Firefighters Let Home Burn Over Unpaid Fee

[FRPLG]

Originally Posted by Dirtbag359

This is the type of thing where you punish people with fees after the fact. That's your incentive to pay. Make it 10 to 15 times the amount of the yearly service fee. Charge him a fine in the range of $750-$1125. Put a lein on the house of people who don't pay, take it out of their pay check. Do what you have to do to collect the fee. Don't sit there and watch a persons place burn down with his pets inside.

The fire department will be sued. Every lawyer within a 1,000 miles of South Fulton Tennessee is going to want a piece of the settlement that will result from this. The assault charges will be dropped. In the end the fire department looks like idiots in a country where fireman are rightfully deemed real life super heroes.

This doesn't work necessarily.

Imagine this becomes the SOP. So what happens? Now people get to basically decide whether to pay the fee or risk having to pay umpteen more in fines/interest/whatever if they have a fire. Let's say it's a lot. Like 100X the fee...so $7500.

Now how many people pay the fee? None? Some? Who knows but I'd bet a good many of them don't pay their fee. As luck would have it most of them won't have a fire but if just one in a hundred does then the whole deal is all square monetarily. But what if only one in thousand do? Now the county is out a bunch of money. Seems to me that the fines/interest have to be significant...to the point of prohibitive. I am guessing a guy living in a double-wide in a poorish rural county doesn't have the juice to pay $20,000 in fines.

This is definitely not a simple moral question to me. On one hand you can't simply make it policy to provide a service whether someone paid for it or not. Regardless of the nature of the service the leverage to actually collect a fee for the service disappears as soon as you set precedent that the fee is essentially voluntary. On the other hand it obviously doesn't seem right that someone loses their home because of a stupid $75 fee. I guess sometimes fair and right aren't the same thing.