The city has been working on a budget for fiscal year 2024, which starts in July. The first draft budget resulted in a deficit of over $1 million. The latest draft reduces that deficit to a little under $400,000.
I don’t believe we should pass a deficit budget or dip into reserves to fund a planned deficit. And I’m not confident we can balance the budget without increasing the Ivins portion of property taxes. Now that probably got your attention. I finally found a way to make everyone in Ivins mad at me. But don’t freak out about my tax increase comment. I may be the only council member who would consider that.
There’s a public hearing at our May 4th City Council meeting on the budget. It would be valuable to get your input on the budget, ways to balance it or deal with deficits, property taxes, and Fire/EMS which I’ll discuss next.
One of the reasons we’re having trouble getting to a balanced budget is the proposed Fire/EMS budget for 2024 is almost 40% higher than 2023. That’s close to a $500,000 increase. Fire/EMS costs have risen significantly over the past few years.
The chart below shows public safety cost trends. Based on the proposed budget, the cost of Law Enforcement has doubled in 11 years. Fire/EMS services have more than tripled.
It’s reasonable/logical that costs increase due to inflation and population growth. Law Enforcement cost increases closely follow population/inflation increases but Fire/EMS costs are almost double what they should be from the impact of population and inflation.
One reason for the cost increase proposed for 2024 is the added cost of re-opening the Center Street station. Andrew Parker, our Fire Chief, should get a lot of credit for getting it opened quickly last year and holding off most of the cost increases to the 2024 budget.
Another reason for higher costs is that we’ve been transitioning from a volunteer-heavy staffing model to a volunteer-light model. More full-time professional personnel cost more.
Our city council pushed for re-opening Center Street last year because a lot of Ivins was not within a 5-minute response time from the Rachel Street station near Harmon’s. It was a life/safety issue. It also resulted in some areas of the city getting an official “ISO rating” of 9 and even 10, which is the worst rating a fire department (and city) can get on a 1 to 10 scale. Because of that, I heard that some home insurance policies were not being renewed last year.
Everyone on the city council supports the need for the Center Street station to be fully operational. But there have been questions about the wisdom of our move away from volunteers. At last week’s city council meeting Dennis Mehr asked if the higher cost from a professional staffing model was worth it. That’s a great question. One way to answer it is to look at changes in our official rating over time.
Our Fire Department was just reevaluated, and we now have an ISO rating of 4. That puts us in the top 16% of fire departments statewide and 17% nationally. Looking back, we had a rating of 5 in 2013, then it improved to 4 in 2014 and stayed there until the Center Street station closed.
The ISO rating doesn’t tell the whole story. The ratings are based on the score fire departments get from an evaluation of 16 items. Departments get a rating of 4 if their score is between 60 and 69.99. Our score is 66.27. So, we’re a strong 4, approaching a 3, which fewer than 10% of the fire departments in the country achieve.
In prior years when we did get ISO ratings of 4, our best year’s score was 60.69, just barely enough to move us from an ISO 5 to ISO 4 rating. Does ISO 4 matter? I asked my home insurance agent. He said an ISO rating of 4 is great and qualifies homeowners for preferred rates.
Our current score puts us close to an ISO 3 rating. Chief Parker plans to secure that rating by 2027. Do we need to be that good? Is it worth the added cost? We’re already better than 80% of the fire departments nationwide. Should we be satisfied with simply being in the top 50%, like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average? Or should we strive to be even better?
People have suggested other models to save us money. One would be a return to the volunteer-focused department we used to have, with a balance of full-time professionals and volunteers. But it sounds like getting volunteers is harder than it used to be. Even so, it’s worth investigating how best to balance volunteers and full-time personnel.
Another idea is to turn everything over to a “fire district” to save money. I’m not sure how well that works in practice as a cost-saving strategy. Last year the Hurricane Valley Fire District proposed a nearly 90% property tax increase. But they haven’t abandoned that “district” concept, so is there something of value there?
I believe that before considering any alternate plan we take a detailed look at what we’re getting from a full-time department that won’t show up in an ISO rating. I can see the benefit of a full-time professional staff with regular assignments and cohesive team training. And I think the alphabet soup of state & federal regulatory agencies and standards like NFPA, BEMS, NIOSH, NIMS, FEMA, UOSH, US Department of Labor, OSHA, IFC, ISO, and UFRA not only add to costs but make it harder for a volunteer department to work as well as it used to when there were fewer regulations.
Going back to my tax increase comment, we would need to increase the Ivins portion of property taxes by $47/year on a primary residence with a $500,000 market value to eliminate the draft budget’s deficit. Ivins has not increased its share of property taxes since 2010. Anyway, come to next Thursday’s city council meeting and tell us what you think.