Firefighters watch house burn.

[Ru the Boatswain]

Yeah but this wasn't taxes. It's a fee. Like, if you want Direct TV, you pay a fee, or else you don't get it. That's not how emergency services should work. Put it in taxes, and then people will pay it.

Regardless of whether they should've been required to pay a fee, firefighters should be like doctors. Do your job first, worry about the bill later.

It's a fee due to the fact that the Fire company CAN'T afford to operate if people don't pay- they don't get enough funds from the state due to tax cuts which in turn reduce spending on useless things(to the state of Tennessee) like the fire dept.

 

[Cailst]

...I was saying that not helping them because they didn't pay a service fee is ridiculous. That's not exactly Republican. That's more like "don't be an asshole."

I'm pretty sure the reasoning was that if they helped that family, then no one else would pay for firefighting.

 

[Phil]

I bet if one of the Firemen's house or his family was in there and the only way to save them was to put the fire out, and they did not pay the fee, I guarrentee you he'd be hosing that house down. Standing there and watching it burn is just cold and hartless.

TL,DR: What Brandon said.

 

[Brandon Rhea]

It's a fee due to the fact that the Fire company CAN'T afford to operate if people don't pay- they don't get enough funds from the state due to tax cuts which in turn reduce spending on useless things(to the state of Tennessee) like the fire dept.

Hospitals face the same situations, but they don't turn you away at the door if you don't have insurance. Like I said, do your job first, worry about the bill later.

 

[Sovereign]

The same thing happen somewhere I can't remember.

You had to pay a fee to use the ambulance, and the guy didn't have any money, so the ambulance actually TOOK the guy to the ATM to get the money. He died on his way to the hospital.

 

[Cailst]

Hospitals face the same situations, but they don't turn you away at the door if you don't have insurance. Like I said, do your job first, worry about the bill later.

I guess because they weren't immediately in danger? Just their possessions.

 

[Ser Yorick]

Hospitals face the same situations, but they don't turn you away at the door if you don't have insurance. Like I said, do your job first, worry about the bill later.

They do if you're stable. If it's an emergency, like if you got shot, they'd treat you, then bill you. If you can't pay? Well, now you're in debt. Good luck, pal.

The fire department was acting on orders, not much they could do. The "patient" was "stable".

 

[Saint]

If they would've put out the fire, how many more properties wouldn't have paid the $75 fee then in following years, and only offered to pay money when they needed the fire department?

Even if it's just 1,000 properties, that's $75,000 a year.

I'm sorry, but $75 a year is less than a quarter a day.

Now if someone would've died in this fire, THEN you'd have a leg to stand on, but clearly this guy didn't feel his property and possessions was worth a measly $75 a year, so why should the fire department place any value on it?

"I thought they'd come out and put it out, even if you hadn't paid your $75, but I was wrong."

I wonder if he expects his life insurance company to come through the same way to take care of his family, or his car insurance after he gets into an accident...

 

[Brandon Rhea]

It shouldn't matter if he didn't pay his silly fee. The article said the fire was beginning to spread to his neighbor's property. Firefighting is a matter of public safety.

 

[Empress]

What I don't get is why there is not a community pool for this.

Yes I can understand that this is common for rural areas, yes I know the cost of operation is costly...

but I find it just silly that there is no pool set for situations like this.. like Taking a small percentage of the fee, and putting it towards situations exactly like this.

 

[Wing]

Raise taxes.

 

[Nameless]

Raise taxes.

Hang the tax collectors.

 

[Cailst]

It shouldn't matter if he didn't pay his silly fee. The article said the fire was beginning to spread to his neighbor's property. Firefighting is a matter of public safety.

They came to stop the fire from spreading, just not before.

 

[Empress]

Raise taxes.

They dont even need to raise taxes..not something that matters much in small towns.. but hell it's easy enough to raise the bill from $75, to $80, and take that extra 5 bucks and make a community emergency fund with it.

OR

Go out and do it anyway...but then bill the person with a fine added...

