TACOMA, Wash. — There’s a special vote on Pierce County’s ballot that Tacoma Fire says is very important: restoring the agency’s levy to $0.50 per $1,000 of assessed property value.
Voters first set that value back in 2006. But since then, it’s dropped to $0.28 due to rising property values.
Joe Meinecke of the Tacoma Fire Department says the money is needed because the department’s workload has increased substantially.
Since 2006, Tacoma Fire’s call volume has increased by around 42%, and Meinecke says about 80% of those calls have been for Emergency Medical Services.
According to a recent assessment study, it’s also taking longer for first responders to answer calls.
“We have a travel time goal of four minutes from the time you call us until we get going to get to your location to help you,” he said. “We just recently completed a standards of cover study which illustrated that we’re actually running at seven minutes and forty-five seconds, so nearly double that goal. That’s significantly longer than we want, and one of the primary drivers of that is literally too many calls and too many simultaneous calls going on in our system.”
If approved, homeowners would pay an additional $108 dollars a year on average. The total annual cost for the average homeowner would be $246.50 per year.
The levy lift would add about $9 million to the Fire Department’s annual EMS budget.
Meinecke says that money would not only go to hiring additional firefighters and EMS units, it would also benefit Tacoma residnts.
“It will allow all of the out-of-pocket expenses for those who are transported by us to the Fire Department, to be covered by the EMS levy, so there won’t be any out-of-pocket expenses for members that need our help,” he said.