[Editorials

[Editorials

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Fire Taxes

The public hearing on the county budget and tax rates produced a lively discussion Monday evening.

In general members of the volunteer fire and rescue squads supported a special levy dedicated to supporting their organizations.

In general land owners, especially large landowners, opposed setting up this special fund and supported using personal property and regular real estate taxes instead.

Unmentioned through most of the debate was the issue of landuse taxation, but that was the background for the discussion. The fire levy would be based on the fair-market rather than the land-use assessment of real estate.

Over the years this newspaper has consistently supported the land-use taxation program. This has been based on the premise that keeping land in agriculture and forestry saves millions in taxes because land that is not in buildings demands very little in the way of services. This is particularly true of the county’s largest budget expense, schools, but it is also true of landfill space, police protection and even demand for fire and rescue services.

Members of the fire and rescue companies themselves supported this point of view reporting that most of their calls are to respond to emergencies at residences.

However, a review of the emergency logs published in the paper this spring shows that a lot of emergency calls were for brush fires. This happens every spring, and it would be reasonable to assume many of these brush fires are on land in the land-use program.

Perhaps for this special budget item a tax that is based on fair market value of property is reasonable. Besides a combination of a three-cent fire tax on real estate plus a 20-cent increase in personal property taxes, which have been unchanged for years, yields almost exactly the amount of money requested by the Fire and-Rescue Association.

This would enable the supervisors to drop the general real estate rate to 71 cents for a balanced budget or to hold it at the current rate of 69 cents by drawing the surplus down by $100,000, about the amount that is needed for non-recurring capital expenses.