Bulk waste fees, false alarm fees- why not a police and fire fee?
In cost-cutting moves the city started rationing bulk waste pickups years ago. To cut down on false burglar alarm calls- a progressive fine was put in place for too many false calls.
It’s time to start dealing with bad actors in the community by charging fees to the property for number of police calls.
That’s right- the police can come to your house because of a complaint no more than 4 times in a 12-month period. You want to fight with your wife/kids/neighbors-after the fourth call, it’s $100, the sixth call is $250, the seventh is $500, the eighth is $1,000. Same goes for calls for paramedics- plus we bill your insurance. What, you don’t have insurance?- after the fourth call- it’s $100 etc.
Failure to pay the fines, the house is ordered to be vacated for a year. Landlords will stop renting to trash. And if you are more than 1 year delinquent on your taxes, everything is doubled. If the fines escalate above and beyond the tax value- the house is seized.
We’ve got neighbors who would have been long gone a year and a half ago if this had been in place.
Why should one family place such high demands on our public safety officers? How many of these problem houses can we afford to support? As long as it’s ok to charge law-abiding taxpayers for false burglar alarms- it should be ok to charge the burglars.
Other communities wouldn’t put up with this kind of hooliganism- they’d find other ways to make life unbearable for the residents, Dayton hasn’t caught on yet- leaving us as a dumping ground for miscreants and losers.
But, as a preventive measure- we should also use the frequency of calls to a location as a trigger to dispatch a social worker/intervention specialist to try to solve the problems- before they get to the point of fines. Right now we’re purely reactive and paying the price.
Any other suggestions? Feel free to contribute.
David: Sounds like a GO on my end, when you get elected City Commissioner maybe you could have it placed on a ballot, and vote it in or have it made into a law. The fire department charges for fires, why not the police? The woman who makes all of my dreams come true; has called in about the dog next door that barks all of the time, as the poor dogs toe nails are too long and scratch the wooden floor I was told, it seems that the neighbor on the other side fails to hear because of no windows and a high fence blocks the repeating sound pressure levels of the dogs barking fails to reach him, it takes more than one person to complain, or so that is what the police informed us. Since she fails to hear it, we have entertained of placing the poor dog in our yard, so it would make her teeth itch, since she fails to hear the dog in her own yard, and has complained about ours. I might add that our dog’s was in the the house, much to her husbands dismay when he came over regarding a barking dog, that wasn’t ours, also they licked his hand.
So a person could have an attitude with someone, the money police charge, could grow out of hand, with the end result maybe becoming messy scene. It is a great idea but I don’t think it will float at this point in time.
Keep up the great idea’s, and don’t forget them when you get in office…Commish!
“The fire department charges for fires” Huh? The Fire Dept. charges fees for EMS transports. And occasionally, the Fire Dept. (and Regional HazMat Team) bill private companies for reimbursement after major hazardous materials incidents if that company caused the spill. But there is no charge for fire response. The Fire Chief has discussed the idea of fees for repeat false alarm offenders due to fire alarm malfunctions, but to my knowledge that system isn’t in place yet… Additional ideas for revenue generation within the public safety departments certainly isn’t a bad idea, though. Increased revenue would likely help spare the departments from further cuts, or even undo prior cuts that have had a significant impact on certain response areas. The EMS billing fee schedule is going up this year, and will bring DFD in line with other area municipalities. However, patients transported by DFD get simply “soft” billed. Meaning that their insurance gets charged (if they have any…), and then any amount over and above that is billed to them directly. But after 3 bill notices, the City simply writes it off. No collection agencies are ever notified. However, a practice used by some cities is “soft” billing for residents of the city, but “hard” billing for non-residents. The theory is that city residents already pay a certain amount of taxes for the city services, so they shouldn’t bear the burden over and above their insurance coverage. But, for example, if a resident of Kentucky driving through Dayton on 75 crashes and requires EMS transport, they would be “hard” billed for the remaining amount, due to never having paid any tax here in the city. That’s just one concept for additional revenue. There are plenty more. Another idea (that City higher-ups can’t seem to understand..) is that sometimes MORE staffing creates more revenue. We require a lot of mutual aid response INTO the City of Dayton to keep our residents covered. DFD has some of the busiest medic units in the State, and even ranks relatively high on lists of busiest units in the Nation. We have a disproportionately high number of medic runs for our population size. … Read more »
Come to think of it, while not a discussion of “enterprising,” I did post on this other Esrati thread recently about the concept of a merger. Mergers aren’t really revenue generation tools like enterprising of services would be, but are generally more palatable to the smaller surrounding cities who are interested in service consolidation, but don’t want to appear to their citizens that they’re just giving up…
http://esrati.com/a-policesheriff-merger-in-cincy-shades-of-things-to-come-in-dayton/6070/#comments
And also, my apologies to the Mayor for incorrectly spelling his name in the post above. Mayor Leitzell.
All City Hall thinks is “CUT CUT CUT” (Brad)
….could it be because the city is BROKE BROKE BROKE?………