Im sure there are tons of options

 

[Will]

They dont even need to raise taxes..not something that matters much in small towns.. but hell it's easy enough to raise the bill from $75, to $80, and take that extra 5 bucks and make a community emergency fund with it.

OR

Go out and do it anyway...but then bill the person with a fine added...

Im sure there are tons of options

Yeah, they should have done that. If they insist on a semi-private system like that, they should at least save the house, then bill the family.

Heartless Battycreases.

 

[Saint]

The moment you do that is the moment the rest of the other idiots quit paying as well. Then who would pay the $80? And where would that extra $5 come from if nobody is paying the $80?

This guy was just the first idiot who needed to be made an example of. I don't feel sorry for him in the least, especially since he knew precisely what he was doing.

This should be a mandatory tax that way idiots like this don't lose everything.

I guess I don't see why it's so hard to pay the $75 to begin with. It's just like having Home Owner's Insurance, Car Insurance, Life Insurance, Flood Insurance, and all of that. You don't come to the Insurance Company after the fact and expect them to pull through for you after you dissed their required payments.

Same goes here. You don't tell the Fire Department to go screw itself with its $75 fee, then scream for them to come help you when you need them.

Health and Personal well-being is one thing. Property is entirely another.

 

[Wing]

If the Fire Department charges a fee for services, then it should not be affiliated with the city's government IMO and just be a private business if that is how they are running.

 

[Saint]

From what I gather, they don't charge the fee to those within the city since they all pay City tax. It's those people within the county who have to pay the fee for the services of the city's fire department.

Either the county needs to rally up some volunteers for a volunteer fire department, or people need to pay the fee.

Finding people to volunteer their spare time to help fight fires in that county must not be easy to do. That, or the county decided it would just be easier to pay the city to have their fire personnel respond to those residents in the county who desired it.

There are a number of counties and small towns that have small, all-volunteer fire departments. Guess his county wasn't one of them. :/

 

[Andreus Makaryk]

Ohnoez, I found another fire department flamewar.:D

To those who say "Tax Them!" the general area is teabagger central.

The city LACKS JURISDICTION to tax outside city limits. And the county ROUTINELY votes down tax increases to fund its own volunteer fire department by a margin of, liek, 19-1.

The situation there has been like this for years. The cities in the area have tried the ER-style approach of put out the fire now, bill later for many years now. They got paid only about 50% of the time. It's also worth noting that the cities in the area have a population/tax base of about 2,000, and they're being asked to provide services to a county of 30,000 (that completely refuses to tax itself to pay for such services).

Something like 75% of the fire calls to the city fire departments in that area are in the unincorporated county...

Do the math. The county has been freeloading off the cities in the area for years, and bleeding the tax base dry. While yes, I believe firefighters have an ethical duty to put fires out so long as they're there, this area is a VERY extreme example of a teabagger/libertarian paradise. The cities have tried to get the county to follow reasonable safety policies, but to no avail. Short of persuading the county to tax itself, the subscription service was probably all the cities in the area could do.

The city had NO obligation to respond to a call from outside its limits, by a nonsubscriber. For a long time, no equipment was dispatched.

Only when a neighbor who DID pay the fee called in to say the fire spread to HIS property did the firefighters come out. They stopped it from spreading further on the subscriber's property.

At that point the equipment was actually THERE, and ethically I think there's at least a strong case for putting the whole thing out at that point.

HOWEVER, the city had been getting bled dry by libertarian freeloaders for YEARS. If the city can't afford to serve a freeloading population ten times its size, what happens when there is no fire department at all because it can no longer be maintained?

I honestly see both sides here...on a micro level, the firefighters should've put the fire out once they were already there for the neighbor's property; on a macro level, the city has to say at some point that it will suffer freeloaders no more, lest it go bankrupt attempting to provide for them.

At this point, either the voters of that county need to wake up and pull their heads out of their libertarian fantasy land, or the STATE of Tennessee needs to step in, declare a public safety emergency, dissolve the county's charter, and split the county/annex it into neighboring counties that tax themselves to provide a minimum level of public safety necessary and desirable for civilization.