08/08/2026
This issue is important. It’s local. And deserves some serious consideration. Read this, then have your own thoughts & concerns ready when you attend Josh Schoeman’s listening sessions. I’ll post the dates, locations& times in a later message. Please share this & discuss with family & neighbors. It affects all of us. The following was not written by me:
A plan to fix fire and EMS in Washington County is picking up steam. Here's the part that should give you pause before you decide how you feel about it.
The pitch isn't just "here's more money for ambulances." The pitch is: let the county take over the taxing power your own town currently holds, so nobody has to ask voters for permission anymore.
Sit with that for a second. The selling point is that you'll stop getting asked.
Right now, if your town needs more for fire or EMS, your own board has to bring it to you. You can show up. You can push back. You can vote them out if they get it wrong. That's not red tape — that's the whole deal. The people paying for something get a say in whether it's worth it, and the people deciding get to look you in the eye at the gas station afterward.
Move that decision one county up, and it doesn't get more efficient. It gets more distant. Somebody a lot further from your driveway now sets your tax rate. And taxing authority, once it moves up, has a funny way of never moving back down — even after the emergency that justified it is long gone.
Some towns in this county already handle this fine on their own. They'd be asked to pay in either way, with no clean way back out once they're in.
None of this makes the county evil, or the people running it dishonest. Problems are real. But a plan only ever looks clean from the room where it was drawn up. The place it actually has to work is your town, with your board, answering to you — and that's not something worth handing away just because the version on paper sounds tidier than the mess you already know how to fix yourself.
