Back in November, the Aberdeen City Council voted to implement an increase to the monthly Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Utility fee beginning on Jan. 1, 2026.

The new rate of $68 was to be reflected on February utility bills. However, a procedural error, pointed out by a resident, prompted the council to repeal the increase at the Dec. 10 meeting. Due to the timing of the vote, notices of the repeal and what comes next were not included in the January billing cycle.

As evidenced by the public comment period at the Jan. 14 city council meeting, residents are confused by the pull back of the EMS utility rate increase.

EMS utility fees were codified into law by the state of Washington in 2006, but a 2012 change in the RCW requiring public hearings before the implementation of utility rate increases went unnoticed. The Aberdeen Municipal Code refers to and defers to the RCW for the parameters of EMS utility rate charges.

“We were alerted by a resident that the RCW had changed, and that the city wasn’t following the protocol,” said Ruth Clemens, Aberdeen city administrator. “I had our legal team comb through our municipal code and they realized we can keep it the same. (It’s) vague enough. Moving forward, we now know the proper steps in order to pass the rate. That was the cause of the repeal. The repeal was simply to go through the process. The way that it’s stated in our municipal code is that we need a resolution. A utility would require a public hearing. We still pass it through a resolution, but we have to have the public hearing component.”

Clemens added that the city must give residents 30 days notice of the public hearing and that the March 11 city council meeting is the target. The council could take action at that meeting if it so chooses.

“It is not our intent to not communicate or to not be transparent, ever. We want to make sure we get it right the first time. There’s a very specific way that we have to get the notice out and that notice has to be done in the utility bill,” Clemens said “So, because we already missed the window of opportunity to get it out in the January bill, because of the nature of how fast all of this is going, we’re getting it out in February, that should give people the 30-day window, and to be able to conduct the hearing in March.”

As to why the change in the RCW had gone unchecked for the past 14 years, Clemens says, “In an effort to not play Monday morning quarterback, sometimes state laws can change, and if cities are not aware of those changes, they can get caught in a loop of conducting business as usual. Now that we are aware of it, we will be moving forward and making sure that we’re doing it in the correct manner, in a compliant manner.”

A cost of service study completed in 2024 found the current fee does not fully cover the cost of providing advanced life support and ambulance standby for the community. EMS is a part and function of the Aberdeen Fire Department and provides emergency medical services including 911 ambulance response, transport, some treatment and release on scene, triage and mass casualty.

Back in November, Aberdeen Fire Chief Dave Golding said, “The (city) councils throughout these rate studies either didn’t follow the recommendations and went with something different or did no increase at all. The increases that have been done to the EMS rate over the years have been very sporadic.”

The 2025 rate was $34. In 2025, the city formed a utility rate committee composed of residents to further study the issue and formulate recommendations for the city council to consider. The new rate recommendation of $68 came from the work of that committee.

Clemens reiterated that the EMS charge on the utility bill is not a tax, it is a fee for a service.

The city has been paying a $2 million subsidy out of the general fund to the fire department for EMS to cover the shortfall in funding due to the insufficient utility rate.