Daily Herald editorial

Every couple of weeks, city council members are handed a fistful of issues on which they must make decisions. Often, they choose wisely. Sometimes, as was the case this week, they do not. Fortunately, Monday’s ill-considered vote to create an “extrication fee” still requires a second approval, meaning there’s a chance to get it right.

If some council members have their way, accident victims who have to be extracted from their crushed vehicles will pay a minimum of $250 for the service. The extrication fee makes almost no sense and amounts to literally piling insult on top of serious injury.

Two other fees approved Monday night — one for operating a fireworks stand, another for generating repeated false fire alarms — are tolerable because they are optional; no one has to run a fireworks stand, for example. That’s not the case when a bleeding, unconscious accident victim must, perhaps through no fault of her own, be extracted from her vehicle. What’s next — a $1,000 fee for being rescued from a burning building? That’s what existing taxes are supposed to pay for.

Charging fees for emergency services is a questionable choice in a year when the council is about to approve a 13 percent tax levy increase while refusing to cut patently unnecessary expenses. And handing an invoice to accident victims, people whose world may have literally just turned upside down, seems more like punishment than a reasonable fee. If there must be fees, they should at least be for optional services. They should be fees that don’t harm the injured.

Council members are, understandably, trying to keep the city’s balance sheet in order. They must not, however, get so tightly focused on money that their decisions drift away from basic good sense, as Monday’s vote to approve an extrication fee did. Austin residents should ask their council members to reverse that decision.