A stockpile of specialized tools and equipment has made the Alamance County Rescue Unit the go-to resource whenever area residents find themselves in the proverbial tight squeeze.
Now, the unit’s top brass are hoping to secure a different sort of apparatus as they strive to extricate their own organization from a mortal peril that looms on the financial front.
Chris Mauney, the current chief of the rescue unit, approached Alamance County’s commissioners on Monday to propose a special countywide tax district that could provide a reliable source of revenue for this longstanding nonprofit organization.
“We’ve been around for 70 years – a lot longer than many of your volunteer fire departments,” Mauney reminded the county’s governing board, “and we provide specialty services that are not available anywhere else.”
Under state law, counties are able to carve out special tax districts to fund services ranging from fire and rescue to recreation and the maintenance of cemeteries. The applicable state statue generally allows these districts to be set up within circumscribed areas where there’s a demand for a particular service. In some cases, it also permits districts that cover all of a county’s unincorporated areas or even the entirety of its territory.
Mauney urged the commissioners to establish a countywide tax district in order to supplement the donations and grants which currently sustain the rescue unit. The funds include a stipend of $125,000 a year from the county that helps pay for various capital projects as well as a cadre of paid staff members who work 12 hours a day to support the unit’s 70 or so volunteers. Mauney argued, however, that an independent source of revenue would allow him to further professionalize the unit, upgrade aging equipment, and have staff members on call 24/7.
Mauney insisted that the funds from a special property tax would ultimately benefit the whole county, including areas with ready access to fire protection and emergency medical services. Despite some measure of overlap, the unit’s chief stressed that his organization has specialized equipment and training that’s absent from EMS and most local fire departments.
Among other things, Mauney noted that his rescue unit can go into trenches and other confined spaces, retrieve people who are trapped in heavy vehicles, and conduct operations in agricultural settings. It can, for example, extract someone from a grain silo, where the rolling tide of kernels demands specialized handling. The unit also has the wherewithal to grapple with raging floodwaters as well as an expert dive team to pull people and vehicles from aquatic environments. Mauney conceded that his organization’s ability to provide these services hinges on the availability of reliable sources of revenue. He added that a year ago, a proposal to slash the county’s annual allocation posed an existential threat to the rescue unit’s solvency. The commissioners ultimately overruled the prospective cuts, which the county manager had proposed to them in her recommended spending plan for the county. All the same, Mauney insisted that his organization needs the sort of financial stability that’s only possible with something like a dedicated property tax.
The unit’s chief went on to add that a special countywide property tax would put him and his colleagues in a more sustainable financial position. By way of example, he said that a levy of 1/4 cent for every $100 of value would be enough to secure this firm footing far into the future.
“A quarter cent would put us in the middle of all your county fire departments,” he added. “It would cost a cup of coffee to allow us to have a tax base.”
In order to establish a special tax district, the board of commissioners would have to establish the purpose and parameters of the proposed levy before conducting a public hearing on the proposed tax. Under state law, the tax would take effect at the start of the following fiscal year.
