The Edmonds City Council will meet for a daylong retreat starting at 9 a.m. Friday, Feb. 7 in the Edmonds Library Plaza Room, 650 Main St.
“The morning will focus the most on ways we’re communicating about the [Regional Fire Authority] annexation information going out to the city,” Council President Neil Tibbott said. The afternoon will include a workshop and discussion, Tibbott added.
Here’s the agenda, which can also be found here:
Welcome Activities
City Legislative Calendar
Helping our Community Learn About Annexation
Break for Lunch
Leadership Tools
Council Takeaways
Adjournment
Looking at this agenda you’d think that the city was in a good spot financially. Not one agenda topic on how to deal with our budget problems. Why aren’t they discussing how to bring in more outside revenue other than just increasing property taxes? Or they could be discussing what additional expenses can be reduced. We all know that the city is in trouble, how we recover is still a topic of discussion and needed action. I see neither in this agenda. Instead, they are going to discuss “Helping our community learn about annexation”. Really? Who’s going to teach us? The same councilmembers that put us in this financial hole in the first place?
Jim’s 100% right. The budget is still a disaster and the Council hasn’t cut expenses nearly enough. They are just relying on offloading all outrageous and unjustified RFA annexation costs to the taxpayers to the tune of almost $1,000 per house., and diverting (not refunding to taxpayers) $6 million in property taxes and another $6 million in business taxes that pay for the current fire/ems contract. The Council is using double taxation as their ‘easy out’ of an unsustainable budget deficit, and is doing nothing to evaluate fire/ems alternatives that can provide equivalent (or better) fire/ems services for $12-$13 million, instead of the $20M+ the RFA will be charging for annexation. It’s highway robbery and the Council is spending time fabricating a sales pitch to convince voters that without RFA annexation, residents will be in danger of having no fire or EMS coverage. The State requires politicians to provide transparent and factual information on ballot initiatives, not sales pitches and misinformation. Vote No! on annexation and hold the Mayor and Council accountable for their double taxation strategy and their inability/unwillingness to hold the RFA accountable for mismanagement. Edmonds fire/ems service costs rose by 50% between 2019 and 2024, and will go up another 65% in 2026 for annexation. Monopoly pricing and unjustified cost of service can’t be condoned. Please join 120 anti-RFA petitioners: https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/no-to-rfa-regional-fire-authority-annexation
I think the Mayor and Council have evaluated many alternatives and have cut what they collectively think is fat, without impairing the ability of the City to function. Time is also of the essence in this budget year. I don’t know why people assume that many different alternatives have not been examined by the Council. They actually have been, and found to either be unworkable or not timely enough. The alternative to increasing taxes is borrowing. That would be expedient for those who don’t want to see their taxes increase by $1,000, but borrowing does not solve the problem. Kicking the can down the road is the reason the US Government now has public debt of $36 trillion. And the annual interest on this debt is now larger than the entire defense budget. That is what happens when you borrow money to solve fiscal problems. Tax increases are unpopular, but do not saddle the City with debt that cannot be retired without greater pain in subsequent budget years. Balance the budget now, and keep it balanced. Give our elected representatives a chance to right the ship.
Hi Gilbert, what cuts has the city made and how much do those cuts amount to? How come the city hasn’t implemented any new revenue streams suggested by the blue ribbon panel?
A No Vote, doesn’t mean more borrowing for fire & ems. The city can and will come to voters for a tax levy.
Why recommend the RFA, when they’ve withheld an estimated $8 million Edmonds residents?
You may be interested in attending the Edmonds City Roundtable event.
