December 2022

Petitions Delivered!

Pflugerville, TX – December 16, 2022 – Pflugerville Residents for Responsible Taxation, a non-partisan group of long-time and new Pflugerville residents from all walks of life, announced a successful petition drive to decrease the rate of local sales and use tax imposed within Travis County ESD 2 by .5 percent.

On Friday, December 16th, at 12:04 p.m., 511 pages with more than 7,000 signatures were handed to Travis County ESD2 Deputy Assistant Chief AJ Stacer with a letter requesting to call an election in May 2023. These petitions have obtained the minimum number of signatures required by Health and Safety Code, Chapter 755.0752, for 5 percent of the district’s registered voters.

It is our expectation that ESD2 will validate the petitions and forward them to the ESD2 full Board of Commissioners to adopt a resolution to call an election to be held in May of 2023.

Travis County ESD 2 has been collecting sales taxes within portions of its district to fund its EMS. Starting in January of 2022, Travis County ESD 2 stopped providing Advanced Life Support and ambulance transport services to the City of Pflugerville, forcing the City to use alternate service providers for ambulances without additional funding.

“This petition is not about reducing funding for EMS, but rather about transferring the control of the funding to elected officials,” said Melody Ryan. “We must transfer taxes from ESD 2 to the City of Pflugerville in order to keep allowing the City to offer EMS. This allows our elected City Council to make the decisions that best serve our City residents. Everyone inside of ESD 2 will need to vote on this.”

Within the boundaries of the City, we can choose to forgo paying a half-cent sales tax to ESD 2 and instead choose to give that half-cent to the City of Pflugerville. Once the ESD 2 sales tax is transferred to the City of Pflugerville, the City Council will have the option to establish its own EMS department. There is no overall tax increase and a tax decrease will occur in the ETJ areas.

May 2023 election: Vote Yes to remove the half cent sales tax to Travis County ESD 2. Vote Yes to give the City of Pflugerville the half cent sales tax to fund emergency services.

https://VoteYes4EMS.com

https://www.facebook.com/PfRRTAX/

pfrrtax@gmail.com

(320) 322-1696

The Big Announcement

December 13th 2022 city council meeting, we announce our plans to fund long term emergency services for the city of Pflugerville.

For the past 2 years, the city has been working with Travis County ESD2 over emergency services.

Unfortunately, issues were not resolved and Travis County ESD2 stopped providing Ambulance services to city residents at the beginning of this year.

Consequently, the city was forced to engage with a private company to continue ambulance services to its residents.

This city council has asked city staff to come up with a long term plan for emergency services.  Unfortunately, no long term plan has been presented to the public.

We believe that is because city management believes no easy funding mechanism is available for the city to support emergency services.

So we have come up with a plan. The first step is to petition to take back the half cent sales tax that Travis county ESD2 is receiving.

The second step will be to transfer those taxes to the city, with the intent that the city will spend the taxes on emergency services.

We have collected over 7K signatures to call an election in May 2023 to reduce ESD2 sales tax allocation, by a half cent.

If this proposition passes, then it will free up a half cent sales tax for the city to collect.

We ask the city council to please pass a ballot proposition for the May 2023 election to collect that half cent sales tax, if the voters decide to remove the half cent from Travis county ESD2.

This half cent sales tax should be used to provide emergency services.

The city can choose to continue to give it back to Travis County ESD2 or use it to establish its own city emergency services.

In any case, this should put the city in a better position to negotiate terms for our emergency services, rather than leaving it up to a non-elected board.

Please allow our citizens to vote to fund emergency services for the city of Pflugerville.