Bedtime Stories for Public Servants: The Distance Between Sirens

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ASPA as an organization.

By S. Mohsen Fatemi
April 17, 2026

The mountains did not care about the General Fund.
They sat there, indifferent and jagged, casting a long shadow over the county annex where Arthur stood at the window, watching a dusting of March snow settle across an empty ambulance bay.

Arthur was the County Administrator. In a town of six thousand, that mostly meant he was the person people yelled at when potholes got too deep or when the cost of keeping people alive began to exceed the budget.

Behind him, Sarah dropped a spreadsheet onto the desk.

“The math doesn’t blink, Arthur.”

Sarah ran the county’s EMS service. Her uniform smelled faintly of coffee and antiseptic.

“Three-point-five million to keep the rigs running,” she said. “We have one-point-eight. By July we start triaging calls based on geography. If you’re near the highway, maybe we make it in time. If you’re in the outlying area…”

She stopped.

Arthur finished quietly.

“…you’d better have a neighbor with a fast truck.”

Sarah nodded.

Arthur kept looking at the mountains.

The hearing was scheduled for seven that evening.

The proposal was simple: a three-quarter percent countywide sales tax to fund ambulance services.

In this county, however, “tax” was not just policy. It was a declaration.

“The outlying council voted no today,” Arthur said.
“Unanimous.”

Sarah wasn’t surprised.

“They see the map,” she said. “They know what forty minutes looks like when someone stops breathing.”

Arthur turned from the window.

“They’re not wrong,” he said.

He tapped the spreadsheet.

“We’re asking people furthest away to pay into a system that still might not reach them in time. How do I tell someone their taxes are going up for a service that might still let their wife die before oxygen gets there?”

Sarah leaned against the desk.

“Then tell them the alternative,” she said.

Arthur waited.

“The alternative is the bay stays empty.”

The hearing was held in the high school gymnasium.

The air carried the smell of winter coats and quiet resentment. Arthur sat at a folding table under fluorescent lights that hummed overhead.

Old Man Halloway stood first.

His face looked carved from decades of wind.

“Arthur,” he began. “I’ve known you since you were in knee-pants. I know you’re a decent man.”

A few quiet laughs moved through the bleachers.

“But you’re asking us to choose between a tax we can’t afford and a service that might still not reach us.”

He gestured toward the map behind the table.

“You call this public administration.”

He paused.

“I call it a shakedown.”

Murmurs spread across the room.

Arthur looked down at his notes, Pareto efficiencies, service agreements, cross-subsidization models from another world.

He stood without reading them.

“Mr. Halloway,” Arthur said, “you’re right.”

The room went still.

“The system is unequal,” he continued. “People furthest from the center pay the most and receive the least. Geography guarantees that.”

He paused.

“But if we do nothing, the system doesn’t stay unequal.”

“It disappears.”

Arthur scanned the bleachers.

“We aren’t voting tonight on whether ambulance service is perfectly fair. It isn’t.”

“We’re voting on whether we still believe we’re a community, or just a collection of people living near each other.”

The room held its breath.

“If the rigs stop running,” he continued, “the first person who dies won’t be a statistic on my desk.”

“It will be someone in this room.”

“And the reason won’t be that the system was imperfect.”

“It will be that we decided imperfection was reason enough to abandon it.”

The vote would happen the following Tuesday.

As people filed out, Sarah approached him.

“Think they heard you?” she asked.

Arthur watched Halloway pull on his coat and step into the cold night air.

“They heard the truth,” Arthur said.

“Whether they can afford to believe it is another question.”

Later, Arthur returned to the annex to turn off the lights.

The empty ambulance bay sat in the snow like an unanswered question.

Public service, he realized, was not about finding the right answer.

It was about standing in the gap when there were only difficult ones.

A Pause with the Civic Sage

Arthur sat alone in the quiet gymnasium, the folding chairs stacked along the walls like a retreating audience.

“Funny thing about sirens,” a voice said beside him. “Everyone expects to hear them someday. No one wants to pay for the silence before they do.”

Arthur turned. The Civic Sage had taken the seat next to him.

“I told them the truth,” Arthur said. “But truth doesn’t keep an ambulance running.”

The Sage glanced toward the empty bleachers.

“Truth rarely fixes anything,” he said. “What it does is take away the stories people use to avoid choosing.”

Arthur rubbed his temples.

“It still feels like failure. Standing there and admitting the system isn’t fair.”

The Sage nodded slowly.

“Fairness is a language communities speak in public,” he said. “But it’s not the rule they live by when the cost becomes real.”

“What is?” Arthur asked.

“Continuity,” the Sage said. “Keeping something—anything—alive long enough to matter.”

Arthur watched the gym lights flicker slightly overhead.

“So what did I really do tonight?”

“You made the tradeoff visible,” the Sage said. “You took what was abstract and placed it in their hands.”

Arthur exhaled.

“And if they decide the cost is too high?”

The Sage stood, brushing a hand across the back of the chair.

“Then they will learn something most communities learn too late.”

Arthur looked up.

“That systems don’t collapse all at once,” the Sage said. “They erode at the edges, quietly, until the day everyone realizes what’s gone.”

The Loose Ends

Emergency services reveal a quiet truth about public life: shared systems are rarely experienced equally. Distance, cost and infrastructure shape who benefits, how quickly and to what extent, even when everyone contributes to keeping the system alive.

For many communities, the real choice is not between fairness and unfairness, but between an imperfect system and no system at all. Collective arrangements endure only when people accept that some benefits will be indirect, delayed or uneven, and that reciprocity does not always look like symmetry.

That tension settles onto the desks of public servants. Their work sits between spreadsheets that define what is financially possible and communities that determine what feels legitimate. In moments like this, the task is rarely to engineer a perfect solution. It is to make tradeoffs unmistakably clear, to hold fragile systems together and to ask, quietly but directly, whether a community is still willing to sustain certain responsibilities in common.

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Author: S. Mohsen Fatemi is a PhD candidate in the School of Public Affairs & Administration at the University of Kansas, where his research examines energy governance, policy, and justice. He is the creator of Bedtime Stories for Public Servants. This narrative series blends storytelling, reflective dialogue, and research-based insights to explore the ethical and emotional dilemmas faced in public service. He can be reached at [email protected]. His website is www.mohsenfatemi.com, and his X/Twitter handle is @MohsenFatemiii. 

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