The Callery Volunteer Fire Company recently approached Callery Borough with a request for a contribution to help support its services. In itself, such a request isn’t out of the ordinary.

Volunteer fire services have been facing financial difficulties for years. As the organizations have been expected to take on an expanding list of duties, so too they have been expected to meet an expanding list of requirements to operate. By the same token, their members are expected to meet an expanding list of qualifications and complete a growing number of training activities.

Meanwhile, just like everything else, equipment isn’t getting any cheaper.

All of that costs money — lots of it.

Asking the municipalities benefiting from their service to chip in and help cover the burden s like a completely reasonable thing to do. What makes the Callery fire company’s request different is twofold.

First, its asking Callery to enter into a contract requiring predetermined, per-capita contributions that increase over time. Generally, a municipality making a contribution to a fire or emergency medical service is doing so on a voluntary basis, not a contracted one. On the whole though, the request isn’t unreasonable.

The second part of the request is what is out of the ordinary: the emphasis the fire company has put on not wanting a designated fire tax. Funds garnered from such a tax can only be used for fire service.

Such a tax would seem like an obvious solution for guaranteed fire funding. So why is the company opposed to such a tax?

Fire company leadership cited a desire not to increase the tax burden on residents of the municipality. That’s admirable, but it may not be realistic.

Callery is not a municipality with money to spare. Its elected officials have pointed out the borough’s budget is already stretched thin. The issue of finding funding could then be exacerbated by a legally-binding annual contract requirement.

That would leave the borough with perhaps one realistic solution: raising taxes.

Whether such a tax increase were labeled as a general tax or a fire tax is immaterial for residents of Callery. A dollar is a dollar and what you name the bucket it ends up in hardly matters to the person contributing the dollar. Additionally, such a tax increase, if not designated to fire services, could be moved around by elected officials in the future for uses it was never intended for.

So why not simply enact a fire tax and in so doing guarantee the money goes where it is intended for the long term?

— JP