It’s time to terminate the IFPD and CSA 38 special assessments.
Congress passed, the President signed and the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that each resident of the country, legal or not, must have health insurance. Wow!
It pays 100 percent of our paramedic and ambulance service — when up to this point only 36 percent of the users [of IFPD’s service] paid their medical bills.
Since $1.2 million of IFPD’S $1.6 million budget is for these services, it’s time to stop having the property owners flip the bill for residents and visitors alike.
Wanna bet that salaries head north again and property owners not the users will be left holding the bag?
Those board members who claim to be about the Constitution will once again compromise their beliefs to keep their pet projects, not only fully funded, but make more excuses on how to spend this new windfall of tax dollars. Just listen to them squeal about how this new funding won’t be enough again.
Wake up Idyllwild, now you’re taxed for health care and the property owners are again taxed for your health care, not to mention being taxed for your fire protection three times:once through the ad valorem property taxes, again through the special district assessments, and finally through the newly adopted state fire assessment.
The official rate of inflation is around 2.5 percent but gross pay for those who provide these services flew off the charts, sometimes exceeding base pay by 100 percent. It’s a state and federal sponsored employee rip off and redistribution of wealth, folks, with IFPD fanning the flames at the property tax payers expense.
Eliminate IFPD, and make the county, state, and feds who take our dollars and spend them elsewhere return those dollars to Idyllwild. So long as IFPD exists we will be taxed at three times the normal rate and receive services less than the standard rate.
Jeff Smith
Pine Cove
