EDITORIAL: Taxpayer EMS support is not a question. It’s life or death.

The Ozaukee County Board last week settled the debate over emergency medical service funding by earmarking $3 million in American Rescue Plan Act money for grants that local fire departments will use to hire paramedics.

The amount is less than the $5 million the county originally said it had to distribute but more than the $2.3 million County Administrator Jason Dzwinel proposed earlier this year as other needs competed for the federal pandemic relief dollars.

Like most compromises, not everyone is happy, but the $3 million is enough to advance an initiative that has already been successful.

Proposed by then-sheriff Jim Johnson last year, the idea of using ARPA money to hire paramedics throughout the county brought to light the EMS staffing crisis that has in some cases resulted in unacceptable wait times for lifesaving help.

It also established as a goal ensuring around-the-clock paramedic service from Mequon to Belgium and encouraged fire department consolidation as a means to accomplish that.

The Fredonia, Waubeka and Belgium fire departments are working hard to establish a northern Ozaukee County EMS service and recently hired the first full-time paramedic stationed north of Port Washington.

Grafton and Saukville are in the process of formalizing a consolidated service that in many ways began years ago when the two villages decided to share a chief.

The Mequon and Thiensville departments have merged to form the Southern Ozaukee Fire Department. 

But the county’s EMS initiative was never intended to be a long-term solution to a crisis that must be resolved. Now it’s time for taxpayers to step up and give their communities the money they need to provide the life-saving services their residents expect, although that’s easier said than done.

During the debate last year over the county’s initiative, and in response to the description of the EMS staffing shortage as a crisis, county Supr. Bruce Ross of Mequon asked, “If it’s a crisis, why haven’t municipalities taken steps to address this?”

The simple answer is they haven’t been able to because the state limits their ability to tax, and communities that struggle financially to maintain roads and other infrastructure as well as provide programs and services have likewise been unable to afford properly staffed fire departments as the populations in their communities grow.

So now some communities will do what the law requires if they want to raise their tax levies above the state-set limit and ask voters in the form of referendums for permission to increase spending for properly staffed EMS departments. Port Washington plans to put such a question on the April ballot. Grafton is considering it.

Reasonable requests based on sound plans for departments that can respond quickly to emergencies at all times of the day and night and on any day of the week deserve a yes from voters and the support of taxpayers.

Taxes exist for the purpose of providing needed services, and it’s difficult to think of a service more valuable than one that saves lives.

Research has found in many cases that the quicker an ambulance can get to a patient, the better the odds that patient will survive without permanent injury. A study published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine found that was true in the case of people who suffered heart attacks, concluding that those who received care from an ambulance crew within 7.5 minutes had favorable neurologic outcomes.

In describing the crisis in Ozaukee County, officials said that in some cases, especially in rural areas, response times have been as long as 30 minutes.

Some spending requests are debatable, and residents do their communities a service when they question them. But when it comes to giving municipalities the money they need to provide quick-response, professional, full-time EMS departments, there is no question. It’s literally a matter of life and death.