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.