Fire dept. needs bond to survive

The Rio Rancho Fire & Rescue Department’s motto is ‘Protecting Your Family.’ For more than 20 years, it has been my honor and privilege to help carry out this task along with many others.

Over the years, and now as your fire chief, I have seen the community grow rapidly and expand like no other New Mexico city, with more and more people calling Rio Rancho home every year. As a result, local government and its public safety departments have faced challenges to keep up with resident needs. Central to these challenges has been the consistent availability of necessary funding for emergency response vehicle replacement such as ambulances and fire engines.

This has been the case because response vehicles are expensive — one ladder truck is approximately a million dollars — and Rio Rancho is behind other communities of comparable size in the state related to available resources, in the tens of millions of dollars each year. This stems from the fact Rio Rancho local government’s primary funding source is the tax on the sale of goods and services, and we have historically had an imbalance in terms of homes as compared to businesses.

So what have we done to get by over time and have fire and emergency medical vehicles ready to meet service calls related to your health, safety, and protection of property and valuables? We have stretched — and made expensive repair after repair — the limits of how long vehicles are utilized and kept in use, taken out loans, saved and prioritized limited resources, and relied on special, unpredictable one-time revenue sources. This is illustrated by the fact we now have firefighter/ EMTs who are younger in age than the vehicles they may have to utilize for a service call.

Unfortunately, we have reached a point as a city where if we stretch the proverbial rubber band any further in terms of vehicles, there is a high probability it will snap. What this means to you is less and less reliable fire and emergency response vehicles that serve to bring help to you in your time of need as quickly as possible.

If Rio Rancho voters approve the $4.1 million Public Safety Bond Question on the March 6 ballot, funding, which is not going to be available through other means, would be used to replace a fire engine, fire ladder truck, ambulance, water truck, firefighter breathing equipment and needed police vehicles.

Approval of this bond question would result in a small property tax increase ($25 for a $100,000 home), which would still leave Rio Rancho’s property tax rates well below those of Albuquerque.

If the bond question is not approved and the city cannot acquire replacement vehicles in the near future, it is almost guaranteed that the city’s rating for public fire protection capability will decrease. If this occurs, the insurance rates we pay related to our homes and businesses will very likely increase. In reality, it becomes a matter of deciding on whether you want to pay a little more in property taxes to replace emergency response vehicles or pay more to insurance companies and still continue to have less and less reliable vehicles in use.

I hope you will think about this bond question and request as an investment related to your safety and those of your loved ones. If the bond question is approved, and when the replacement vehicles are subsequently acquired, please remember these vehicles are the property of the people of Rio Rancho whose sole purpose is to respond to your needs.

Visit rrnm. gov/2018election for additional information about the March 6 election.