Chugiak fire chief to ask voters this spring for first mill rate increase since 2005

Medical calls to Chugiak's volunteer fire department have climbed from roughly 800 to 1,000. Asked why at an Anchorage Assembly event in Eagle River last week, Chief Clifton Dalton said the cause is not in his department. "Our healthcare system sucks," he said. "There isn't enough primary care." People who cannot get a doctor call an ambulance and go to the emergency room, and the fire department is what arrives.

A fully equipped ambulance runs about $700,000. The municipality bills $950 plus $12 a loaded mile for a ride, which Dalton said is a bargain next to private services elsewhere and still does not cover what the service costs to run.

Chugiak's fire service area collects about $1.7 million a year and keeps roughly $1 million after the city takes its cut for dispatch, maintenance and data systems. A new fire truck costs $1.2 million to $1.5 million. Some of the department's trucks are past the 15-year service life national fire standards recommend.

So the department will ask voters in April 2027 to raise its property tax rate, the first increase since 2005. City code caps the rate at one mill, so only voters can change it. Property owners in the Anchorage Fire Department's area pay 2.27 mills, more than twice as much.

The department is all volunteer. It covers 50 square miles from five stations, from the North Eagle River exit to the Knik River bridge, serving about 14,000 residents and a Glenn Highway corridor that carries some 60,000 vehicles a day. Its crews also deploy to wildfires around the state, to Tok this year alongside Anchorage and Girdwood, to Healy the year before, and the Kenai Peninsula before that.

Dalton told the room the department has never bonded and has not asked for more money in twenty years, and that the goal is to keep what it has rather than add to it.