JW, thank you for your response. But I think you might have misunderstood me, I wasn’t making a claim about accountability/transparency, rather, I was responding to your comment about efficiency/duplication of effort (“It's either the RFA or each city runs their own levy. Duplication of effort/cost is inevitable in the latter, whereas a combination provides more options down the line for efficiency.).
You may not consider an additional special district to be burdensome to monitor, but I’m not sure how widely that view is shared. I know from trying person still in the work force that it’s extremely hard if not impossible to be even moderately well-informed about what our current local governments or boards supported with our property taxes are doing — from schools, the state, the city, the county, the library district and the port. Add to that the fact that they all schedule things with zero regard for what their sister governments are doing during the same period, making it impossible for any citizen who tries to follow along to do so in any sustained way unless they don’t have much of a life and aren’t working a job.
I’m not hearing the answer to my question about why fire/EMS should be split off from other city government functions and given its own board (and staff support) and taxing authority, or how that will make things more efficient. If there is an efficiency from the regional economy of scale, then why wouldn’t we seek that same gain from merging all the city functions (merging Olympia and Tumwater)? There’s a lot of functions that cities do that are even less geographically based than fire/ems response, which after all does involve serving physical places on the ground. Why merge the functions that are place-bound but not merge all the other things like city governance, HR, legal, etc.
Another concern that occurs to me, just from reading some of the pros and cons, is that the board seems likely to become a rubber stamp for the fire fighter unions, with no countervailing influence. I’m willing to bet real money that if this proposal passes, the fire board is going to end up populated > 95% with current or ex-fire department folks, year in and year out — it’s going to be difficult if not impossible for anyone not supported by the fire folks to be elected.
With fire/ems located within city governments, it’s fine for the fire/ems people to be 100% single-minded about advocating solely for their parochial interest because that tendency is balanced by the fire budget having to go through a city council that is also hearing from all the other advocates for all the other needs. But it’s not obvious that a fire board dominated by folks from the firefighter community and with taxing authority will have any motivation to restrain itself.
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