Neal Opposed the 911 Fee

Neal opposed the 911 fee from the start and worked hard to finally get it repealed. His rationale published at the time to explain why he was so opposed to this fee follows:"

1. Nothing to do with 911 Service

This proposed “fee” is simply a device to raise funds for the City. It has nothing whatever to do with 911 except that 911 provides a convenient peg to hang a new tax on, one that is generally so highly regarded and considered so essential that I believe the Council and city staff presumed it would be relatively immune from criticism and controversy.

2. Inappropriate 'Fee'

The charging of a fee to pay the operating costs of a core public safety service like 911 is inappropriate in my opinion.

3. 'Opt-Out' Provision Compromises the Design and Intent

The specific provisions and mechanisms of this proposal, particularly as related to the “opt-out” provision, are antithetical to an efficient emergency response system. Even though the staff in response to public criticism has now (as predicted) reduced the “opt-out” fee and provided for the first call to be exempt from the charge in any case, the “opt-out” provision still creates a perverse incentive to work around the 911 system that compromises its design and intent.

4. Will Generate Far Less Revenue than Projected

The “fee” as designed will generate far less revenue than projected, if many people choose to “opt-out”, as I believe they will. It will have huge administrative implications and probably huge administrative expense. Complications and expense usually go together. Moreover, until amended at my request, the proposal directed the staff to spend the money immediately that is presumably going to be collected. That is, the staff was recommending that the Council not only proceed with the tax, but to actually spend the money before they knew for sure that sufficient funds were going to be collected.

5. Risk of Litigation is High

If litigated, the fee is almost certainly going to ultimately, I believe, be ruled a tax, requiring a vote of the electorate. The risk of litigation is high. The cost of defending this ordinance will be huge. Moreover, the reduced “opt-out” fee now may create an additional vulnerability as it is arbitrary and severs the required link between the fee and actual 911 costs. Instead it substitutes a standard of one year’s fees as the benchmark. There is no relationship whatever between one year’s fees and an equitable share of cost. There may also be litigation risk and liability attendant to the “opt-out” provision, should it be argued that an avoidable harm was done to some party as a result of delays or errors in summoning emergency assistance because of it.

Those are the essential reasons for my vote. Most of you could simply stop reading here. For those who wish to hear more and have the patience to pursue a fairly complex policy dialogue further, what follows from here is my rationale in some detail.

A key distinction in my mind between a “fee” and a “tax” is whether it pays for a service that is optional or elective in some sense. I do not regard access to the 911 emergency assistance service as an optional service in any sense. It is a core element of modern public safety systems. Further, it is contrary to sound public policy and the public interest to be able to “opt-out.”

Taxes are generally used to pay for services that are essential to the polity in some fundamental way and that individual citizens cannot provide for themselves, but that take the collective effort of the community to provide. The more vital such services are to the community, the more they should be paid for with the first tax dollar. These are services I regard as “core services.” To repeat for the sake of emphasis, for such core services as 911, a tax is the appropriate funding mechanism. When services are optional or elective, and presumably not critical to the existence and proper functioning of a civil society, it is arguably more appropriate for a community to recover the cost of those services by charging a user fee – an amount directly related to the cost of the service that the specific user is consuming.

A second distinguishing characteristic of fee-based services is their variability in use or application from one citizen to another. Without doubt in every community we charge “fees” for some services that fall into a special category where we do not permit people to opt out and use is not elective, services that are indeed vital to the community. Generally that category has some relationship to public health and safety. Public services like water, sewer and trash collection, none of which are voluntary, fall into this category.

While it is true that these public services are vital public health interests for any community and thus cannot be left optional, they still have a consumer quality that sets them apart from such core public safety services as 911, at least in my mind.

First, while you cannot choose to have the service or not, the amount of the service you use is within the consumer’s control to some degree. Second, and more important, consumption of these services is in fact variable. Thus, a flat uniform tax is generally inequitable, and a rated fee that varies with usage is appropriate, which is in fact exactly what is employed in these kinds of fees. I didn’t feel that 911 really shared this differentiating characteristic. Most people do not use 911 often or even ever. Thus, I regard it as a core service whose chief value is that immediate access to it is guaranteed, and whether it is used is irrelevant.

