The Glade 4.0

Wanted to get peoples take here on this. Pretty straight forward. County citizens have to outsource to a local town for fire protection. 75 bucks a year to cover it or the Mayor says they're "out of luck". Guy didnt pay. House goes on fire. See post title.

http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/Fi ... 52668.html

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

He should have paid.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Yup.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

If I get in a car wreck (God forbid) today should I go out and buy a policy afterward and expect to be covered? Of course not.

We can argue that his township county whatever should have had a blanket contract to provide service (and just tack to on to the property taxes, but they didn't. And he knew they didn't. He chose to gamble with his most valuable possession. I feel for his loss, but hey he had a chance.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I don't feel for his loss. He wasn't gambling, he was trying to get a free ride. **** him, and **** his house.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Put the fire out and fine him what the response cost.

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Holy shitsnacks!

So he can declare hardship or bankruptcy, default, and leave the city tax payers with the bill?

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Wish they could but they can't operate like that. They need a budget, and have to have revenue streams to establish that budget.

Screw that guy. He didn't prepare, so he lost his gamble. What isn't said is that county had NO firefighter access before the agreement in question. Poor faux outrage fluff reporting.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

I wonder if he paid his homeowner's insurance. If so I wonder if they will deny his claim since he did not take any action to provide for fire-service protection.

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Hopefully the insurance (if existent) was aware of the spotty fire coverage charged appropriately and will support his claim.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I live outside Knoxville city limits, in Knox county. Live inside the city and fire protection is a municipal service, outside the limits and you contract with a private provider.

I've wondered before if it would be worth it to have some sort of an "a la carte" contract option - to in effect say, "no I'm not going to pay the annual contract fee, but if I ever require service I agree in advance to pay (some flat fee, more than quantity x of annual premiums would be) to be provided service." That way there's no sitting there pleading while your house is burning. Wouldn't work though I suppose, because the fire service can't consistently operate on "maybe" revenue. Sucks to be these people, but if it was possible to just pay for the month where your house is on fire, there probably wouldn't be any fire service to put it out in the first place.

Edit: Also, the ISP I worked for ten-ish years ago had a PoP in Obion. Here's me, not missing providing dialup access to rural West Tennessee.

This.

If you let people do that then guess what happens next year? A whole bunch of people don't pay, figuring they'll pay $75 when the fire happens. Then the fire department's revenue goes to ****, and if this goes on long enough there is no fire department.

Or, in this case, since the city taxes citizens for city fire protection and then charges people outside city limits in their sector of the county $75 for coverage, the people in the city end up footing the bill for people outside city limits except for those few who end up paying.

In fact, I'm told that the Federal government doesn't allow fees over $500 if you DO choose to handle a situation like this on a pay-per-call basis, and you can't compel payment afterwards nor can you demand payment up front. I haven't been able to verify this regulation but it sounds typical.

In either case, I'm guessing that there are not enough calls in rural Tenessee outside city limits to pay the additional cost of covering them with fire protection. If they get 20 calls a year outside city limits, that's $11,000 in additional revenue. That's a pittance compared to the expenses of firefighting equipment, supplies, and training even if the fireighters are volunteers.

The local outrage is people wanting to have it both ways. They want to not have a county fire department and pay taxes for it, they want to be able to opt-in to the city fire protection for a pittance ($75 a year? give me a break, you cheap bastard) and then they want to act outraged when the fire department won't fight fires for people who didn't opt in as if it were simply a matter of $75. It isn't. Once you do that, the number of people paying that $75 goes right in the crapper.

Edit: Jeryn, to my knowledge you can operate on a pay-as-you-go basis but that federal limit makes it impractical unless you're getting a ton of calls.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I didn't say he should pay $75 on the spot.

The structure is:
Pay $75 a year and we'll put your house out if it comes aflame, no matter how many times.

Or, don't pay $75, and if your house comes aflame, we'll come and put it out, but you'll pay $1000 in a tax lien that goes against your house.

Easy.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Which would be great except that A) he doesn't live in city limits, so how the city could put a tax lien on his house I don't know. Maybe they can. People who live in the city in this area are taxed for fire protection and those in the county subscribe to city services there
B) There's that $500 federal limit and prohibition on collections process (supposedly, again I haven't verified this yet)

C) It really doesn't solve the revenue stream problem. The fire department needs steady revenues, not those that just appear when a fire happens, and certainly not after waiting around to resolve a tax lien.

