To suggest that Kevin Blake’s commentary regarding the Valley Regional Fire School and our volunteer firefighters is simply misleading is too generous. It is flat-out fiction.
This year, as we have every other year, Republicans in the House and Senate offered alternative budgets that represented priorities for funding vital state services for those most at risk, and to support critical core functions of government.
We did so without raising taxes and without hurting important services such as hospitals, or gutting aid to towns and cities or local education.
As I pointed out on the floor of the House of Representatives during the budget debate on May 13, one of those core functions we deemed critical was funding for our Fire Schools.
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It is unfortunate that Mr. Blake chose to politicize this issue, for what purpose I do not know, but he needs a lesson in civics. Republicans made the tough decisions to prioritize our spending choices in a very difficult budget year — we had to come up with four separate budgets in 11 months because of collapsing revenue. We made no cuts to the Fire Schools operation in our alternative budget.
The Democrats, who control the legislative agenda and pick what bills will be called, cut the fire school funding from the original June 2015 budget twice, last December and again in May.
They also proposed a surcharge, a tax, on all residential home insurance policies to raise the money for the schools. That was not the tough choice that had to be made, it was simply another tax hike. We have seen what raising taxes does in a bad economy and when faced with huge deficits. It makes everything worse.
Mr. Blake’s oversimplification of how to solve the problem of building a new planned fire school at a time the state faces a projected $935 million deficit was breathtaking. “Plans have been drawn,’’ he wrote in this space recently, “and all that was needed to start the physical construction of the fire school was the state providing the necessary funding.’’
If one takes the time and effort to try and educate the public about an important issue such as our volunteer firefighters and what is government’s responsibility to them, more than just a passing interest in the facts is required.
I do agree with Mr. Blake on one thing: Our volunteer firefighters put themselves in harm’s way every day they are on the job, and we should never forget that.
The writer is the Republican Leader in the state House of Representatives.
