'Crash taxes' allowed by state law

Don’t crash your car outside your hometown - else be ready to pay up.

More on that in a moment on the Face The State Radio Minute.

Say you’re driving down the road, and all of a sudden the idiot behind you forgets to brake and you’re now in a fender bender. Even if everybody’s unharmed, the responding firefighters might hand you a bill for their response. And here I thought we already paid taxes for this kind of thing. But under state law, if you’re outside your home fire district the bill is perfectly legal. Except, we don’t pay a fee to police officers who might respond to a 911 call, and you might not have even wanted the fire department to show up to your accident to begin with. State lawmakers should do the right thing by taxpayers and change the law to prohibit this kind of highway robbery.

For FaceTheState.com, I’m Brad Jones.