We both grew up in small towns much like Vashon.

Our love for that small-town experience drew us to move here to raise our family and buy our business. We own the only pharmacy on Vashon, so we work on the front line of health care here by filling prescriptions for hundreds of Vashonites each month.

In fact, you may know of us because we were key partners to VashonBePrepared and the Medical Reserve Corps during the pandemic, supplying the vaccine for that community volunteer effort.

Those two things — our family and our care for our community’s health — give us compelling reasons to vote Yes on Proposition 1 on the August ballot for Vashon Island Fire & Rescue.

It’s simply the right thing to do, a basic part of living in an unincorporated community where we have no hospital and we get our services from taxing districts. On the mainland they have cities. On Vashon, we have taxing districts for everything from parks to schools to sewers — and for our island’s only 24-hour, seven-day-a-week access to emergency medical care.

So far, a lot of the discussion about restoring the levy rate for VIFR seems to focus on money. That’s fair. It’s a tax, after all. But we look at it this way. It’s money well spent to sustain the safety and health of this community for years to come.

If the levy fails, the people who need it most will lose much-needed healthcare access. Seniors on limited incomes. People with limited means. People experiencing homelessness. Whoever they are, when Vashon residents call 911 they really need help.

Please don’t tell yourself that you won’t call 911 at your house at some point. We know from personal experience it could happen to anyone. We’ve had to call for help three times in the last eight years. On Vashon, there’s nobody else to call for urgent medical assistance in the middle of the night.

Of course, we’re not fans of taxes. Who is? But we believe taxes paid by us and other fortunate households pick up a big chunk of the cost for all sorts of folks to be part of this incredible island community. In the case of our fire district taxes, we are investing in better care for our entire island population and doing our job as citizens of Vashon.

Every six years, we need to top up our local community services, and the fire district is no exception, just like the parks and schools.

We remember the last fire levy restoration in 2017 when VIFR was on the brink of bankruptcy because there had been no levy vote in 27 years. Vashon did the right thing back then, and now we all have an opportunity as a community to take another step to undo those decades of neglect. We need to vote yes in August to get our fire and rescue services back to where they should be.

Everyone in the community will benefit from the levy restoration because we all will be investing in a stronger capacity for emergency response.

The levy restoration will assure enough first responders are on duty and ready to roll in order to aid anyone in trouble, even when one or two crews are off the island for three hours on a hospital run or when an all-hands response is needed for an advanced life support situation such as a heart attack or a serious road accident.

For hundreds of island households on the south end and on Maury, approving the levy restoration will stave off a downgrade by the state’s fire risk rating bureau by stationing full-time staff at the Burton fire station.

Give your insurance agent a call and ask what your premium will be if the state rating bureau downgrades your neighborhood from a class five to a much higher class nine risk. If you get moved to class nine it could cost you hundreds or even thousands of dollars more for fire insurance, much more than the levy restoration will cost.

But our main point is this: We all have one thing in common when it comes to calling 911. We want to know someone is coming — we will get the care all of us deserve from our dedicated firefighters and EMTs.

We believe Proposition 1 is a good investment in a safer — and healthier — Vashon community.

Tyler and Amy Young moved to the island in 2017 and bought Vashon Pharmacy, a business that has been operating within a few doors of their current location for the last ninety years, since 1933.