OPINION: Chatham fire fee: Commission must levy tax to ensure fire protection for unincorporated residents

Feb. 25—This is a column by Editorial Page Editor Adam Van Brimmer.

Two words can cause a flame around here quicker than a struck match.

Fire fee.

Just typing the term makes me flush at the memories of its last mention. The year was 2018, and then-City Manager Rob Hernandez and the then-Savannah City Council attempted to make fire protection service financing its own line item on property tax bills.

The strategy failed and left advocates badly burned — Hernandez later resigned, and all but one city council incumbent who faced a re-election challenger lost. The lone survivor was now-Mayor Van Johnson, a vocal opponent of the fire fee.

Now it's the Chatham Commission's turn to manage a fire department financing flareup. Unlike their city peers, the commissioners don't have the option of letting this situation smolder — whereas the city just continued to pay for the fire department through the general fund, the county doesn't have such a mechanism in place.

Chatham County does not operate a fire department. The county government has never had to — by the time the unincorporated county's growth reached critical mass in the 1960s, a number of small fire departments had merged to create Southside Fire.

Southside, which recently rebranded itself Chatham Emergency Services, is funded by property owners who pay for fire protection directly through an annual subscription. Their coverage area includes some 35,000 properties, each of which is invoiced for service annually.

The issue for Chatham Emergency Services — and now the Chatham Commission — is that more than 10,000 landowners ignore the bill every year. Chatham Emergency Services has no recourse to address non-subscribers and is operating at an unsustainable deficit as a result.

The situation will force the Chatham Commission to take action. Failure of the fire department would crater unincorporated property values as no property insurance underwriter will write a policy on a home or business without fire protection.

The Chatham government staff has floated several potential solutions to the problem and commissioners have held virtual town halls to gather feedback. The most practical fix by far is a county-levied fire fee, either as a defined line item on property tax bills or as an extra mill or two in the unincorporated area's special services district tax, which is how the Chatham County Police Department is funded.

If the county puts fire protection costs on tax bills, everybody pays. The Chatham Commission can then contract out the fire services to a third party, such as Chatham Emergency Services.

Such a move will meet with opposition — nobody wants to pay more taxes, and many unincorporated residents brag about their low property tax bill, many of them ignorant of the fact that the absence of a fire department contributes significantly to the savings.

Yet there are no viable alternatives. Many non-subscribers are intentionally gaming the system. They know Chatham Emergency Services can't chase them for unpaid subscriptions, and they know the fire department is a private non-profit that's not subject to open records laws — meaning the public can't get easy access to the list of those not paying their bills and apply pressure that way.

They also know Chatham Emergency Services' policy is to put out their fires whether they subscribe or not. As fires are a public safety issue, Chatham Emergency Services feels — rightfully — a moral responsibility to respond to protect human life.

A fire call can cost a non-subscriber $8,000 or more, but even Chatham Emergency Services' chief acknowledges the risk-reward calculation.

"We don't have any teeth on the front end," admits Chief Chuck Kearns.

Sadly, only the county has the power to ensure fire protection is properly and fairly funded in unincorporated Chatham. Fire fee may be dirty words within the Savannah city limits, but they mean salvation for the residents beyond.

Contact Adam Van Brimmer at [email protected].

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