A discussion at the Tuesday, October 7, 2025 Supervisors meeting began as another self-evident analysis of the shaky finances of the County’s three volunteer ambulance service operations in the unincorporated areas morphed into a larger discussion of how to adequately fund the chronically underfunded services.
The Round Valley ambulance is reportedly in the most precarious financial position these days due to a limited number of qualified volunteers, resulting in having to pay EMTs from other parts of the county to travel long distances to and from Covelo to cover 24 hour on-call volunteer shifts
Supervisor Ted Williams speculated that Covelo seems to have a higher percentage of crime-related medical calls, making the recruiting of volunteers even more difficult.
Over the years multiple studies have shown that the three volunteer ambulance services in the unincorporated areas of the county — Covelo, Laytonville and Anderson Valley — are particularly underfunded despite operating with minimally paid public spirited volunteers.
Santa Rosa-based Coastal Valley EMS medical service administrator Jen Banks told the supervisors that they are currently conducting EMS training for some Covelo volunteers, but that they will not have any new graduates until early next year.
Further complicating matters is the Board of Supervisors’ indolence and their confusion on how to even approach the problem.
Should they consider a sales tax increment on top of the existing sales tax increments in the County? (“Measure P.”) Should they ask the ambulance and fire districts to float their own property tax add-on ballot measures individually? Should a new tax cover public safety in general? Or just ambulance and fire? Or just ambulances? Should a potential ballot measure be initiated by the supervisors or the public in general? How much could be raised with a sales tax that only applies to the unincorporated areas where sales are much lower than in the cities? Or should a new tax apply county-wide like Measure P or Measure B, the mental health measure from 2017?
(Measure B, some may recall, was a half-cent sales tax increment, reportedly generating about $8 million a year until it phased down to a 1/8 of a cent last year. Almost none of that money has been spent for the mental health and drug rehab services required by the measure, only for a couple of new buildings to house “reimburseable” mental patients.)
How would any new tax revenues be allocated? Would it be spread too thin to make much difference? Would an emergency services sales tax take priority over a road tax that the Supervisors have also been contemplating?
After randomly bouncing the subject around for about an hour, the board directed County CEO Darcie Antle and her staff to come back on Nov. 4 with a summary of the tax options and various funding levels that a new tax could generate. But even that analysis costs money which CEO Antle said would come from whatever’s left of the dwindling PG&E settlement money that the County received in the aftermath of the devastating Potter/Redwood Valley wildfires in 2017.
The last time the county tried to address emergency services tax revenues, the Supervisors proposed and the public narrowly passed (about 55 percent to 45 percent, low for a tax that supports such a popular service) a quarter-cent emergency services sales tax: the above mentioned Measure P, which, after a couple of years of stalling and bureaucratic bumbling, is now generating about $4 million a year which is grudgingly allocated by the supervisors on a quarterly basis to the 22 fire services districts in the county according to a complicated formula based mainly on population.
Over the last decade or two the County has paid for several studies which always end up concluding that our volunteer ambulance services are stretched thin and underfunded. This combined with obscure and pennies-on-the-dollar medical most reimbursement rates, bureaucracy, and patchwork funding, makes the fact that our ambulances operate effectively at all even more impressive.
While the State of California has imposed increasingly strict training and qualification requirements on ambulance volunteers, it has done almost nothing to help finance these essential services or their training.
Complicating matters further, we learned this week that the Mendocino Association of Fire Chiefs is worried that the Board’s allocation of the Measure P Emergency Services sales tax revenues is in jeopardy. Measure P is an “advisory” measure, also known as a “general tax,” that the Supervisors can legally withdraw at any time despite their internal resolution to the contrary. The Chiefs Association is contemplating its own county-wide measure for next November (2026) that would replace Measure P with stronger language that would guarantee that the existing funds can not be withdrawn or diverted.
If you are among those who don’t follow the Board of Supervisors much and therefore have a rosy view of county functioning, you might think that an ambulance-related tax measure might appear on a ballot as early as next year.
However, if you live in an unincorporated area of the County and are following Official Mendocino’s inability to get out of its own way on most issues, you should keep a close eye on your local ambulance service’s finances and staffing levels, contribute in whatever way you can, and look for ways to help them operate independent of county officials.
We’d like to hope that the supervisors can somehow navigate the complex financial waters associated with not only the County’s looming budget deficit, but at least adequately fund volunteer ambulance services in the county.
But history shows that every attempt so far has failed.
Mark Scaramella is the Managing Editor of the Anderson Valley Advertiser and a long-time Observer of the County’s Board of Supervisors.
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