I mean it's great in terms of the fairness of the dollar amounts, but its treating it like an insurance policy. The difference is that insurance policies don't need equipment or training.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Ya'll are a bunch of big meanies. The guy's house was burning down, its not like he was asking for a free luxury item.
Whatever happened to communities and neighbors and people helping others?
Sheesh.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

Boortz covered it pretty well on my way into work. Any kind of pay-on-the-spot method would reduce the steady $75 revenue stream, and would result (especially in a poor rural area) in way more money in collections and/or court than is worth the city to bother with.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

He decided not to help his community. He didn't want to pay the $75 fee for coverage, figuring he likely wouldn't catch fire and therefore wouldn't need it. Typically, any fees or taxation you pay for fire department doesn't get used by you -- it gets used by the poor bastards who DO catch fire.

So this ******* who decided not to pay for coverage now demands that the fire department put out a fire on his home? I don't see how helping him could possibly be ethical. It also sets it up so that in short order, nobody has coverage, at all, because everyone else will quickly stop paying their $75 dollar fee, too, when it turns out they don't need it.

This man opted out of the community. He chose to declare he was not their community, not their neighbor, and wasn't going to help or need help himself. Perhaps the "christian" thing to do would be to help him anyway, but honestly, the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head. Jesus didn't handle economics all that well.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Well lets see:

1) For one thing, we discovered that communities and neighbors helping each other aren't very good at fighting fires
2) Because of that we decided to come up with the concept of trained firefighters, and we invented proper equipment to do it with
3) That stuff is very expensive
4) Therefore, we need to find some way to pay for it. In many places, we tax people
5) This county is not one of those places. It is rural Tenessee and evidently cannot afford a county fire department.
6) It therefore allows county resients to subscribe to city fire protection for which the city charges the pittance of $75 a year

Are you following yet why we're not big meanies?

If not, here is the rest:

7) If ole boy gets his fire put out for free when he doesn't pay taxes and doesn't pay the fee, everyone else in the county will expect the same and stop paying
8) Then, the residents of the city are stuck paying for the fire department for no reason other than what side of a map line they live on
9) Then, one of two things happen:
9A) The city stops having fire coverage for the county which now has NO fire protection AT ALL or
9B) The city can't afford or decides it doesn't want a fire department and gets rid of it (not likely but possible) or
9C) The city goes to the $500/fire model except that this eventually leads to either the fire department being underfunded or not serving the county like in 9A because you can't force people to pay

In otherwords, what happened to neighbors and communities helping out was that people like this guy expected community help when they didn't help the community themselves. That just isn't sustainable. Unfortunately, this picture of "communities" that all help each other out is largely an illusion. There's usually a certain portion of the people that do most of the helping, another portion that helps some, and another, large portion that is always getting help and never getting it.

Not only that, but in this case the guy wasn't part of the community. He lived outside the community, which generously allowed him to use their services for a very small fee. He chose not to take a very generous offer and suffered the consequences. The community has to protect itself from people who take advantage of its generosity.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

See, if this were Little House on the Prairie, the community would come together and help out anyway and save the man's home if they could and livelihood, and he'd be so appreciative he'd pay back pay for all the time he didn't, plus the cost of the emergency effort, and devote his life to helping the community.

But real people suck.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Lawyers.

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Evidently the $500 limit is either not absolute or doesn't exist, so I rescind that part

However, that creates even more problems since evidently charging people for what a fire actually costs just makes the legislature want to slap limits on you. Granted, the 22% for the billing company seems a bit much but, this is the problem.

People want services and they want to not pay for them, and they appeal to public outrage to get away with it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Heh. Yeah.

I just think the whole situation is sad, that's all. I'd help my neighbor out, even at expense to myself.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

I don't see what's particularly sad about it. It's not as if the guy couldn't pay. He evidently had the money because he was offering to pay whatever it took when the fire started.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

...and I offered to marry my son's dad when he was in the hospital dying a few years ago and I was trying to give him motivation to live (it worked BTW)...everyone says things they don't mean out of desperation.

There are fees for everything these days...I'm not sure what this guy's financial status is, but sometimes you have to make some tough calls about what you can afford and what you can't.
Yeah, maybe he could have sold something to come up with that $75 a year, but maybe he didn't realize how important it was until his house was in danger.
All I'm saying is its real easy to sit here and condemn him and his home over $75 when nobody has even attempted to look at this from another angle.
Plus, yeah, I feel sorry for the guy.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

The guy should have paid, no doubt. He's free riding off others and would have been quite literally stealing from his neighbor had the fire department put it out.

That said, I do feel bad for him. I think many people are conditioned now to just expect things will be done for them regardless of if they pay the fee or not. He's a dope for not paying, but he's probably not a bad guy and it's a harsh lesson.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe