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EMS Response Times, Dying on the Streets, Tax Cuts and the Controller
Submitted by Dan U-A on Sat, 12/22/2007 - 11:24am.
Poor, poor Stan Shapiro. He is currently on a vacation, out of the country, when stories with headlines like this come out:
"Butkovitz: Halt tax cuts, fix EMS"
And from the Inquirer, we get this:
Philadelphia's city controller - contending Mayor-elect Michael Nutter should be assessing city services before talking tax cuts - yesterday reported dangerously slow response times on emergency-medical calls.
"Most of the departments we look at, we see gaping holes in service," Alan Butkovitz said at a news conference in which he released a performance audit by his office of the Fire Department's Emergency Medical Services Division. "We're in the midst of this tax-cutting craze."
Nutter has pledged to enact tax reforms, including scaling back the business-privilege tax.
In response to the audit, Nutter's spokeswoman, Melanie Johnson, said "the mayor-elect wants to review the controller's report and will have a more detailed comment after he has seen it. In reference to the controller's recommendation to freeze business taxes, the mayor-elect is committed to improving the business climate while at the same time improving on the delivery of city services."
The controller said the assumption behind the "tax-cutting craze" is that city services are up to snuff. But the performance by EMS ambulances is one example of a service that falls woefully short, he said.
Stan, where are you!?!!?
As far as the EMS specifically, this is unfortunately not anything particularly new. Mike Newall, of the CityPaper wrote a cover story about our EMS problems two years ago, the Daily News did its own series, and Newall followed up last month, and reminded us of some people who likely died specifically because of slow EMS response times:
Danny Rumph, a 21-year-old stand-out guard at Western Kentucky University, suffered cardiac arrest on a Mount Airy basketball court and died after waiting 31 minutes for an ambulance. Ricky Badway, 22, suffered cardiac arrest at his girlfriend's house in Roxborough and died after waiting 22 minutes for an ambulance. Rotan Lee, a prominent education reformer, suffered cardiac arrest at his West Philadelphia home and died after waiting 19 minutes for an ambulance. And a 5-month-old baby girl suffered cardiac arrest in Wissinoming and died waiting for an ambulance that never even arrived.
"And these are just the cases the press knows about," says one paramedic. "This happens all the time. It's a silent epidemic."
We know about these, because they are the extraordinary cases- a local Division 1 basketball player, a prominent Philadelphian like Rotan Lee (Read Seth Williams' remembrance of him here), and a 5-month old baby. But, I think we all understand that for every case that is reported, many, many more go unreported.
So, Butkovitz undertook an audit of the EMS system, and came up with a long list of things needed to be done to fix the system. First, and foremost though, is hiring more paramedics, which will cost money, and appears to be the jumping off point for the first Philadelphia Politician in recent years to utter the phrase "tax-cutting craze" in recent memory.
Anyway, this is a big deal in this whole tax cut debate for a couple of reasons. First and foremost is that the last Controller, Jonathan Saidel, was basically the point man in so much of the debate. And second, Butkovitz is now, by far the highest ranking city official who appears to be getting off the BPT train. Maybe he will fall back in line, maybe not.
I think we need to take a few reasonable steps before cutting taxes:
1) A whole sale evaluation of city services, city departments, etc., to figure out exactly what our budgetary needs are- from EMS, to libraries, etc. This is often proposed by our very own Gaetano. Within that, there will be different levels of urgency- so, we will have to prioritize.
2) Unlike with the Street administration, our more Open-Govt oriented new Mayor should give us some detailed figures from the BPT cuts. What is the breakdown for BPT breaks? There are something like 75,000 payers of the BPT in Philadelphia. What percentage of this tax break goes to the top one percent (750) of businesses and top 5 percent of businesses? What percentage goes to the other 70 thousand or so payers? If the idea is small business job creation, and it only gives the typical small business a hundred bucks a year, then... you know where I am going with this.
At least then, with a little more information under our belt, we can at worst look at the situation, and agree to disagree on where our next steps should lie. At best, maybe we will even agree...
