ESD 2 cut off ambulance service, then got it handed back
ESD 2 took over Pflugerville’s ambulances in 2017. When the City refused its demand for more money, it cut the service off in 2022, forcing the City to hire a private company. In 2026 the City Council voted at 1:30 a.m. to hand the service back to ESD 2 — at a higher price, for slower response times.
2017 — the takeover
ESD 2 takes on ambulances it wasn’t built for
Before 2017, Pflugerville’s ambulance transport ran through Austin-Travis County EMS, paid for by county property taxes. In 2017, ESD 2 took the service over, telling the public it was funded by sales tax and that the regional service wasn’t good enough.
The independent study the City later commissioned found no data or evidence that the regional service had been inadequate, and no evidence that patient outcomes improved after ESD 2 took over. It also noted that ESD 2 “had neither the experience nor the funding” to run ambulance transport in 2017. There wasn’t even a budget line for it.
Once ESD 2 voted to provide ambulance service, the taxes residents paid it were now covering both fire and ambulance. That matters later.
2020–2021 — the demand
A manufactured crisis, and an independent reality check
In 2020, ESD 2 and the firefighters union pushed to create a second taxing district, ESD 17, stacked on top of ESD 2, warning of a “financial calamity” by 2024. Separately, ESD 2 asked the City for a $2.79 million annual subsidy.
The City hired AP Triton to examine the books. The verdict: the crisis was self-imposed, the subsidy was unsubstantiated, and with modernized billing the ambulance system could pay for itself. The district was posting multi-million-dollar surpluses the whole time. See the money.
In November 2021, Pflugerville voters rejected the ESD 17 tax overlay by a wide margin, about 61% against in the city.
Voters rejected adding Pflugerville to a second taxing district (ESD 17):
- City Prop A: 61.5% against
- City Prop B: 64.4% against
Source: Travis County canvass, Nov 2, 2021.
2022 — the walkout
ESD 2 cuts off a life-and-death service for leverage
When voters and the City refused to hand over more money, ESD 2 stopped providing ambulance transport to Pflugerville on January 1, 2022 — a service it was already collecting taxes to run. Ambulance response is a life-and-death service, and ESD 2 used it as a bargaining chip.
The City saw it coming and lined up a private provider so residents were never left without an ambulance. But ESD 2 kept collecting the same taxes, including the sales tax that had been added to pay for ambulances. Residents were now paying twice: once to ESD 2, which no longer ran ambulances, and again through City funds for the private company that did.
You paid ESD 2 for ambulance service. ESD 2 stopped providing it but kept your money. The City then had to pay a separate company to actually send the ambulance.
2022–2026 — the private provider
A private ambulance covered the gap, faster and at no cost to the City
The City contracted first with Acadian, then with Allegiance Mobile Health starting in July 2022. In 2024 it locked Allegiance in through 2028 at about $1.3 million a year, flat, with no annual increases and monthly performance reporting, at no cost to the City’s general fund beyond that contract.
The private provider beat ESD 2’s ambulance record on speed. Allegiance’s contract required it to arrive within 7 minutes 59 seconds on 90% of calls, and it reported averages around 6 to 6.5 minutes. By ESD 2’s own reports, its EMS response times had run 12 to 16 minutes at the 90th percentile. See response times.
2022–2024 — the petition & the courts
It took the Texas Supreme Court just to force a vote
If ESD 2 wasn’t running the ambulance service, residents argued, it shouldn’t keep the sales tax that funded it. In December 2022, a citizen effort turned in a petition with 7,097 signatures — well over the roughly 4,400 required, and the largest petition drive in Pflugerville’s history — asking for an election to reduce ESD 2’s sales tax.
The unelected ESD 2 board refused to even call the election, saying the petition’s wording was “legally insufficient.” Residents had to sue. In May 2024, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the board could not refuse — it had to verify the signatures and hold the vote. In other words, it took the state’s highest court just to make ESD 2 let residents vote at all.
A former Travis County Judge who represented the voters said he had “never seen a governmental body behave the way the appointed ESD 2 Board has,” pointing to its use of a taxpayer-funded website and mailers to talk residents out of signing the petition, and then its refusal to call the election after the petition succeeded.
November 2024 — the election
Proposition A goes to the ballot, and fails
Proposition A would have abolished the half-cent (0.5%) ESD 2 sales tax collected in Pflugerville, freeing that money for the City to fund ambulance service, and reduced the tax elsewhere in the district.
ESD 2 and the firefighters union campaigned hard against it, warning that it would cut roughly 40% of revenue and force station closures and layoffs of 80-plus firefighters — figures the District never backed with published financials. Supporters pointed to its roughly $35 million in reserves. The measure lost, about 68% to 32%, on a district-wide ballot far larger than Pflugerville alone.
A “don’t defund firefighters” campaign works on voters who haven’t seen the numbers. That’s exactly why the claims are worth reading closely.
View the data
| Category | Votes |
|---|---|
| For (Yes) | 16,669 |
| Against (No) | 35,963 |
Source: Travis County election results (unofficial pending canvass), Nov 2024.
July 2026 — the 1:30 a.m. reversal
The City hands the ambulances back, for more money
On July 14, 2026, a City Council majority voted — at roughly 1:30 in the morning — to end the private ambulance contract and hand ambulance and EMS transport back to ESD 2, effective October 1, 2026, on a six-year deal. A late-night vote pushed through by a handful of members drew little public scrutiny.
The terms: ESD 2 will be paid about $1.9 million a year, roughly $600,000 more than the private provider’s flat $1.3 million, with yearly increases built in (reported at about 2.5%). The service goes back to the same district that walked away from it in 2022 — the one with slower response times, now at a higher price.
The full sequence: ESD 2 said it couldn’t afford ambulances, cut off a life-and-death service to pressure the City, kept the tax money, fought the residents who wanted that money back — and then was handed the job again, in a 1:30 a.m. vote, for more than the private provider charged.