The Osceola County Commission’s 3-2 vote Monday to raise fire fees – so that fire service will be maintained at its current level – will not be an easy pill to swallow for businesses and homeowners, but, we believe, it is a step that had to be taken.

In the past, we said it was not a good idea for the county to use the general fund – generated through property taxes – to subsidize, or buy down, fire fees for property owned by special interest groups, including businesses, local government and institutions, such as nonprofits and churches. In that way, certain special interest groups benefit to the detriment of other groups, such as homeowners.

Monday’s decision left part of this traditional buy-down in place. The benefactors this year will be government entities and institutions that own tax-exempt property, to the tune of about $2 million. We can accept that decision, for now, though we would have preferred that a subsidy – if there had to be one and there was money available – should have gone to small businesses as an economic incentive in these hard economic times.

We don’t believe that having to pay for a school’s fire fees, for example, would financially break the Osceola County School District, whose School Board in June tentatively agreed not to ask voters Nov. 2 to continue a quarter mill property tax for two years to fund critical school operations, mainly because it “wasn’t needed.” We also don’t believe any churches would go out of existence if its congregation had to pay for fire service.

We would hope that in the future – whether it is next year or five years down the road – everyone will be weaned off these buy-downs and the actual fire fee charged will pay for the actual fire service provided.

The bottom line in Monday’s decision is that the quality of fire service – such as response times and the ability to handle larger structure fires in terms of having enough manpower on hand – will not be diminished. In addition, no one will have to pay higher fire insurance premiums because our county’s firefighting capacity was reduced.

However, going forward, we fully expect firefighters – because the $23.9 million Fire Rescue budget was kept intact – to take a two-week furlough or corresponding pay cut, just like other county staff will be doing in the next fiscal year.