Ambulance utility fee starts July 1
By Terry Murry on Tuesday, April 19th, 2022 in Columbia Basin News More Top Stories
COLLEGE PLACE – Starting July 1, an ambulance utility fee to help support the College Place’s basic life support ambulance service goes into effect. The College Place City Council approved the ambulance utility fee on April 12 following four years of analyzing various options.
To ease into the cost of the utility only 33 percent of it will be charged from July 1 to Dec. 31, 2022. Then, 66.67 percent will be charged through 2023. The full charge activates in 2024. This means for the average single-family homeowner the cost per month beginning July 1 is $2.28, in 2023 is $4.56, and in 2024 is $6.84.
The ambulance utility fee was selected due to the large increases in call volume the ambulance service has witnessed over the last couple of years.
“In all the time I’ve been here, it has always been four or five percent increase in call volume every year,” Fire Chief David Winter, who came in 1990, told the council last week. “Then last year it was 20 percent. This year so far it has been 25 percent.”
The College Place Fire Department is primarily a volunteer service backed up by limited full-time personnel. The agency has witnessed a trend of multiple calls at the same time and, due to its limited full-time fire staffing, it’s challenging to get a second ambulance rolling in a timely manner. The city said the ambulance utility fee will allow CPFD to hire four full-time firefighters which enables the city to have two full-time firefighters on duty at any given time.
“We think that this fund and these personnel are enough to sustain us for at least the foreseeable future that we can even estimate,” Winter said.
Visit https://www.cpwa.us/departments/fire/ambulance_utility.php for more information on the ambulance utility fee.
