After more than three hours of math, geography and history lessons, dealt out and received by Eastside Fire and Rescue (EFR) officials and Sammamish City Councilors at a Nov. 17 meeting at City Hall, it was a simple piece of logic offered by councilor Kathy Huckabay which most succinctly surmised what is becoming a significant problem for her city.

“I think (the funding model) is fundamentally flawed,” she said. “I strongly recommend you go back and look at the funding model, because it’s not working in my estimations.”

The outgoing councilor’s somewhat frustrated expression at the end of the long discussion spoke most clearly what others had been sort of saying most of the night – the service we get from Eastside Fire and Rescue is fine, it’s just expensive, and getting more so.

With the gap between revenues and expenditures growing tighter by the year and the city’s money managers approaching what could well be an unsustainable future, the Sammamish councilors and City Manager Ben Yazici are questioning why the amount they pay for EFR service is going up 7 percent a year.

This figure far exceeds the cost increases of any other city expenditure, or increases in the Consumer Price Index, which averaged 3 percent over the same period.

This year the $5.6 million bill will account for 26 percent of the city’s annual operating budget.

It was revealed on Tuesday night that wages for fire fighters was the single biggest expense for EFR every year – and in 2009 these firefighters received a pay increase of 7.5 percent. At the same time, EFR administration staff took a .6 percent pay reduction, and support staff salaries stayed even.

Despite all the words of goodwill and praise between the council and EFR, the relationship at the moment is testy at the least, and adversarial at worst, and it appears that unless EFR can come back to the city with a different formula for how much it will pay, the city will look at a significant change to the way it provides fire service to Sammamish residents.

At the moment that formula works basically like this:

There are nine stations in the EFR reach which includes Issaquah, Sammamish, Renton, North Bend, and Carnation, serving about 140,000 residents.

Sammamish is served primarily by three stations, 81, 82 and 83.

The nine stations each cost $2,056,000 to run.

Each station’s service area is decided by a computer program which plots the location of each station, considers existing street networks, speed limits and topography – this program then calculates which station could get to a given address the fastest. All addresses within that range are then designated as that station’s service area.

The total assessed property value of those homes is calculated, and the cost of the $2,056,000 station is distributed as a percentage of each homeowner’s assessed valuation. In Sammamish this figure is typically around the 50-60 cents per thousand dollars of assessed valuation.

Eastside Fire and Rescue then adds the contribution amount from each home within the city’s boundary, and that is Sammamish’s bill for fire service for that year.

It is a system that can be difficult to understand, and it is leading some councilors to question whether Sammamish is paying more than it’s fair share.

This question was highlighted by Yazici during a statement to open Tuesday’s meeting.

Though prefacing his comments with the warning that statistics could be used in misleading ways, Yazici said “in 2008 Sammamish paid 28 percent of EFR’s budget, but only received 18 percent of the service calls. The other EF&R partners paid 72 percent of the budget, but received 82 percent of the service calls.”

The main concern of the council, however, is not how much the city pays compared to its neighbors, but the rate of annual cost increases.

“In 2001 we paid $3.2 million for fire and emergency services,” Yazici said. “This year, we’re paying $5.6 million. That’s a 67 percent increase. As you can imagine, that is not a cost trajectory our taxpayers can sustain. In recent years, our representatives have expressed great concern about these yearly budget increases and asked for better cost containment from the EFR administrative staff. But the costs keep going up. The check we wrote for 2008 service went up seven percent. The check for 2009 is going to be up 6 percent. These numbers are completely detached from the rate of inflation.”

Yazici added that, despite rumors, the city has no plans to decrease the number of stations or firefighters.

EFR Deputy Chief of Planning Wesley Collins was one of a number of EFR officials on hand to respond the council’s concerns, promoting the benefits of the combined fire service.

Collins said studies had shown that by combining resources and minimizing resource overlap, the larger organizing of EFR was 15-24 percent more efficient than the standalone fire services that existed before EFR came into being in 1999.

By this measure, Collins said “we have saved the taxpayers millions in 2009.”

“These savings come from having a leaner administration,” he said. “They don’t come from having less firefighters on the street.”

“The level of service we provide is better than the level of service that could be provided as a standalone,” Collins said, adding that it was the cost efficiences and economies of scale which enabled EFR to provide services such as Rescue, and a Hazard Material Decontamination Unit.

The council reiterated its opinion that it was not the quality of the service that is in question, but the reason for the continued escalation of its cost.

Of the firefighter’s salaries Collins said “they have binding arbitration,” referring to the contracted agreement between the International Association of Firefighters and EFR. “Their contracts tend by a little more rich than other contracts. When I say more rich, I mean they tend to be above CPI increases. It is very difficult to keep the budget below 5 percent when labor costs and medical are going up by more than 5 percent.”

At times the councilors said it was important to know what the increase would be into the future – but at others they challenged why there needed to be significant increases at all.

“In Sammamish we try to do a six year plan,” said Councilor Lee Fellinge. “It would be helpful to us to have something we can count on. We look at 7 percent (increases) and that causes us concern, because we don’t believe that’s sustainable.”

“I think we could work with your staff easily and come up with six year projection,” Collins said. “But the wildcard is always the level of service.”

Councilor Nancy Whitten pressed Collins to explain where the cost increases were coming from.

“These are policy issues that are extremely concerning, for the direction of Eastside Fire and Rescue,” she said. “This 5 percent increase every year eats up all our money. There will be nothing left for things like roads and parks.”

Councilors and EFR officials discussed alternatives for the future, such as increasing revenue by charging for medical responses, and the possibility of the creation of a City of Sammamish non-profit entity that contracted with a hypothetical Regional Fire Authority.

None of these options appeared workable at the moment, although EFR Deputy Chief of Operations Jeff Griffin is in the process of completing a report on additional revenue sources.