ARLINGTON — With the Tuesday mail-in election looming, only about 23 percent of Arlington voters have returned their ballots that will decide the fate of emergency medical services here.
People in the city and Arlington Heights’ Fire District 21 are voting on whether to renew and make permanent the property tax that funds EMS protection. Proposition 1 would renew the tax levy at a slightly higher rate than is paid currently. Nothing else is on the mail-in ballot.
“It’s not a new tax,” said Barbara Tolbert, chairwoman of the citizens committee supporting the EMS levy. “People are being asked to renew a levy that expires at the end of the year.”
This week, voters can expect campaign phone calls and doorbell rings from a pool of more than 50 campaign volunteers, Tolbert said.
“As we’ve been out and about, we’ve been hearing from a lot of people telling stories about how the lives of loved ones were saved with help from our paramedics,” Tolbert said.
There is no organized opposition to the ballot measure.
If approved, the levy would continue to fund 24-hour paramedic services by the Arlington Fire Department. The tax levy has been renewed every six years since 1980. Other local fire districts have passed permanent EMS levies, arguing that the service is essential and that money saved on elections could be better spent for life-saving equipment, Arlington Fire Chief Bruce Stedman said.
The current EMS levy rate is 46 cents per $1,000 of a property’s assessed value. If the proposition passes, the levy rate would rise to 50 cents per $1,000 of assessed value, which is the same amount property owners paid in 2004, Stedman said. If the proposition fails, the fire department will eliminate paramedic services and just offer basic life support, he said.
If the proposition passes, the owner of a $250,000 house, for example, would pay $125 a year for emergency medical services. The current rate is $115 a year for the same house. That equals an increase an increase of $10 a year or about 83 cents a month.
When put before the voters in November, the proposition, which needed a supermajority of 60 percent, lost by 41 votes in Arlington.
Arlington Fire provides emergency medical services for the city, as well as for the town of Darrington and the Silvana, Arlington Heights and Oso areas. The levy passed in the Oso, Silvana and Darrington fire districts, but the failure in Arlington means potential problems for all the fire departments. The current levy expires in December.
If the Arlington levy fails again, the fire districts that passed the levy in November could use the tax revenue to fund paramedic service from another agency, but no one is sure what agency that would be.
For more information about the levy and what it funds, call Stedman at 360-403-3600.
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