Posted by Kromey at 9:18pm Oct 6 '10Just found a follow-up article on this incident (link below). As I had surmised from the limited information in the first, there is no tax-funded fire department to cover the area where this home burned. Instead, the city fire department (funded presumably by city, not county, taxes) offers the option for nearby county residents to pay a very reasonable fee to have them respond to fires well outside their standard jurisdiction.
To reiterate: It's a city fire department. These are county, not city, residents. The county does not provide fire protection services. The city has stepped up and offered to fill in that gap.
But obviously they cannot do that for free, and the county residents are not funding any fire department with their taxes.
Basically, the county and state governments have failed utterly, and the city government is picking up the slack; think of the "fee" as really a city tax that these non-city residents are voluntarily paying.
And to be clear, despite the obvious slant and spin in the first article posted, these fire departments are not "pay-to-spray": They are your usual tax-funded fire departments who in addition offer a subscription service to go outside their coverage area to protect your property from fire.
To reiterate: It's a city fire department. These are county, not city, residents. The county does not provide fire protection services. The city has stepped up and offered to fill in that gap.
But obviously they cannot do that for free, and the county residents are not funding any fire department with their taxes.
Basically, the county and state governments have failed utterly, and the city government is picking up the slack; think of the "fee" as really a city tax that these non-city residents are voluntarily paying.
And to be clear, despite the obvious slant and spin in the first article posted, these fire departments are not "pay-to-spray": They are your usual tax-funded fire departments who in addition offer a subscription service to go outside their coverage area to protect your property from fire.
Yup, I was right - Kromey