In the shadow of the largest election landslide in Thurston County’s history we want to take a moment and thank everyone who worked so hard to help us enhance the service we provide to the community. For us, it was an important vote of confidence to the street fire fighter and medical responder. We heard loud and clear that the community cares and emergency services matters. Thank you for everyone who voted and for closing a chapter in history that clearly was a long time coming.
We had a few thoughts regarding the past three years that we thought would now be relevant especially in hind sight. First, the inability of government entities to get along is a huge waste of the taxpayer’s money. The most important thing governments can do in economic times like these is to work together, put personal differences aside, and work to save money and produce a value to the customer/tax payer. What isn’t helpful is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on staff time, consultants and third party reports, attorney fees, and court costs, etc. etc. It didn’t make sense then and it really hurts now realizing how much money was squandered. Was it worth it? No.
We’ve also wondered where the drive to create a new city fire department came from. It never did make any sense on paper to take a government entity and essentially duplicate it and then somehow claim that the cost/benefit value to the citizens somehow made sense. Or even to go into neighborhoods and tell people that their response times and service would be better but they would be doing it with less resources and longer response distances. Did we ever hear how much it would have cost to start up a new fire department? At times, the answer seemed so farfetched and unrealistic that perhaps it was all a joke gone wrong where political figures were so personally angry and attached to a political position that they were unwilling to make amends or change course. Would the local political elite have driven this position over the proverbial cliff had the voters not stepped in?
And what about a few of those key players or “political elite”? We’ve wondered quite a bit about a few select folks and tried to guess why they hold the views that they do. When they went down this path of creating a new fire department, they helped support the project by essentially shutting out external input and communication especially from the firefighters. We asked “why” then when this all started and still ask “why” today?
What about Jeff Powell? Jeff is a prominent local businessman and president of the local chamber of commerce. The fire fighters have already stated in earlier blogs that we would bend over backwards for business if given the chance and we want to be a proponent for business initiatives. We are keenly aware that the success of our local small business sector makes all the difference for the entire community and we believe that we agree with many of the goals of the local chamber. But for some reason, Mr. Powell has been a frequent opponent to the fire district even before the city district fight in Lacey. Why? We frequently find that our critics, who stand from a distance and never step into a fire station or talk to those actually doing the job, are at a significant disadvantage when understanding the issues. So this is an invitation to change that and for other critics to see for yourself what’s accurate and what’s not when it comes to local fire and EMS service.
As a final thought, everyone needs to work to prevent this from happening again. The amount of misinformation that was disseminated and then held as truth during the height of the district/city mess was very troubling. It’s been said that “truth is the first casualty of war”, and in this fight this statement was absolutely the case. From 17% pay raises, to only 5 calls a day, or the “per capita” taxation figures that a former politician spun to make his case, it was all “bull spit” to support a political mirage. Prevention through accurate information, political action through good and honest politics in our elected officials, and through reasonable and citizen focused community leaders is what must occur.
So is it over? The Olympian had an editorial a few weeks ago calling for political tranquility and to move on and it’s been something we’ve been thinking about. One of our mistakes in the past is that we trusted certain administrators and politicians to make the right decisions. One of our lessons learned is that no citizen should take a “hands off” approach especially in our local political system. And that should go for any organization, community group, and business entity; people need to be involved and care about what your local politicians are doing. We’ve seen the damage that self serving politicians and empire builders can do to a community. It was our wakeup call that the safety of the community and those that serve the people should not rest to chance and the current political whim.
With that said, you will continue to see fire fighters showing up at meetings, supporting schools and other community service groups, and caring about who gets elected or holds office. We encourage everyone who is also concerned and caring about what goes on in your community to make the same efforts and show up at meetings, support good candidates, and ask hard questions of your leaders.
Thank you for supporting the people serving you.