We are going to pay more for our ambulance services in Jefferson county whether we vote yes or no on the proposed levy, so we need to know what each option will provide us with.

Understating the proposed Jefferson County Ambulance District:

First and foremost, people seem to care the most about money , so let’s be straightforward- voting for the levy is CHEAPER than not voting for it within just a few years. How?

Idaho Falls Ambulance has been very gracious to Jefferson County. Our county paid them $319,176 out of our general fund from our county taxes to service our area this past year. But it actually costs them MORE than that to service our area, so their tax payers are subsidizing our county. As you can imagine, they don’t want to keep doing that. But Idaho Falls wants to help us out, so rather than charge us the full amount right away, they will raise what they charge us 25% each year to give us time to get our own ambulance district up and going. But if we don’t, they will charge us over $1,000,000 a year within just a few years because thats what it will cost them to maintain staff and equipment to service our area. That’s over ONE MILLION to wait for an ambulance in Idaho Falls to be available and come to our area. That means our county has to come up with that money to pay Idaho Falls, or we go without ALS ambulance services in our county. To put this into perspective, just from January to March this year, Idaho Falls responded to 108 calls and central ran 473 calls in Jefferson county.

So that leads to the second part: why should we have an ambulance district?

Central started an ambulance to help get us going. In addition to the money we pay Idaho Falls, the county gave some money to Central to help fund the ambulance (most recent year $300,000) but it costs much more than that to run an ambulance, so Central is also using their Fire Department budget to help fund the ambulance. In fact the local fire districts with Quick Response Emergency Services are all doing the same thing. They don’t get funds for medical services so they have to squeeze funds for equipment out of their fire budgets and hope for volunteers.

Central has recently been running a BLS ambulance. What does that mean? It means BASIC life support. That’s really important and on many calls it’s sufficient, but over 1/3 of calls are ALS calls- ADVANCED life support. It costs more to run an ALS ambulance, but they can help with heart attacks, severe trauma. Think about if someone is hurt badly- a BLS ambulance can’t intubate, can’t provide medications to restart a heart, or pain medications. So in those cases, Central has to call Idaho Falls anyway. One ambulance also can’t keep up with all the calls in our area either, so we call Idaho Falls again and again. Idaho Falls is busy with their own area too though- nearly every day all of their ambulances are all out at the same time at least once. They could use help in their area sometimes too, but since central ambulance is only BLS, they can’t help with calls. Every county in our area has ALS, except Jefferson county. Another note for the Roberts folks- we’re not in central’s fire district, so central ambulance doesn’t service our area and we rely on Idaho falls. If Idaho falls stops serving our area because we can’t afford to pay them from our county budget, we’ll be in a bad situation.

So what’s the solution? What does an ambulance district even mean? It means funds for ambulances and staff in our area. The plans is to take that million that Idaho falls will need from us and run two ALS ambulances in our county with it instead. One will be housed in Rigby, and another will be added in Menan, staffed 24/7 with paramedics and EMTs. That means faster service for most of the county, with plans to budget to add additional ambulances down the road as growth continues. The levy rate can never exceed .0004 times property value. The ambulance district will set a budget each year, and that will be applied across the tax base. If that value ends up being less that .0004 it means our tax will be less than that rate. It can never exceed it. As more homes go in, the tax base gets bigger (homes have a higher value than bare ground) so it’s likely that rate will decline. For Roberts folks- this is cheaper than the mosquito abatement (and cheaper than not passing a levy and paying Idaho Falls in a few years).

As for those few places where Idaho Falls ambulance is actually closer- the beauty of it all is, if we have ALS here we can trade services with Idaho Falls. There are areas in the Idaho Falls district that are closer to Rigby, and areas in Jefferson that are closer for Idaho Falls Ambulance. With both counties having an ALS service, the closest available ambulance could come through a mutual aid agreement or a plan to pay for the number of calls we service for each other, so no one is going to wait longer. Same with Madison on the north side! We can work with and aide other counties around us if we have an ambulance district.

Other benefits are, our fire departments will also improve because they’ll have money to spend on fire equipment instead of subsidizing medical. And the Quick Response teams aren’t going away- they’ll have funding and protocols from the ambulance district. They can even improve! They’ll still come, sometimes beating the ambulance there to begin care, sometimes with the ambulance to provide extra hands and help.

So why not wait a few more years? Because if we wait, as the costs to Idaho Falls go up we won’t be able to maintain the BLS ambulance we have, let alone add a second ambulance and upgrade to ALS, because that money will have to go to Idaho Falls.

That could mean losing the staff that are already in place, many of whom are already ALS certified but are not able to use those skills because Central doesn’t have an ALS license and the county can’t have an ALS license until they can afford to run an ALS ambulance. But if we move to ALS, the staff are already in place to make that change. Idaho Falls is intentionally trying to give us the time to get going. If we pass the levy now, the ambulance district won’t get any of that money until 2027 because first the money has to be collected in 2026 with taxes. So they’ll continue to use general county funds and fire budgets to get this going knowing that funding is on the way, but they can’t sustain it without a levy, especially as Idaho Falls prices increase.

So the real question is, do we pay less money for faster local services or more money for Idaho Falls to come when they’re available and wait for them when they’re not?

Perhaps the worst part is, for every person who votes no, two people have to vote yes for this to pass, because it requires a super majority. That means all the people who go to the poles uninformed who see a levy and think it’s just going to increase their taxes will vote no, and cancel out two yes votes. We have got to get the word out, and people need to show up to support the levy at the polls on May 20.

We’re going to pay for our ambulance services either way, shouldn’t we invest that in our own county and faster services?