Palo Pinto County Judge David Nicklas presented Rotary Club of Mineral Wells members Wednesday with information about the Nov. 7 sales tax election for Emergency Services District No. 1.
All registered county voters can cast a ballot for or against the proposition. However if passed, sales taxes for ESD No. 1 would only be collected outside Mineral Wells, ESD No. 2, Graford, Gordon, Mingus and Strawn.
Those smaller incorporated towns outside Mineral Wells and Santo would still benefit from county paid EMS service – and the Santo and ESD No. 2 areas could in the future receive full-time paid EMS service should they opt to consolidate. But that is later down the road.
It is first things first, and that is to see if county residents support and want paid EMS by deciding the Nov. 7 proposition. The sales tax referendum is the first step in the ongoing efforts to bring full-time 911 EMS to rural areas of the county.
"If (the election) fails then the people in the county are telling us they are fine with putting someone in the back of their station wagon or truck and taking them to Harris to take care of," Nicklas told Rotarians and Palo Pinto General Hospital CEO Harris Brooks.
ESD No. 1 board members in August voted to call for the Nov. 7 sales tax election to levy a 1.5-cent sales tax to “help and assist emergency services” in the county.
At present emergency ambulance service in Palo Pinto County outside Mineral Wells is dependent on volunteers to respond to those calls. That has become less reliable in recent years as the number of volunteers able to take calls has dwindled. Mineral Wells EMS has picked up many of those calls, now responding to about 43 percent of the EMS in the county, sometimes going as far away as Strawn and Possum Kingdom Lake which has left the city at times with just one ambulance available for its 16,000 residents for sometimes several hours or longer.
Early voting for the Nov. 7 election begins Oct. 23.
The election is part of a three-pronged approach to generate the revenue needed to sustain full-time 911 EMS service in the county. It is estimated the 1.5-cent sales tax would generate around $200,000 annually to help offset a $650,000 annual subsidy to contract with an outside 911 EMS provider.
Palo Pinto County Commissioners have agreed to use about half a million dollars in unappropriated fund balance dollars to contract with and start paid EMS service. County commissioners have said they do not see the county using its fund balance to subsidize EMS costs more than a couple of years, especially if permanent funding solutions are not in place.
If the sales tax measure passes, the next step the ESD No. 1 board will undertake is trying to get 100 county residents – qualified voters and landowners outside Mineral Wells and ESD No. 2 – to petition the county for the creation of Emergency Services District No. 3 that would assess an ad valorem tax rate within that overlay district to further offset subsidized EMS service costs.
If a sales tax overlay and ESD No. 3 become reality, the county then hopes to convince ESD No. 2 to join with the third ESD, adding its approximately $225,000 annual sales tax revenue to give residents and businesses in the Santo and southeast quadrant full-time paid EMS service.
At present, EMS service in ESD No. 2, which includes the busy Interstate 20 and southern U.S. Highway 281 corridors, still relies on volunteers from Santo Fire/EMS to answer emergency medical calls.