Actually, I'm still here
until December 27. So I'm glad I'm still around to say: "all praise to Alan Butkovitz" for having the courage to express his common sense on tax cuts. Tax cuts (without replacement revenue) mean less money, period. Less money means less services, period.
I am leaving soon for a month, so I'm not going to get back into this at length until I get back. But in the meanwhile I highly recommend that people check out this article on the One Philadelphia website: http://www.onephiladelphia.org/2007_1115.html Common sense, and the Michigan State University research described in the article, tells us that low taxes not only produce lousy services, but that the lousy services also result in a miserable business environment. So get set, folks, we're getting ready to live in interesting times, here in Philly.
Its Butkovitz's job to
Its Butkovitz's job to report on issues of fiscal concern for the city. Its not his job to tell either the mayor or City Council what policy they have to pursue.
Despite sounding like music to Stan's ears, one has to wonder why Butkovitz would so awkwardly insert himself directly into a wider issue on how and where the city should shift its focus in terms of balancing revenue versus quality city services. To me its horribly inapropriate and awkward for Butkovitz to equate one issue (number of EMS ambulances in a city with a lot of private ambulance services) as a being definitively connected to a much broader taxation debate. It touches on so many issues - property tax collection and our city's sometimes less than stellar collection record, the future of assesments, the expiration of 10-year abatements as examples just from property taxes - that touch on city revenue, as well as issues like the ballance of EMS vs. fire fighters.
Butkovitz own reports about the pathetic state of city police stations, our crumbling schools, our overcrowding in local jails, substandard city services on a number of levels, future contract negotiations for municipal employees - all of these strike me as more important for figuring out future city fiscal policy than this one report on ambulances and its strange and politically awkward for Butkovitz to underline a 4 minute difference in ambulance response time as the defining reason keeping Philly from being a "world class city". Something is very strange about this report.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
Saidel was the biggest
Saidel was the biggest proponent of BPT cuts in the City. Did you criticize him for that?
I'm not sure where you are
I'm not sure where you are headed with Saidel. Saidel, Butkovitz, whoever is next can have general opinions about how tax policy, city services, job growth interrelate but its an entirely another question why Butkovitz would go out on a limb and sate that of all of Philadelphia's problems a handful of EMS ambulances should be the deciding factor for our city's tax policy.
I do have a question related to this report.
What percent of EMS ambulance responses in this town are a direct result of gun violence? What impact will a change on police enforcement strategies or potential job growth under Nutter have on the overall demand for EMS service?
Someone, not necessarily me, would argue that a commitment to a continued phasing out portions of the BPT (at the very least the Gross Receipts portion) and small incremental decreases in the wage tax are more important to stopping the evacuation of well paying jobs to the suburbs than the cuts will cost us in revenue. Philadelphia still has overall negligent job growth while the metro region does very, very well in terms of job growth. Thats a huge problem for our city's survival long term and clearly in the big picture something needs to change. Many people would argue that the city should focus on doing more in terms of what can only be handled by city government with less and putting more of what should be handled by federal and state government on them if our city is going to become economically competitive with its suburban counties. Some of them much more extremely than I would.
Regardless, its a bigger question with a lot more angles to it than a handful EMS ambulances. Why would Butkovitz single out this one issue to hinge the whole debate on, particularly with municipal employees negotiations around the corner?
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.
I suspect that with his
I suspect that with his report in hand, he wanted to make a point about services in general, not just EMS response times.
Butkovitz
Butkovitz is a former state representative from Northeast Philadelphia who is very ambitious. This report is part of a ramped up PR offensive from the City Controller's office. Saidel was very influential during his time as Controller and I'm sure that Butkovitz wants to follow in his footsteps.
I like a lot of what Butkovitz is saying, but there is more happening here than just a report. The media and political lovefest for Michael Nutter will not last forever. The Controller is likely trying to get out in front of the incoming mayor on a number of issues and position himself as one of the administration's critics.
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