Regional Fire Authority — Explained
February 10, 6:30 PM
Edmonds Waterfront Center
Gilbert-
I don’t think the Mayor or Council have done proper due diligence on alternative fire/ems solutions – and have just relied on the flawed Fitch research that said the RFA was the lowest cost/preferred fire/ems provider. Maybe they made a couple phone calls to Mukilteo and Everett – but they have let almost a year go by without doing proper due diligence. We are talking about the potential savings of $9M per year for a city-run fire/ems operation. That’s worth spending money to evaluate alternatives with a research firm other than Fitch. One that is objective and unbiased, and not beholden to the RFA. Fitch’s report didn’t even mention that the City has the right to buy back fire apparatus at market value; nor that it has the opportunity to secure other fire/ems revenue from transport services, Esperance, and Woodway; nor that Fitch provided research to Vancouver, WA that recommended a more cost effective/efficient way to run a fire/ems service by contracting the EMS service to AMR at a cost of less than $500,000 per year; nor that the RFA $20M price for annexation (a 65% price increase from 2025), or its 50% contract price increase between 2019 and 2024, has nothing to do with the cost of providing service, and everything to do with monopoly pricing. The Council has failed to analyze alternatives.
You may want to ask Multnomah County, OR thinks of contracted EMS service from AMR. There they did mandate by contract that each Ambulance be staffed by 2-Paramedics each shift. it was nigh unto impossible to recruit and pay enough Paramedics to serve Multnomah county and response times grew exponentially. Edmonds is much smaller than Multco and has lower call volumes; the most efficient and effective manner delivering Fire and EMS is via a properly funded and operating Fire Department. Nationally, smaller departments with 3 or fewer stations have been consolidating for the past decade or more. They can not longer afford the administrative costs, overhead costs, training requirements or apparatus payments. Go with the RFA
Kurt,
I think you’re making an economies of scale argument. If that were the case shouldn’t we expect a cost decrease by joining the RFA rather than the substantial tax increase we’re facing?
Thanks to Mr. KrepIck and Mr. Lopez for offering similar opinions suggesting that the Mayor and Council have been derelict in their duties to examine each and every possibility and to convey their conclusions to Edmonds residents. In my opinion, had this criticism been directed to the Council at an appropriate time, elegant solutions to our budget problems could have been considered, and we would have been able to balance the City budget without any pain or inconvenience. Unfortunately, this apparently did not happen. I must conclude that either these suggested alternatives were not feasible, or the Mayor and Council preferred to have criticism heaped on themselves for ignoring much better solutions to the dire budget deficit problems that the City now has. It seems to me that hard-working and earnest City officials, some of them newly elected, will always listen to sensible suggestions and try their best to find the best solutions to intractable problems. I will assume that they have done so, unless someone has credible proof that they did not.
Mr. Leiendecker,
I wouldn’t call citizen input as “criticism” as you characterize it. The facts are that numerous citizens have been providing the administration and City Council valuable information, insight and suggestions over the course of years to avoid the financial situation we currently find ourselves. I would challenge anyone to do a public records request on my own emails to the mayor, finance director and City Council since 2020. What you’ll find is a comprehensive, independent analysis of our city budget and forecasts along with suggestions on how to avert where we find ourselves now. This was predicted yeas ago. It all fell on deaf ears. At this point I have no sympathy for our elected officials, past or present. They were elected to solve our problems, not create them.
I would suggest that your assumption is wrong.
Gilbert – I don’t think you realize how our ‘EdmondsCanDoBetter’ citizen group has worked tirelessly over the last 9 months to give productive feedback to the Mayor and Council – only to have our collective efforts stonewalled and ignored. I personally sent over 20 ‘public comment’ emails to the Mayor and the Council over that time. Others from our concerned citizens’ group have posted over a dozen LTE’s to My Edmonds News, hundreds of meaningful comments, and attended many of the Council meetings and given their analysis and suggestions. Sadly the Council deemed the RFA to be the ‘least costly’ and ‘most preferred’ fire/ems vendor back in June of 2024 – and proceeded to negotiate the one-sided $20M annexation deal that left taxpayers holding the bag. You can check out all the public comments with a PRR request- or I’d be happy to send you a sample. The Council has been under a lot of pressure to fix the disastrous financial disaster – but it’s unconscionable that they chose double taxation, fewer budget cuts than are needed, and a mismanaged RFA monopoly as the easy-out solution that treats taxpayers as second class citizens. We’ve asked the Council to honor Public Disclosure Commission campaign guidelines to allow equal time/space for RFA advocacy vs. RFA opposition and they’ve ignored that request for public meetings and City website.