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Larry,

Thanks for the informative reply.

For the federal funding component I believe that was discussed at city council, but I can't seem to find the meeting minutes for it. In lieu of the documentation, I'll adjourn on that point.

However, and this is again my penchant for weighting the opinions of the line workers highly so take it for what it's worth, from those I've spoken with in my own research the way the city of Olympia has the BLS transport proposal designed is that the program has to generate enough revenue to pay for itself which means the units will be transporting to overloaded hospitals that are backed up with ambulances waiting hours. The result is that these units will be frequently out of service for responding. The way Lacey runs an aid unit is that it is essentially a medical call only primary response vehicle allowing it to respond to more calls because private ambulance companies do the transporting (and the sitting at the hospital). A bigger pool of available money provided by the RFA would provide flexibility to these units to more align with the response model of our neighbor Lacey instead of being revenue-driven to survive.

I was unaware about the credit rating issue that you addressed so thank you for that.

Can you please provide me the answer from save our FD on these two issues I find key:

1) Does Save our FD acknowledge that there is a funding crisis for the fire departments? Specifically coming to mind is the Olympia fire department because of the city council meeting (it was either August or September of last year) where the city manager stated the city could not adequately fund the fire department. This was part of the council's justification for endorsing the RFA proposal.

2) If the answer to the above is yes, then what does Save our FD propose be the means to increase funding for the fire department? This has to be some sort of new revenue source as the city itself has stated the pool of money is not big enough to apportion what's needed to the fire department.