Therein lies the basis for my conclusion that 911 access should be treated as a right purchased with the first tax dollar, not an “add on” amenity subject to fee or rate-based “consumption management”.

Actually, however, the issue of tax or fee per se was not my central concern. My central concern was that treating 911 as a fee-based service in the manner proposed would fundamentally undermine the integrity of the 911 system.

The 911 system is designed to be an easy to use system for centralizing public safety access and improving the efficiency of response. Opting out is counterproductive. It encourages reversion to the use of multiple seven digit phone numbers, received at multiple different locations within the service agency, and subsequently transferred to the central dispatch point, with all the risk and delays of dropped calls, incorrectly interpreted requests and responses, loss of vital information, etc.

When the first emergency medical systems (EMS) in the country were being designed, the engineers and designers realized that these problems, and often even the challenge of finding any appropriate number at all to call for help, were the cause of great delays in response to emergencies, while the inefficiencies of non-centralized intake and dispatch led to huge unnecessary costs in the system. They designed a far more rational system so simple a child can use it and saved taxpayers an enormous amount of money doing it. I am proud to have been a small part of that effort.

In their ignorance of those design considerations and their failure to consider carefully the expertise available to them, the City of Ventura and its Council, albeit without evil intent, have inadvertently launched a very destructive initiative. Unless rescinded, it will predictably become a classic example of triggering the law of unintended consequences. As the old proverb says, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.

As a result of this action, people now may find it of more concern to avoid a fee than to call for assistance. It won’t be in those cases where someone is being murdered in front of you that we will see a perverse effect of course. At least I should hope not. But it may be in those cases where a drunk driver is weaving down the road, and people could ask themselves if they want to pay $50 or even $17 to call it in, or the mattress that fell off a truck on the freeway and people might say “Oh well, the CHP will soon be along.” It could be in that case where someone sees a suspicious person lurking in the shadows down the street and, now, has yet another reason not to act, or the case where something sounded like what might have been a scream across the street, but nothing now, maybe just our imaginations, let’s wait to see if we hear it again. Or, no worry, someone else will call about the smoke next door. If it’s really a fire, they always do. Now, we will have parents who may tell little Johnny to ignore what they tell him in school about 911, that he should never call that number without permission.

Now, because of this proposal, I fear we have a tragedy in the making, and sooner or later someone will be the victim of our poor decisions.

Some of my Council colleagues say not to worry about this stuff, since the first call is going to be free and the Good Samaritan call will be exempt from the fee in any case, but all this does is make the trigger point for the perverse consequence the second call instead of the first, and the ordinance is written so that the Good Samaritan relief is applicable only if the call is placed away from home or business. Perhaps they didn’t actually read it that carefully.

Further, no one has given serious thought to the administrative burden of dealing with all those requests for relief, and if they are simply approved willy-nilly on demand, which is the likely fall back for an over-burdened staff, the result will be to forego the revenue they are seeking, add substantial service management burden, anger the citizen who must apply for the relief and jump through numerous administrative hoops, increase administrative costs, and further erode the system by generating citizen frustration and loss of confidence. Multiply these effects exponentially in a major incident like a large fire in the neighborhood or a big traffic accident where dozens or even hundreds of people may be calling legitimately, not knowing someone else has already done so. Or maybe they won’t call at all, because after all someone else will have done so. “We can save our one call for something that directly affects us.”

Finally, since the largest volume of 911 calls come from the senior community, the very community who are most likely to live on fixed and low incomes, seniors will have both a high incentive to “opt-out”, while having the greatest need and highest likelihood of multiple calls. Or perhaps they will feel they cannot afford the risk of opting out, at least after the first call. Then they are forced to opt in. The “opt-out” provision, even as revised and perhaps more so as revised, is thus inherently discriminatory and inequitable.

It’s these kinds of thoughts that led me to my vote. It isn’t just a simple tax versus fee issue. It has a lot to do with good service design, thoughtful legislation, and public trust in government, all of which are compromised by this inappropriate rush to generate a few dollars more in city revenue.

