A plan to create an emergency service area in Cooper Landing is off the table, and a new effort for a larger, regional service area is underway from the borough mayor’s office.
Cooper Landing Emergency Services has been a volunteer-run, donation-funded emergency department for decades. Board members and staff began pushing for a formalized service area in response to rising costs and a need for sustainable, predictable funding.
Cindy Ecklund, the Eastern Peninsula member of the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly, brought forward a resolution in May, opening the door for a formalized, tax-collecting service area for Cooper Landing.
The assembly passed Ecklund’s resolution overwhelmingly at its June 6 meeting. But the next step was to create a mayor’s report about possible costs, and host community meetings. At that stage, Ecklund said, Mayor Peter Micciche calculated a mill rate of 3.95, and presented it at a community meeting.
“Most everybody in the audience was not that happy with that high of a mill rate,” Ecklund said.
She said after that discovery, public opinion leaned against the service area, and Micciche unveiled a new plan.
“The mayor had put forward three options: Do nothing, form a Cooper Landing Emergency Service Area at this time, or let the mayor work on putting together an East Kenai Peninsula emergency service area,” Ecklund said.
Micciche is now beginning work on that third option, a service area that would encompass the whole eastern peninsula, including Cooper Landing, Moose Pass, Bear Creek, Seward, Lowell Point and Hope.
From an efficiency perspective, he said that’s the only way to have a low mill rate and quality services.
“We have nonexistent industrial taxpayers in many of these areas, we have very limited commercial, and that makes it very difficult, that puts all of the costs on the backs of the individuals residents and taxpayers,” Micciche said. “You add Seward into this, 2,600 people, heavy industrial bays, lots of commercial, and you start looking at what it would take to have an efficient, sustainable model, and suddenly you can bring down that mill rate significantly, and start enjoying the scale that comes along with that economy.”
Another component of the plan, he said, is to seek state or federal funding to supplement the local taxes, because the eastern peninsula highways are heavily traveled by tourists from outside the borough.
Micciche said a 1985 study determined that combining service areas on the peninsula would be more efficient. More recently, he pointed to Central Emergency Services, which combined the City of Soldotna’s emergency department with rural central peninsula services, to what he described as great success.
He said, learning from the example of Central Emergency Services, an important part of the plan will be allowing these long-standing emergency departments to maintain their unique identities.
“There was some heartache, because of the loss of that identity, which is why I absolutely insist that individual identities don’t go away,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what, we never looked back.”
In the coming months, Micciche said his goal is to meet with the boards of the various service areas to gather input, and then bring the issue back to the assembly through a petition signed by community members. His goal is to have the eastern service area on the ballot for voters by 2024.
