Imagine for a moment that you are stalking the wily wapiti in some Wyoming wilderness, and you step in a badger hole.
You hear the ankle snap, and fall on your butt in the cactus and can’t move.
Miles from the trailhead, you curse at your cellphone as if that will produce a signal. But, nada.
You start to feel cold and hungry. Then it gets dark and you begin to hear carnivores approaching in the night.
“I hope the sheriff gets here pronto, I wanna go home,” you pray to whoever will listen.
You know enough about Wyoming laws to quote to yourself the statutes that place responsibility for search and rescue operations on county sheriffs.
And you remember that you voted for the current sheriff, and he’s a good guy.
But then, you also recall voting for Proposition 1 that drastically cut property tax revenues that help fund your county sheriff and his search and resscue capabilities.
“What a pickle!’ you say to yourself, as you hear the carnivores circling closer.
Diminished capacity for counties to conduct effective search and rescue operations is but one of the unforeseen and unintended consequences of taking a chainsaw to property taxes in Wyoming and cutting those revenues in half.
Nobody ever wakes up in the morning thinking that they’ll get lost out in the Big Empty or fall off a ledge and won’t be able to walk out, but it happens.
Or that their kids will wander off from the fishing hole and disappear into the trees. That happens, too.
Most folks don’t give their county’s search and rescue team a second thought, blissfully believing that they’ll never need to be found and rescured.
And they won’t... until they do.
In my last column, I justified my opposition to Prop 1 by showing how property taxes protect your property.
It’s equally true that they also protect lives.
What got me thinking along this line was Kate Meadows’ article about the Big Horn County’s search and rescue team winning a new truck and $30.000 in much needed cash for their operation.
They entered a nationwide contest and walked away winners.
A previous legislative cut to property tax revenue in Big Horn County had sliced away more than half of their operating budget in a year that is shaping up to be a record year for search and rescue calls.
So their winning the new truck and a pile of cash came at a very opportune time, and will probably save lives.
Now imagine that Prop 1 passes, and every one of Wyoming’s 23 counties sees their property tax revenue further reduced by another half.
That revenue reduction will filter down to county search and rescue teams, and it will take some creative accounting indeed to offset that loss and put together an operation effective enough to rescue your ass if you are lost or hurt way out in the boonies.
Maybe they’ll need to resort to bake sales or lemonade stands for funding.
Or, like their compadres in Big Horn County, they could enter contests with lucrative payouts.
I can imagine my county search and rescue folks going on Jeopardy for money to buy new equipment.
I would be saved, should I get lost, only because my guy made it to Double Jeopardy and knew who inherited King Leopold of Belgium’s crown.
Or we could resort to recruiting bad-ass poker players to our search and rescue teams... good bluffers with ice water in their veins who could enter high-stakes games, push their chips all in and win the pot on the river card.
But I don’t think that it’s wise or rational to rely upon games of chance to provide the funding for our counties’ stautory responsibilities.
And it feels a bit socialistic, to me. Maybe a bit decadent.
If I, or a loved one, ever need the services of a search and rescue team, I’ll want to know that it’s well funded by a reliable revenue stream, trained and well-equipped, and not relying on the luck of the draw to save me or mine.
To do otherwise would amount to rolling the dice for people’s lives.
Rod Miller can be reached at RodsMillerWyo@yahoo.com
