During the weekend of Oct. 12-13, the Winchester Fire Department and the Clark County Fire Department each had to idle one piece of equipment due to insufficient personnel available.

This insufficiency was reported as due to a number of individuals being either ill or injured … and possibly just exhausted from long periods of work without relief.

City officials, county officials, chiefs of both emergency services and staff personnel are engaged in trying to find long-term solutions to this problem, which has been ongoing for some time, but has now exhibited itself most dramatically.

All local residents want to believe these discussions are being carried out with the final goal in mind of proper staffing with adequate pay to retain the trained personnel necessary to staff the services and meet the requirements of the community.

Part of the problem lies in the necessity of using highly-specialized pieces of ambulance equipment simply to transport patients, even those who don’t require intensive emergency services.

A recent example is of a woman who was severely injured in a fall and requested she be transported to a Lexington hospital, which had her complete medical history. The ambulance service was unable to do so because of insufficient vehicles to cover the county while one was away in an adjacent county.

Still, it would appear the one, single underlying problem affecting these local services is insufficient funding, funding which only comes from locally-generated taxes and the occasional state or federal grant, although grants typically are not available for continuing costs such as pay.

Make no mistake. No one likes to pay taxes and it is too often difficult — if not impossible — to equate taxes with the maintenance of vital services. But when someone is witnessing an assault or a drug deal or an attempted theft or burglary, that person is unlikely to be thinking about how much he or she has been paying in taxes to assure a rapid response to a frenzied call for help by the police.

When a person’s home is being consumed by an uncontrolled blaze, is that person likely to be thinking about his or her last tax bill while they are waiting for firefighters to arrive?

And when someone is deathly ill, or has suffered a debilitating fall or been severely injured in a traffic accident, that person is probably not reminding someone else making a 911 call on their behalf taxes have assured someone is going to answer that call.

The bottom line is Winchester and Clark County are operating off a bottom line, an attempt to keep taxes at the lowest possible level that will insure continuance of the services demanded by the residents of this community.

Everyone probably breathes a sigh of relief each year when local governments don’t raise taxes, and the truth is expanding business and building help to assuage the tax problem. But if these expansions are insufficient to generate the necessary revenue to maintain emergency services, then the taxation approach must be reviewed.

Is the community giving too many tax advantages to businesses to locate here? Are too many taxes going uncollected? Is the current tax rate adequate?

The groups convening to discuss the difficulties facing our emergency services must be asking these questions. And many others.

But in the final analysis, the tax base in Winchester and Clark County must — must — be set at a level which assures the efficiency and maintenance and health of emergency services.

No other alternative is acceptable.

Chuck Witt is a retired architect and a lifelong resident of Winchester. He can be reached at chuck740@bellsouth.net.