With all due respect to former Rep. Dolan, the RFA issue is not about trusting firefighters. It’s about how best to provide and use funding in ways that protects the public. We believe that our state's regressive tax system should not be made worse by this new fee and that if additional revenues are needed there is a better, more fair and less risky way to do so. We believe that creating yet another level of government officials and money added for another duplicated bureaucracy to serve the new organization would be better used to provide real firefighters and equipment.
Under your position we need to just give the firefighters a blank check to fill in with whatever they say they need and that we will have to pay for. That is not a responsible role for our elected officials to take.
What the RFA proposal says it will do is what the public needs to know about, not how much you trust and respect firefighters. The opposition also values and respects firefighters but voters and policy makers need to trust but verify claims made. We did the verification and found that the platitudes and talking points of the RFA supporters to be lacking in substance and documentation.
Please go to SaveOurFD.org and see the source documents, the videos and spreadsheets that demonstrate that the “No on Prop. 1” has the receipts that back up our statements and positions. The No on Prop 1 side doesn’t seek to confuse, it seeks to clarify the facts. Then ask for that level of proof from the “yes” side and judge for yourself.
What is demonstrably false is Laurie Dolan’s claim that the NO side says RFA’s “is a totally untested concept”. That is absurd and just plain wrong. What she may be reading is the recognized fact (we have the video of the RFA Planning Committee saying this) that the funding formula used to extract millions of dollars from the public has never been tested in court.
The successful RFA approach you refer to has huge risks that do happen in real life. Look no further than West Thurston Regional Fire Authority, which is now closing two of its five fire stations and reducing fire staff after voters failed to pass its maintenance and operations levy – the same kind of vote that would be required here six years from this November. With a 60% RFA vote required, the risks are great.
Certainly, firefighters are trustworthy. And so are police officers, public works officials, parks and arts department staff and other city employees. Under your logic, would we want each of these groups to peel away from city government and have their own commissioners, taxing authority and administrative staffs?
We say no. Vote no on Proposition 1. See SaveOurFD.org for the facts.
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