely be nearly the same as the price of providing services continues to increase.

• Quinton Smith is the founder and editor of YachatsNews.com and has attended nearly all of the YRFPD board meetings the past four years. He can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com

To read a levy fact sheet prepared by the Yachats Rural Fire Protection District board, go here

To read about Yachats Rural Fire Protection District budget committee deliberations last May, go here

To read about a Yachats Fire Protection District board discussion about South Lincoln Ambulance, go here

To read about the Yachats Rural Fire Protection District’s struggle to retain firefighters, go here