Back in June, County Fire went to the board of supervisors in San Bernardino looking for a three percent increase to the contentious $157 per parcel fire fee levied against property owners in approximately 19,000 square miles of mostly unincorporated county land known as Fire Protection District 5, or FP5. The request came even before property owners had seen the new fee on the tax bills and just months after it was established in an unorthodox maneuver called a negative protest vote. The process and the requested increase did not sit right with supervisors, including our own newly appointed Third District Supervisor Dawn Rowe, a resident of Yucca Valley. Reporter Mike Lipsitz picks up the story from here…
Rowe joined the other supervisors in calling for county administrators to come up with funding options to cover a $13 million annual shortfall in providing fire and emergency services. And she led the effort to successfully deny the requested 3 percent increase. Cutting funding from the fire district’s budget completely could lead to fire station closures, staffing cuts and higher response times, fire officials have said. And while acknowledging that the public must pay for such services, Rowe said yesterday that she couldn’t, in good conscience, support the increase before the public has a chance to vote on the matter. So county administrators yesterday outlined a few alternative funding methods, including property and sales taxes, that voters could see on the ballot sometime before January 2021, Until such a vote, the $157 special tax isn’t going to go away, but it isn’t going to go up either.
