Mayor Glenn Jacobs has nixed the notion of a fire district and “fire tax” for Knox County. In his Friday Facebook post, Jacobs said, “I do not and I will not support a fire tax.”
He talked about Rural Metro Fire’s new station on Emory Road and praised the local business for making “significant investments in infrastructure and equipment.”
Jacobs said over the last five years, Knox County has suffered a third fewer deaths per million than the rest of the region. Injuries per million are less than half of other comparable communities. And annual property loss due to fire is about half that of other areas our size.
All the while, “we pay about a third of what Tennessee’s 10 largest communities pay for fire protection.”
Jacobs concluded: “I get very nervous when government steps in to fix something that isn’t really broken. We’ve seen that happen time and again, and the results are never what we are promised, but the costs are inevitably more than advertised.”
It’s safe to say the idea of a fire tax in Knox County is as dead as the holiday turkey. It’s hard to pass a tax increase here. It’s never happened over the objections of the chief executive.