MENDOCINO CO., 10/9/26 — Teal yard signs for Measure D, with a white ambulance on them, festoon the south coast. When Linda Carricaburu posted a photo of one in a Point Arena Facebook group, she added a warning: “If this proposition D does not pass, we may not have Emergency care available to our area.”
The ambulances will keep running, said Bronwyn Golly, who runs Coast Life Support District, the ambulance service for the coast from Irish Beach south to Timber Cove.
“If Measure D does not pass, it will not instantaneously halt operations,” Golly said in a phone interview Oct. 8. “We are funded through our fiscal year, and what we will have to look at is basically a change in our service model.”
Now the district keeps two ambulances on duty around the clock, each with a paramedic. Asked whether a failed vote could mean one ambulance instead of two at some hours, Golly said, “That’s definitely something that could happen.”
“This isn’t going to happen November 4th,” she said. “But it’s going to require us going back to the drawing board.”
On the south coast, a second ambulance matters because one call can take a crew away for hours. The nearest full hospital is in Santa Rosa. “It’s two hours to definitive care on average,” Golly said. She told county supervisors Sept. 15 that a single hospital run takes a crew five to seven hours from start to finish.
Golly has worked for the district for more than 20 years and grew up in Point Arena. “My family and friends live in this community, and I care very much about this district,” she said. As a public official, she said, she can explain the measure but can’t campaign for it. A committee of supporters is doing that.
What it costs a household
Measure D would raise the district’s ambulance tax from $61 to $101 per “unit of benefit.” A single-family home counts as three units, so its bill would go from $183 a year to $303, $120 more. The tax would rise with inflation each year after that. The district’s separate urgent care tax stays as it is.
If Measure D gets less than the two-thirds vote it needs, the $61 tax stays in place. Golly confirmed that.
“That $40 is a big ask,” Golly said. She said the district built the number by looking five years ahead, including federal cuts it expects under HR 1, 2025’s federal budget law known as the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
The biggest federal cut is a Medi-Cal program in which the district sends public money to the state and gets it back with federal matching dollars. District budgets show it brought in $517,554 in the fiscal year that ended June 30, and the district paid in $230,360 to take part. This fiscal year’s budget counts on $510,000 in and about $250,000 out. Golly told supervisors Sept. 15 the program is set to end in 2029.
She also said the district now needs about $200,000 in donations to balance its budget. This fiscal year’s budget counts on $191,764 in donations. People gave $189,692 the year before. “We can’t continue operating relying on donations,” she said.
“We’re a service”
Golly said she has been out talking to people about the measure, and someone in one of the groups called the district “a really poor business model.”
“I mean, it is,” she agreed. “But we’re a service. We’re not a business.”
She said a single ambulance transport costs the district about $4,000, counting everything it takes to keep crews ready. Medi-Cal pays $118.20 for a transport, plus $3.19 a mile, according to the district’s billing review. Private insurance may pay the full bill. A rural district doesn’t run enough calls to make up the difference the way a big city service can, she said.
People ask why the coast doesn’t just bring in a private ambulance company, she said. Her answer is that no company would make money doing it. That’s why residents pushed in the mid-1980s for a district of their own, paid for with a local tax, she said. The Legislature created it in 1986.
District residents pay a lower ambulance rate than visitors, under a board resolution. Golly said that when a resident’s insurance doesn’t pay, the district writes off the rest, because residents’ property taxes already support the service. Visitors don’t pay property taxes, thus pay a higher fee.
The district says its calls have climbed since COVID. Golly said that’s from the jump in 2021 and 2022, more people working remotely from the coast and more visitors. The ballot argument for the measure says emergency calls have doubled. The district’s billing reports show a smaller rise in billed runs: 521 from July 2019 through March 2020, and 629 over the same nine months of 2025-26, about a fifth more. But billed runs leave out calls where paramedics responded, and no one went to the hospital.
The district ended the fiscal year June 30 ahead: its unaudited year-end report shows it took in $266,150 more than it spent, and its cash rose to $957,547 from $706,936 a year earlier. But that surplus rested on money the district says it can’t count on. Donations brought in $189,692, and the Medi-Cal program brought in about $287,000 after the district’s own payment. Without those two sources, the district would have spent about $211,000 more than it took in.
Keeping people home
Golly said part of what the passage of D would buy is room to try things that keep people out of the ambulance altogether. She described paramedics visiting patients at home to check blood pressure, look at a wound and talk with their doctor at the local clinic, instead of driving them over the hill.
“It’s better for us,” she said. “It’s better for the patient, that they don’t have to figure out how to get a ride home from the hospital.”
Medicare pays an ambulance service only when it takes a patient to an emergency room, she said, not when a paramedic treats someone and leaves.
Election Day is Nov. 3.