City proposes fire, alarm fees

SANDPOINT — Area home and business owners might want have to have their checkbooks handy the next time their house burns down or their security alarm goes off.

The City Council is mulling a proposal that would charge residents for wracking up numerous false alarms, and another that would tack on a user fee for some emergency calls, including structure fires.

After a debate, the council voted 5-1 to send the false alarm plan to a September public hearing, but decided the user fee proposal needed more work and remanded it back to the Administrative Committee. Councilman John Reuter voted against both proposals, and Councilman Michael Boge voted against the user fee plan.

Under the false alarm proposal, home and business owners would not be charged for the first two false alarms each year, but would be fined $150 for the third, $300 each for the fourth through sixth, $500 each for the seventh through ninth, and $1,000 each for the tenth and all additional false alarms.

City Attorney Will Herrington said the goal of the ordinance is to curtail excessive false alarms, not to generate funds.

“The revenue enhancement that it provides is not the primary issue for me,” he said. “Having a fee structure for false alarms gets the people who have false alarms in their system to correct the problems and deficiencies with those systems.”

Both Fire Chief Robert Tyler and Police Chief Mark Lockwood said they have wasted too many man hours responding to false alarms and agreed that a more affective deterrent was needed. Tyler said his crew has responded to as many as seven false alarms from one location in a single day, and Lockwood said there are local businesses that have had more than 30 false alarms in a year.

Tyler also asked the council to implement a user fee for emergency responders, which would charge home and business owners a fee for the use of fire personnel on calls ranging from structure fires to medical emergencies to downed power lines and trees. Tyler said the program would add a much-needed revenue source to the department’s ever-tightening budget.

“Every year I come here looking for capital expenditures for apparatus replacement and major equipment replacement. I hear every year, ‘You find me the money.’ I don’t know where the hell the money is,” he said. “Our fleet is aging. I don’t know where else to get the money.”

While the majority of the council was willing to accept some form of user fee, Reuter said he couldn’t support any plan that would punish residents who lost their home to a fire.

“How does it affect homeowners who have homeowner insurance, and how does it affect homeowners who don’t have homeowners insurance?” he said. “So my house burns down and I didn’t get homeowners insurance. … Now I owe the city money on top of the fact that I don’t have a house?”