EDITORIAL: Baker City Council needs to act on fire department

Published 2:00 pm Friday, May 6, 2022

There’s little time left to prevent the Baker City Fire Department from being gutted, and the Baker City Council needs to act.

The seven councilors are the bosses. They — not City Manager Jon Cannon — set the city’s policies, and they represent citizens. Councilors, who meet Tuesday, May 10, at 7 p.m. at City Hall, 1655 First St., need to recognize that the city can continue to operate ambulances for at least the next fiscal year, starting July 1, without plundering other departments within the city’s general fund. The city’s financial records show this to be the case.

But if councilors continue to accede to Cannon’s plans, they will preside over a dismantling of the city’s fire department without precedent, at least in modern times.

This is neither necessary nor acceptable.

It’s also not likely to be reversible. If the city drops ambulance service and cuts its fire department staff, even a new, sustainable revenue source probably would be a moot point, arriving too late to restore the level of public safety service that city residents have paid for, and have reasonably come to expect, over the decades.

The issue directly involves Baker County as well as Baker City, and city councilors and county commissioners share a responsibility for working together to craft a solution.

Baker County is responsible, under state law, for providing ambulance service in the county. If the city follows through on the current plan, which calls for the fire department to cease operating ambulances Sept. 30, 2022, the county would need to find a different ambulance provider, likely a private company. To that end, the county recently released a request for proposals for ambulance service in the Baker Ambulance Service Area, which includes Baker City and about two-thirds of the rest of the county. The deadline to respond is June 3.

If Baker City fails to submit a proposal by that date, then it might become a foregone conclusion that the city will not only shut down ambulance service but also — due to the loss of about $1 million annually in ambulance revenue and because most of the department’s service calls are for ambulances rather than for fires — lay off six firefighter/paramedics, half the number who work regular 24-hour shifts now.

The City Council seems to be plodding meekly toward that dismal outcome. On Tuesday, May 3, the city’s budget board, which includes the seven city councilors and seven city residents, approved a proposed budget that includes the fire department layoffs. The City Council, which has the final authority on the budget, must adopt the spending plan by June 30.

During budget board meetings earlier this week, Cannon described a mounting financial problem that has reached a crisis point.

“We just don’t have the money for it,” he said, referring to the ambulance service.

But the city’s budgets over the past several years don’t justify an action so dramatic as slashing the fire department.

Ambulance billing is hardly a new issue — Cannon is right about that.

And although Baker City probably will never come close to recouping its full costs for operating ambulances — not in an aged community where about 80% of patients transported are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, which pay about 20% of typical bills, and who don’t have the means to make up the difference from their own coffers — the city can, and has, boosted its collection rates and its overall ambulance revenue.

In calendar year 2019, the city billed $2.45 million for ambulance services and collected $801,000 — 32.7%.

In calendar year 2021, the collection rate rose to 50.8% — the city collected $1,124,000 from billings of $2.21 million.

The city has botched ambulance billing in the past, to be sure.

In 2016 the city hired a private company that promised to boost ambulance collection rates. The opposite happened. The city collected about $88,000 less than the previous fiscal year, while projecting that it would get about $200,000 more.

But that was a one-year mistake, several years ago. And more to the point, even with that lost revenue the city has collected enough from ambulance bills over the past several years to operate a full-service fire department, one that responds to all manner of emergency calls, without having to significantly subsidize the department from elsewhere in the general fund.

And, as the recent increase in collection rates shows, the situation is improving.

The city will need a new revenue source in the future to accommodate increasing costs and, likely, the need to hire more firefighter/paramedics to handle increasing call volume.

That source must include money from residents who live outside the city limits who benefit from the city’s ambulances. The city is in effect subsidizing ambulance service for much of the rest of the county.

The city’s costs will continue to grow. The last time the city hired three new firefighter/paramedics to handle increased call volumes — and avoid a big boost in overtime cost, which is the inevitable result when demand for a service rises but the staffing stays the same — the city had a three-year federal grant that paid about two-thirds of the cost. That money is gone, and if the city needs to hire more firefighters, there might not be any federal dollars to help. The union representing firefighters wants higher salaries, as well.

But all that lies in the future.

The City Council’s chance to preserve the fire department might end in less than a month.

Of course it would have been preferable to have the city and county during the past few years agree on a proposal to take to voters in the Baker Ambulance Service Area, asking them to increase property taxes, or possibly institute a household fee, to ensure that the Baker City Fire Department has enough revenue to operate ambulances and maintain its firefighting capacity.

But even though this situation has festered, that doesn’t mean the city has been slashing other departments in its general fund to feed a voracious fire department over years of neglect. The city’s budgets show otherwise.

Blaming county officials, and previous city councilors and city staff members, for this situation is not leadership by current councilors. It’s true that councilors can’t solve this problem, for the long term, on their own — voters, within the city and outside, will need to decide how much they value the current Baker City Fire Department.

But only city councilors can give voters that chance.

And due to councilors’ failure to strongly question Cannon’s contentions about the city’s financial situation, time is very short indeed.

— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor