BENTON COUNTY, Wash. – Benton County Fire District 4 is working with a different budget for emergency medical services than expected this year. It was told a clerical error led to $500,000 not being collected in the district this year.
Fire Chief Paul Carlyle said he got in contact with the county assessor’s office right away.
Benton County Assessor Bill Spencer said, “There’s a number of different reasons for it, why it got missed and there really are no excuses for it.”
Spencer said the office has had 4 different people filling the role that works on levies and those tax statements since 2020. That turnover lead to someone picking up the process of setting levy rates halfway through the month-long process. After the new staff member was trained the team did not go back and check the former staff member’s work.
After finding out about the mistake Spencer said, “Our very first call was to the Washington State Department of Revenue to figure out what we needed to do to make it right.”
The office is unable to re-send statements to people in the district for this year’s rates. That does make it cheaper for tax-payers this year but the $500,000 will still be collected over the next three years through levy dollars.
For now, Benton County Fire District 4 plans to keep the three paramedic positions it raised the budget for, but it will be reducing and delaying the other things it had planned through that budget increase. Carlyle said some programs might be scaled back this year.
“The board of commissioners, myself and staff here really recognized with our call volume increasing we needed to keep those staff. That was our number one priority,” he said.
Spencer said the assessor’s office is working on levy workshops for next year to make sure the information gets submitted correctly.
The department is also pushing for a more standardized submissions to make it more efficient and easier to catch mistakes. He said the department also plans to give districts an opportunity to verify before things are finalized.
“Putting those things into play, I think, will prevent, hopefully this from happening in the future,” Spencer said.
Chief Carlyle said the department will work with what it has and change if emergencies come up.
“At the end of the day, I want to make sure that everybody in West Richland and our response area know that we’re still response ready we’re still going to be here responding to 9-1-1 activation. We’re still going to be here to support the citizens as they need,” Chief Carlyle said.