But even if you just look at it as a simple tax versus fee issue, the voters and taxpayers of this state have determined that they do not want to pay any new taxes without voting on them. That is the rule of law now. I may not have enacted that law or agree with it entirely, as I believe strongly in representative democracy and tend to discourage ballot box legislation, and I take my personal responsibilities as your law-maker very seriously, but it was the people’s decision. Using the artifice of calling the 911 surcharge a “fee” to avoid the voter approved restrictions on the legislative power of taxation is unethical and inappropriate in my simple world. It is tantamount to committing a fraud upon the people.

So, let it be put to the voters as they have asked or, actually, as they have required. Let there be a public debate over the question of whether to impose a 911 tax. Let me give the voters my concerns about how it might work and why it is a poor idea, then let them vote their preference. I’m OK with that. I generally have found that voters, if given enough information, usually do figure out what is good and what is not and can make sound and reasonable decisions.

Then there is that other slight ethical issue. The fact is that the fee, as I mentioned first, is not intended and not needed in any way to pay for the actual 911 system, but is simply a device being attached to 911 to raise money for other purposes. While the City is prepared to put in the assurance that it will never reduce the financial commitment to 911 (or, if it does, it will reduce the fee), that is a meaningless, if dramatic, gesture. It is an easy guarantee to make because the money is not in any way related to 911’s actual operation, and no one has any intent to reduce (or expand) 911 services. The fact is that the only actual reference to spending the money on 911 upgrades was added recently, almost as an afterthought, to head off precisely this criticism. Worse, there is no clear connection between what much of the money will be spent for and the avowed goal of reducing response times to serious emergencies or crimes in any case.

The money will be used putatively to buy more police and fire personnel, but since it actually creates a return of current funds to the General Fund, it can be argued that it would go to pay for anything the General Fund buys, including sand cleaning subsidies to those million dollar homeowners on the Pierpont beach or marketing support to the merchants served by the DVO or to the fee rebates granted developers or to the multi-million dollar relief granted to Olsen Corp. to reduce its Quimby obligations for parks downtown, or even the cost of moving a “historic” hamburger stand (all of which I also consistently opposed, most of the time as the lone vote against, as well).

Some of our citizens believe each and every one of these recent expenditures of our Council is inappropriate. Many would suggest that, if our Council were just more prudent, there would be no need for the 911 fee to begin with, but that in any case it is simply an unethical ruse to disguise the purpose in the robes of 911 services, when the truth is that the money will clearly pay for other things entirely – expenditures on which many would not concur.

There is also the matter of the ease with which a “fee” can be increased year after year. It’s not so easy to do that with a tax, of course. Now, they will say that this fee has a limited escalator built into it, but read it carefully, my friends. As I read it the Consumer Price Indexed annual escalator for the fee actually only guarantees that the fee must increase by that amount each year. It is within the discretion of any future Council at any time to increase the fee more than that amount. It is the current policy of the Council to increase fees annually to recover the full cost of the service in question, unless bona fide reasons are found to subsidize the service by charging less than the true cost. Voters might anticipate naturally that these fees could grow quickly in future years after public scrutiny has diminished. Ask yourself when was the last time there was a lot of press coverage and public attention when the City “adjusted” its standard fee schedules.

The voters are often well served by finding a voice they trust and heeding it. I am fortunate to be regarded by many in our community as such a trusted voice, at least for the moment and on this issue. Whether it lasts for a moment or a lifetime, I try to take great care not to betray that trust. I hope my explanation helps you understand my reasoning and reinforces the confidence some of you have placed in me.

In sum, I opposed the 911 tax not because I am opposed to “public safety”. I voted NO because I am for public safety, and this measure may do the greatest violence to public safety of any proposal I have ever seen this Council consider in all my time in the City. I voted against it because I am for responsible government. I voted against it because I am for fiscal prudence and financial integrity, and I refuse to be manipulated into making unwise decisions in the name of paying allegiance to alleged “public safety.”

As I said this evening in Council session, there is something very wrong when the leadership of a community stoops to deception and sleight of hand to achieve its goals. The affront is only made worse when it is perpetrated behind the shield of “public safety.” It is worse still when the very act clothed in the guise of “public safety” may, in the final analysis, undermine the people’s true safety and well-being.

With apologies for the length of this explanation,

Neal Andrews