Greetings! I’m Casey the firefighter/paramedic and I am here to help you understand the conflict going on regarding the ambulance and Baker County.

The first thing that myself and the other firefighters would like you to understand is that there is no budget crisis. Baker City is not losing vast amounts of money on the ambulance nor is it in any other department that we are aware of.

There is no crisis except that which was created by city manager Jonathan Cannon’s manipulation of our elected officials, and the trust of the citizens of this great community.

To help illustrate this point I am going to highlight some large-scale numbers for the city and the fire department, and then we will get into the nuance of the fire department budget and how he was able to craft the illusion that we are losing money.

The IAFF, International Association of Firefighters, conducted a routine assessment of the city of Baker City’s budget and found that the city is in excellent financial health.

City Reserve Funds (essentially our savings account) are up 34%, or 2.44 times greater than our liabilities.

City revenue is 12% greater than our expenses, meaning that we’re putting 12% of “extra” income to the general fund.

Next, we will look at fire department budget reports and previous years accounting to assess the overall financial health of the fire department. All of this information is available online to the general public. If there is anything that is not available, one simply has to submit a request to the city using their form and you can obtain the same financial information that we have.

Excluding this year, when financial reports have grossly overshot previous years due to manipulation by the city manager, we see a trend. Starting in 2015 and going until 2020 we note that every single year the fire department was under budget except for two years, 2018 and 2019. In the former, we were 3.5% over our allocated budget, and in the latter, a scant 1%. If the fire department has been under budget for five of the last seven years, I assume we are still doing fairly well. We are certainly not hemorrhaging money as I have heard some say.

Now we get to the nuanced assessment of the fire department budget. To understand how this complex assessment works, we need to think about our budget being broken down into two separate components, ambulance and fire. To be clear, there is no physical or other boundary between the fire department and the ambulance service. I am a fireman and a paramedic. Depending on your needs as a victim calling 911 I can either put on bunker gear and go put the fire out in your home or I can come to your house when you’re having a heart attack and provide lifesaving interventions.

Now back to the accounting. It helps to think of our budget as being divided into two parts of unknown size. The fire department part is paid for by the taxpayers and there is no expectation from the city to reimburse the general fund for fire department expenses. The second component, the ambulance service, is essentially given a loan out of the general fund and then is expected to reimburse the city for that money using ambulance billing and other sources of income.

Now, if we play the game of “what would a nine-year-old say?” we would say that each part needs to pay for half of the fire department budget. 50-50 split. If our budget is $1 million, we expect the fire department to cost approximately $500,000 and the ambulance service would also then cost approximately $500,000.

In that example, the city would give the fire department $1 million at the beginning of the year and expect the ambulance to reimburse the taxpayer (general fund) $500,000 in ambulance revenue. This brings the effective cost of the fire department down to $500,000 a year.

Unfortunately, that’s not the game that Mr. Cannon and his cronies are playing. Taking the broadest brush imaginable, they stated that since roughly 85% of our calls are EMS (ambulance)-related, then 85% of the fire department’s budget can be attributed to the ambulance. If 85% of our budget goes to supporting the ambulance alone, then the ambulance alone needs to reimburse the city for 85% of the fire department budget.

Using our $1 million budget from the example above, the expectation is that the ambulance then needs to make $850,000 to justify its existence (85% of $1 million). The other assumption this makes is that running the fire department will only cost $150,000.

If the ambulance only makes $300,000 this year, Mr. Cannon frantically proclaims “the ambulance is costing us $550,000 a year!” When we apply real budget numbers, we find that this 85% assumption is where the claims of the fire department losing $700,000/year come from.

Do you see what he has done there? I call this bad math. You can call it what you would like.

If one wants to check the validity of the “85% rule” we only need to look at the new budget that was passed earlier this month for the fire department only. Even though this budget incorporates three months of ambulance service and associated costs, it also accounts for nine months of the year with no ambulance. This is a good approximation for what it would cost to run the fire department without the ambulance. I can tell you right now that it will not be 15% of our current combined service budget. The actual budget passed for the fire department alone was $1.67 million. That’s 72% of our current budget for fire only, the exact opposite of the 85% rule.

The reality of this unfortunate and highly political situation is that we don’t know what it costs to run the ambulance alone. We don’t know how much of the fire department budget actually goes to ambulance operations versus that which goes to fire operations. We have never had a professional company come in to evaluate the structure and cost effectiveness of this department. City staff can’t even tell us why we bill the amounts we do when we take you to the hospital.

If we can’t answer these simple questions and find ourselves using ridiculous math that doesn’t pass the “asking nine-year-old” test, does it really justify putting 16,000 citizens at risk and terminating half of our fire department?

I believe the answer is no. They have not brought enough proof to validate the risk they are exposing this community to.

Hundreds of you showed up on May 10 to tell city council that very thing. They listened and voted to put in a bid for the ASA. While that is a great start, I’m here to tell you that it will not be enough.

Under Mr. Cannon‘s leadership, council will likely put in a bid of $1 million or more. In private conversations with this department, he has said as much.

I am not here to pass judgments on whose duty it is to pay for the fire department or the ambulance. My purpose today is to tell you that if you want to keep fire-based ambulances showing up to your emergencies, we need a reasonable bid to the county. A $1 million dollar bid will shut down negotiations between commissioners and the city, and the fire department along with it. We will lose six firefighters and the safety our current structure has brought you for the past hundred years.

Furthermore, when the fire department has been gutted and you only get two firemen to show up to your emergency in the name of “saving money,” you will not get a tax break. The city has no plans to reduce taxes when they reduce fire department services.

Reach out to your councilors and demand that they work with the county to make this problem go away. Reach out and tell them to handle Mr. Cannon so that the city goes the direction that the population wants it to go in, not the direction he wants to go in.