Borough set to charge for rescue operations

MAT-SU — Come this spring, hikers, fishermen and anyone else who gets lost or hurt in the wilds of the Valley could receive a bill for their rescuers’ time.

The borough assembly over the summer agreed to a proposal from the Department of Emergency Services to charge fees for off-road rescues and approved a fee structure. Deputy Director of Emergency Services Clint Vardeman said right now the department is working out forms, policies and procedures for rescue.

“We don’t have an exact date (for implementing the fees), but we’re targeting sometime this spring,” Vardeman said.

He said that while everyone who needs a full-on borough rescue will more than likely get a bill, how that bill is paid, or even if it’s paid, will depend a lot on the individual circumstances.

“We’re not trying to bankrupt somebody. That’s not the issue. It’s just a matter of trying to be equitable to the taxpayer because it costs a lot of money,” he said.

He said that, much like the borough’s fees for ambulances, the first place the borough will look for payment is a person’s insurance company. If there is no insurer and the person can’t pay in full, the borough will look at setting up payment plans.

“If they just can’t pay they just can’t pay,” he said, but the borough will document that to make sure no one with the means to pay is getting let off the hook.

And it’s not like rescue services are going to somehow morph into a profit-making business.

“We’re not going to make any money on it. We won’t even break even,” Vardeman said.

Unlike fire protection and ambulance services, off-road rescues, he said, aren’t something everyone in the borough needs. So the fees are an effort to make the tax structure more equitable.

“We want the people who actually have to use the service to pay for at least part of it,” Vardeman said.

Also, some of the people using the services don’t pay anything at all for them.

“We have a lot of people that are tourists that don’t pay taxes here and we’re trying to have them share the burden that our taxpayers do,” Vardeman said.

Off-road rescues, he said, aren’t terribly common in the Valley. Alaska State Troopers are obliged to run search-and-rescue operations in the state. Under the troopers is a network of volunteer search organizations that are usually called out to find missing hunters and hikers. Occasionally the troopers will also call on the borough if more manpower is needed, Vardeman said.

But, usually, he said, the way it works is someone gets lost, the troopers find the person and then when they need someone to transport the person to safety they’ll call in the borough to bring out their snowmachines and ATVs.

“They’ll say, OK we’ve got him and he’s right over here,” he said.

The borough does often run operations when the person who needs saving is in the water. The borough has a dive team, boats, trucks and trailers for the purpose. But it’s hard to quantify how much the dive team gets used.

“I’ve only been here going on six years and there have been some summers when the dive team have been an almost every day event and some summers where they almost never get called out,” Vardeman said.

He said there has been some question of whether the borough should even consider charging for this sort of thing. The fear, he said, is that if someone is lost he might hesitate to call for help for fear of being charged a fee. Vardeman said he hopes the borough’s commitment to working with people without the means to pay for a rescue will eliminate those fears.

“If people want our help we want them to feel comfortable calling us,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.