Whither the Volunteer EMTs? Rounds Economy Kills Ambulance Service

Fellow Lake County media maven The Jackrabbit's Den wades into the public policy pool this morning, criticizing Minnehaha County voters' rejection of a rural ambulance district. Jackrabit1 says that paying $15 per $100K of property value would have been a heck of a deal on a reasonable social insurance policy and a cheap way to help take care of neighbors.

Notable is this Dell Rapids native's discussion of why rural Minnehaha County got into this bind over ambulance service in the first place:

Most communities in Minnehaha County are served by volunteer ambulance services. These folks donate their time, and in many cases, their money, in order to provide good medical service not only to their communities but the rural parts of the county.

However there's been a problem. The pool of available volunteers is shrinking. It used to be that the folks that volunteered were able to take time off from there jobs should an emergency arise. For example, if the butcher in Dell Rapids was on-call and a call came through, it wouldn't be but a 5-minute drive to the garage and hop in the ambulance. Nowaday, many folks have to work out of town, which makes daytime service difficult, if not impossible. So that volunteer may now have to drive 15-30 minutes just to get to the ambulance, which is pretty impractical [Jackrabit1, "Emergency Service by the Wayside?" The Jackrabbit's Den, 2008.01.10].

When folks worked on the farm or in their hometown (and when, I might add, more of them worked for themselves or for small shops with fellow community members), it was a lot easier to get off work to go help neighbors. But as the rural economy dwindles, as Governor Rounds and the GOP kill small-town schools with consolidation and underfunding, more folks have to adopt the commuting lifestyle and go to Sioux Falls for jobs that pay the bills. And when you're stuck commuting, your involvement in your community goes caput. When you need neighbors to help, they're all answering phones at Citibank or pushing gurneys at Sanford.

So folks in rural Minnehaha County now have to find money to hire EMTs. But that might require some new taxes, and evidently the folks in rural Minnehaha County are thinking just like their dear governor, who's convinced we can't have any new taxes, not even to make South Dakota "even better."

My neighbor and fellow radical populist Gerry Lange says that Doc Farber argued that the proper way to run government is for citizens "to first clarify their needs and priorities, then find the money to pay for those services." Governor Rounds -- all too many voters -- seem to do politics the other way around.

Governor Rounds likes to say we just don't have the money to raise teacher pay out of last place in the nation or expand highways or any of those other big-spender projects. But, if certain conservatives are right, poverty is a choice. If we set our priorities, we can get out of our alleged fiscal poverty and make rural ambulance districts and higher teacher pay and maybe even four lanes to Mobridge happen. Governor Rounds certainly thinks he can make funding happen for his priorities (new Internet, Homestake lab, free lightbulbs for schools and businesses, new planes...).

But as long as our economic development strategy focuses on big towns, big corporations, and absolutely no new taxes at all ever, small towns will find it harder and harder to maintain the quality of life that we say we cherish.