ESD Tax Increase

On May 8th the voters of Johnson County will decide whether or not to increase our taxes.  The Emergency Services District (ESD) is requesting an increase in the ad valorem tax rate from $.03 to $.06 per $100 property valuation.  I'm not as concerned with the tax rate as I am with the entity responsible for my tax money once they get it and how the fire departments in the county are funded.

The first issue is that there are two different types of fire departments in the county; independent volunteer departments and municipal departments.  Cities such as Joshua, Keene and Alvarado are included in the ESD, but the fire departments are part of the cities with municipal budgets paid for by local residents in the city property tax.  The fact that residents of cities with their own fire departments also pay the ESD tax is double-taxation for those people.  Only state legislation will alleviate this - more on that later.

In the case of the City of Joshua specifically our fire department ran 50% of all calls in 2009 to areas outside our city limits, but the ESD only provided about 35% of our fire department budget so the citizens of Joshua subsidized  the remaining service to the county areas that our department is responsible for.  Alvarado and Keene show similar breakdowns when factoring out salaries since they have paid fire fighters.

The ESD budget revenue for 2009-10 is just over $2.6 million, but only $1.25 million is allocated back to the departments that provide the services the ESD primarily exists for. They have high overhead costs and  they've been stock piling money to build a dispatch center instead of working with the Sheriff's office to improve fire dispatch from the 911 call center.  The ESD just opened their new dispatch center and now have to find a way to fund all the additional salaries and overhead.  The sophisticated software they're using is supposed to improve call dispatch time, but 911 calls will continue to go to the Sheriff's dispatch center first and then forwarded to the ESD dispatch center.  The first financial priority of the ESD should be to compensate the participating departments dollar for dollar what they spend to provide services to the ESD.  Will that be the case when they double their revenue?

Due to current state law counties with populations under 250,000 have their ESD board members appointed by the county commissioner's court.  I encourage you to contact State Rep Rob Orr and our soon to be  elected State Senator and ask them to introduce and support legislation that will allow voters of counties to elect their ESD board members regardless of population.  Any entity with the power to levy a tax should be directly accountable to those being taxed.  In addition, request an amendment to state law to allow  municipalities by local election to exit the ESD to alleviate the double-taxation of city residents.  Cities could then enter into contracts with ESD's on a level playing field and negotiate service areas and compensation beneficial to all parties without city residents picking up the tab.

A.J. Mathieu
Joshua City Council