No EMS vote this year, says Yakima City Council

A badly fractured Yakima City Council decided after a long public hearing Tuesday night not to put a levy before voters this November that would pay for more firefighters and improved paramedic training.

Voicing fears that the business community wasn't on board and that they were being rushed into something that would be on the books permanently, council members also decided for the time being not to refer the tax measure to voters in the spring.

This action came even though at least five members of the group at one point or another spoke glowingly of their support for the proposal.

The proposed Emergency Medical Services levy would add 12 firefighters and a dispatcher at a cost of about $3 or $4 a month for most homeowners in Yakima, based on a calculation of 25 cents per $1,000 of assessed property value. The tax would be in addition to a levy that is already collected countywide, and in that sense would double for city taxpayers the existing EMS levy.

The fire department says it needs more firefighters due to a call volume that has jumped by 62 percent over the past 10 years. The result, fire officials say, is lengthening response times and over-reliance on volunteers from rural fire departments as backup. The levy would collect about $1.3 million and would also allow the fire department to train firefighters as full-fledged paramedics rather than basic EMTs.

Over the course of a two-hour hearing, several members of the public as well as quite a few firefighters spoke in favor of the proposal. They said that training firefighters as paramedics would bolster the efforts of the two private ambulance companies that serve Yakima, which provide one paramedic per call.

Mostly, they said, the public just needs to be asked what it thinks in the form of an election. "I'd like you to let us vote on this," urged Richard Carmody, a retired Eisenhower High School teacher.

But several members of the business community questioned the proposal. Chief among them was car dealership owner Bob Hall, who said he had at least 14 questions about the levy based on a presentation made by Fire Chief Charlie Hines.

"This is a heavy issue," Hall told the council, urging the group to appoint a blue-ribbon committee to study it further.

Also in opposition was Woody Woodcock, president of Advanced Life Systems, one of the two ambulance companies that serve Yakima. Woodcock argued that ambulance paramedics are not a burden on taxpayers because their services are paid for only by patients who need transport.

"It's strictly user-fee driven," said Woodcock, who also argued there is little evidence that having two paramedics at every scene -- one a firefighter, one from the ambulance company -- would save lives.

A representative of AMR, the other ambulance company, told the council that two paramedics are better than one and that his company supports better medical training for firefighters.

At the end of the hearing, Mayor Dave Edler made it clear he wanted the levy placed on the ballot for the November general election. The deadline to do is Aug. 12.

"My charge to the council is, Why would we put this off?" he said.

But a motion for a November date made by Councilman Neil McClure and seconded by Edler was defeated 5-2 by the rest of the council.

Council members said they were concerned about rushing into something. Of particular importance were fears voiced by council member Rick Ensey that the levy as proposed would be permanent, a factor that Ensey and several other council members indicated they only recently learned and for which Ensey pointedly blamed City Manager Dick Zais.

A subsequent motion for a March special election was also defeated, this time 4-3. With that, the meeting ended. The council, in effect, took no action and had no plans to take action anytime soon.

The hearing lasted 21/2 hours.

* Chris Bristol can be reached at cbristol@yakimaherald.com or 577-7748.

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