‘Accident tax’ committee has conflict of interest
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Editor,
I attended the meeting of the Polson Rural Fire District board on Wednesday, Feb. 9 and first, would like to thank Jack Clapp for starting the meeting with the Pledge of Allegiance. This has not been done in previous meetings that I have attended. Second, I would like to comment on the committee that has been established to review the “accident tax.”
In the past three months the board has gone from billing only those who are non-tax payers to billing everyone through their insurance companies and now an “independent and impartial” committee will decide which automobile crash victims will be billed for the accident tax. The committee is made up of the fire chief and two fire board trustees. I stood up and asked, with no disrespect to the two named trustees, if there shouldn’t be an independent party chosen as the three people now on the committee had a clear conflict of interest. Apart from the fire chief’s obvious conflict, one of the trustees has a husband who is a fireman, a son who is also a fireman and is heavily involved with the auxiliary. I was told in no uncertain terms that these three people would be independent and impartial. How can this be, when there is clearly a bias toward the fire department? Deciding on a case-by-case basis is surely another form of discrimination.
I continue to be absolutely against this “accident tax.”
Al Fillman
Big Arm
