Your interest in containing costs is, without question, admirable. Maintaining an appropriate balance between the fire district budget and the public welfare can’t be an easy job – particularly under current circumstances – for any of you.

To date, I have refrained from weighing in on any of the “hot” topics splayed across the headlines. Tempers are high and I perceive a desire on everyone’s part to dig in their heels on any/all given positions to save face. I implore you, STOP!!!

With regard to privatizing emergency medical services, please consider the following:

Private ambulance services are “for profit” businesses. By definition, the more closely restricted the care provided, the higher the profit margin. The negative potential has, I’m sure, been parsed ad nauseam and I won’t add to it here.

But what about this? The verifiably well-trained professionals currently providing those services are not anonymous strangers who may or may not be qualified. They are our neighbors. We greet them in the grocery store, the outlet mall, the gas station, the movies. We know them by name.

On the one year anniversary of a potentially fatal heart attack, a woman whose life they saved was able to take a full meal to the station in gratitude for the extra year she’d been given. Every member of the crew on scene a year before greeted her at the door with hugs and congratulations all around. Though individually, they’d checked in with her from time to time, this was the first “reunion.”

Isn’t that the definition of “community?” Haven’t we already achieved what every town, city and county strives to become? To consider altering something SO COMPLETELY RIGHT is unconscionable.

Step back a little and take a look at the real picture of what we are as a community. It’s a nice view. Please don’t break it up.

Respectfully submitted,

WENDY V. TANZER