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Wall Street has created a financial opportunity for itself from the very carnage that it precipitated, and is now preying on cash strapped local agencies whose income has been gutted by the decline in real estate tax revenues. The correct solution is to make sure that local tax agencies have the resources to handle the issues at the local level, as has always been done in the past, not by largely unregulated national commercial interests. Unfortunately, this is just part of the ongoing privatization of local functions that benefit only the financial community. For example, witness the latest trend that is emerging sell “services” to local agencies recover the cost of emergency services from accident victims.
An example of such a company is Fire Recovery USA, located in Roseville, California. They’re part of a growing number of companies ‘helping’ strapped communities bill for emergency services. This is a particularly insidious way of creating a private ‘business’ opportunity to extract funds from a public service as someone has to pay the @20%-plus fees typically charged by such companies. Note that these schemes are essentially a direct give-away of public property or data, (sometimes in response to campaign donations as in the attempts to privatize reporting of Federal weather reporting by NOAA) as none of them require any investment by the private party in the underlying existing infrastructure and its maintenance. E.g. Building maintaining and staffing fire and police stations, providing police cars and fire trucks, training staff, etc.
Here’s a couple of quotes from the Fire Recovery USA website apparently inviting communities to circumvent regulations to gain extra cash.
http://www.firerecoveryusa.com/
“We bill on your behalf, for the services you provide during a Motor Vehicle Incident, Vehicle Fire, Structure Fire, Hazmat Clean-up, False Alarms, Gas Pipeline and Power Line Incidents, Water Incidents, and Special Rescues.
We have developed a proprietary method to allow a local department/government to bill to recovery the costs of mitigating an emergency. These “incident response mitigation rates” allow some departments to bill within a regulated environment that discourages service cost recovery.”
http://somewhatlogically.com/?p=342
(Another case where the old rule of thumb- never trust a corporation that has a flag prominent in it's brand- applies)
An example of such a company is Fire Recovery USA, located in Roseville, California. They’re part of a growing number of companies ‘helping’ strapped communities bill for emergency services. This is a particularly insidious way of creating a private ‘business’ opportunity to extract funds from a public service as someone has to pay the @20%-plus fees typically charged by such companies. Note that these schemes are essentially a direct give-away of public property or data, (sometimes in response to campaign donations as in the attempts to privatize reporting of Federal weather reporting by NOAA) as none of them require any investment by the private party in the underlying existing infrastructure and its maintenance. E.g. Building maintaining and staffing fire and police stations, providing police cars and fire trucks, training staff, etc.
Here’s a couple of quotes from the Fire Recovery USA website apparently inviting communities to circumvent regulations to gain extra cash.
http://www.firerecoveryusa.com/
“We bill on your behalf, for the services you provide during a Motor Vehicle Incident, Vehicle Fire, Structure Fire, Hazmat Clean-up, False Alarms, Gas Pipeline and Power Line Incidents, Water Incidents, and Special Rescues.
We have developed a proprietary method to allow a local department/government to bill to recovery the costs of mitigating an emergency. These “incident response mitigation rates” allow some departments to bill within a regulated environment that discourages service cost recovery.”
http://somewhatlogically.com/?p=342
(Another case where the old rule of thumb- never trust a corporation that has a flag prominent in it's brand- applies)
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