When you need an ambulance, do you dial 911 immediately or do you schedule a time hours later to make the call?

The nature of calling for an ambulance suggests the faster the call is made, the better.

The same can be said of Benton County Judge Bob Clinard’s decision to set an election on a challenged $85 annual household fee to support rural ambulance service.

Clinard last week decided to set the election for February.

Proponents of the election are opponents of the $85 fee. They wanted the county to set the election for November, almost a year away.

The Benton County Quorum Court couldn’t come to a consensus about what to do after opponents of the fee gathered enough signatures to force the election.

The Quorum Court approved the ambulance fee in September after years of debate over how to best support an ambulance system that will respond to emergency calls in Benton County’s rural areas. Officials opted to maintain a system that divides rural areas among one rural ambulance system and the cities that run their own services. Clinard negotiated payments to those city services, which had previously said they could no longer subsidize their response to rural areas on the backs of city taxpayers.

The plan would place the annual fee on property tax bills.

Securing ambulance service in rural areas for the future is a critically important public safety matter that has dragged out for years as debate over paying for it raged. It makes no sense to delay an election almost a year, leaving the entire county and the cities involved in a holding pattern. This issue has been nothing but a holding pattern for several years now.

Clinard made the right call.

If rural residents support the fee, it will still take time to get procedures in place for collection. If they defeat the measure, county officials don’t need to wait a year just to start from scratch again.

There’s also a danger members of the Quorum Court will just give up on developing payments for rural ambulance service. We hope that doesn’t happen. How frustrating will all this be if some day in the future someone dies because ambulance service is unavailable?

Ambulance response is a necessity for a growing county, whether it’s for the many homes in rural areas or traffic accidents or other emergency situations that happen outside the borders of a city.

Unless someone has a better, workable idea, the $85 fee is probably rural residents’ best bet to maintain ambulance coverage for the 21st century.

We hope in the days and weeks to come, members of the Quorum Court who believe they’ve created the best attainable solution will speak out in support of their measure and work hard to help residents understand what is at stake. Without leadership from the top, it’s hard to imagine rural residents saying yes to this new obligation.

February will be here before any of us know it.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 12/16/2013