Follow-ups

Just a couple quick items to follow-up on things CMM has blogged on earlier:

It seems North Brookfield EMS has gotten its contract with the town. According to the Telegram, the deal is for a year and provides the service access to $25,000 that town voters approved earlier this year.
Ominously, though, it sounds like the deal would allow the town to put up its own ambulance with town employees (I assume they mean the Fire Department) and break the contract with just a month's notice.

In Gardner, the City Council has decided against signing-on with a company that would collect money from at-fault drivers to recoup the costs of fire and police responses to the accidents they cause.
Rather than defeating the proposal by official vote, the city council simply removed it from their calendar, achieving the same goal.
Cost Recovery Systems, of Dayton, Ohio, is a company that promises to recoup the cost of sending fire and police vehicles to accident scenes by targetting the drivers deemed at-fault in the accident and sending them a bill.
I'm sure a good chunk of the money ends up in Cost Recovery's pockets.
A couple other communities in the state have or are nearing deals with this outfit.
I applaud the Gardner City Council for steering clear of this whole mess.
Money is good, but at what cost?
To me, it's a pretty thinly veiled attempt at allowing police and fire departments to start billing for services that have traditionally generated no revenue.
I couldn't agree more with City Councilor Kim Dembrosky, who said after the move was defeated that “sometimes people say that government goes a little too far. I think this would have been one of those cases.”
Amen.