The city of Kirkland should charge the state for emergency services that our fire and police provide to incidents on I-405. According to what I’ve been able to find out, which includes two unanswered inquiries to the city manager, taxpayers are not reimbursed when our local fire department and police department respond to incidents on I-405. Local taxpayers absorb all the dollar costs – wear and tear on equipment and personnel.

Equally, if not more importantly, when city emergency vehicles are handling emergencies on I-405, then response times to city emergencies are increased significantly.

Fire stations 27 and 26 are dispatched to I-405 incidents on a routine basis. I can confirm this from my personal experiences listening to my scanner for thousands of hours. When 27 or 26 are deployed, residents and business at Finn Hill, Totem Lake, Evergreen Hill and Rose Hill do not receive the quickest possible response times that our local taxes are paying for.

According to the fire department, during the period Sept. 27, the day tolling started, to Dec. 9, our local taxpayer funded fire department responded to 40 incidents on I-405 without any reimbursements. By the way, during the same period in 2014 – e.g. before tolling started –  there were 32 incidents.

As a property tax payer, I want the city to bill the state for emergency responses on I-405. The money collected by the city would be used to beef up our fire stations, so that the timeliest response to local emergencies would be possible even when the fire department has had to respond to an incident on I-405.

I urge you to write the Kirkland City Council to fix this burden – cost and response times – on local taxpayers. It is very unfair to us and the state is getting a free ride.

Before closing, I would also like to add that we Kirkland citizens are blessed with a wonderful fire department and police department. We are very fortunate to have people in these departments who really care about us.

Kenn Kullberg, Kirkland