OK, you’ve just been in a car accident. Your car is crumpled, and you’re injured. Through the smoke you see firefighters with extrication tools coming to remove you from the wreck.

If your injuries are not too painful, you may feel a wave of relief. Help is on the way.

But before you settle into the neck brace, consider the traffic control, the fluids spilling, the firetrucks and foam, the Jaws of Life poised to save your life. Who’s going to pay for all this?

In some towns, you’re going to pay.

What drivers might once have taken as an inalienable right – the right to be saved at a car accident – now comes with a price tag attached in several Maine municipalities. Some fire departments charge to rescue you, should you need rescuing in their jurisdiction.

Livermore is among those Maine towns, this week joining Auburn, Turner, Bangor and a handful of other fire departments that bill for specific services connected to automobile accidents.

We know why municipalities charge. It’s to shore up budgets hit by increasing costs without passing those costs on to taxpayers.

There’s some logic in it, too. If the reckless are going to be wrecking and wreaking havoc in the streets, it seems reasonable that they pay to clean up the mess. Presumably the bill will be sent to the insurance company of the motorist found liable. What could be more fair?

But dumping our bill for public safety into the laps of insurance companies can only lead to the same sort of convoluted mess that handing over public health care has. There will be disputes over the rates charged, the materials used, whether or not their driver was completely at fault or whether the other driver contributed to the accident and should pay a percentage.

Let’s not go there.

Certainly a car accident is different than a house fire. In a house fire, taxpayers might legitimately feel that they have paid their dues via property taxes for services of town firefighters.

But while drivers who pass through town may not pay taxes there, they do pay state and federal taxes, from which towns and fire departments regularly benefit.

Sharing the burden as taxpayers – as we do now in most Maine towns – would be more fair and cheaper in the long run. The less we rely on insurance companies to pay the bill, the more likely the bill will be less.

Livermore will charge a minimum of $300 to go to an accident scene and $200 an hour for a firetruck. If it costs that much in Livermore, how much will it cost in Portland? In New York City? We hate to think.

Better to increase taxes a little than pass the cost on to insurance. We’ll all be big losers.


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