By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews
YACHATS – The Yachats Rural Fire Protection District board agreed Monday to see if someone from the outside can help it sort out increasing concerns over the district’s staffing of the longtime nonprofit ambulance that serves the area.
Meeting in a special session Monday, board members asked fire district administrator Frankie Petrick – who is also secretary of South Lincoln Ambulance’s three-member board – to see if the Special Districts Association of Oregon could recommend someone to study what everyone says is a unique relationship between a private ambulance company and a taxpayer-funded local government.
Three of the five-member fire district board said they thought it was time to see if it made sense to bring the ambulance service under the auspices of the district. They also said other options include turning the service over to a private company or keeping the decades-long arrangement.
Although fire volunteers had been providing rudimentary ambulance coverage since the 1930s, they formed South Lincoln Ambulance in 1967 as a nonprofit to help raise money for an ambulance and its equipment. As the department moved from a mostly volunteer organization to paid firefighter/paramedics, previous boards agreed to have fire district employees staff the ambulance for little to no compensation.
Although longtime board member Ed Hallahan also voted to seek outside help, he resisted the move throughout the discussion during the special, three-hour holiday meeting, as he tried to explain the history and philosophy of a nonprofit service.
Board members Doug Myers, Donald Tucker and Drew Tracy pushed back to say they were increasingly uncomfortable with the current arrangement and wanted to explore alternatives.
At issue is a contract that has Yachats firefighter/paramedics staffing an ambulance service – with its potential revenue — over which it has no control. It is an arrangement like no other department in Oregon.
Of concern is:
- The nonprofit is controlled by a three-member board, two of which are fire district administrators – Petrick and Shelby Knife, who is leaving the district Friday for another job. During discussions Monday, Myers continually had to ask Petrick which organization she was speaking for;
- That the district provides staffing that easily costs over $100,000 in wages and benefits a year for each firefighter/paramedic, but currently receives $19,000 a year from the ambulance nonprofit in rent and reimbursement;
- While Hallahan and Petrick said the ambulance nonprofit has donated lots of equipment to the fire district, the yearly contract the nonprofit wants the board to sign says the nonprofit owns 51 percent of the office’s copy machine and all of the fire district’s office computers;
- That firefighters are regularly out of the district transporting ambulance patients to hospitals in Newport, Florence and occasionally Corvallis, requiring it to ask for coverage from fire departments in Waldport or Seal Rock. Those communities get ambulance service from Pacific West Ambulance, which holds contracts for the rest of the county;
- Oftentimes when Yachats firefighters are on fire calls, they respond with one person in an engine and one in an ambulance – a staffing safety issue — in case there is a medical call and they have to leave. If there is an ambulance call, then they leave the engine at the original scene and return later to retrieve it or have another department take it to Yachats;
- The fire district has no control or leverage in setting SLA’s rates, which are 30 percent lower than the basic rate for the rest of Lincoln County – a benefit most say helps insurance companies the most; and
- The ambulance nonprofit and fire district are being sued for $3 million each by the mother of a Waldport woman killed when she collided last January with the SLA ambulance driven by a fire district employee. Attorneys for the ambulance nonprofit immediately filed motions saying it was the district’s liability, not the nonprofit’s.
Contract at issue
Board members Tucker and Tracy for several years occasionally questioned the fire district/ambulance nonprofit relationship but never had a board majority to prompt a deeper discussion.
That changed when Myers joined the board last February. Myers, who spent 46 years with Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue and is currently a volunteer captain for the Sisters-Camp Sherman Fire District, has a reputation as a detailed-oriented “fix-it” administrator.
Monday’s discussion was spurred when Petrick asked the board to sign the usual yearly contract between the ambulance nonprofit and the fire district.
Myers said Monday that the board needed to represent the fire district’s taxpayers and focus on what is best for them and the district. He said an ambulance agreement that worked 40 years ago may not necessarily work as well today.
“My belief is that the fire district no longer has the staffing availability to give free labor” to the ambulance nonprofit, he said. “In the last 15 years things have changed significantly” because 75 percent of all calls are for medical reasons that often take Yachats firefighters out of service when they transport patients.
Petrick and Hallahan pushed back to say that the nonprofit was not “hoarding” money but keeping funds in reserve to replace or upgrade the ambulance every 10 years, as required by law. SLA is soon getting a new ambulance paid entirely by insurance money after its ambulance was totaled in last January’s wreck.
Hallahan also said he would rather have Yachats firefighter/paramedics transporting people to Newport “as a community service.”
“I’d rather have the people employed as fully as they can be doing as much as they can for the community,” he said, adding that the Yachats ambulance saved “my life once and my wife’s life more than once. I’m sorry, that gets personal.”
Tucker said the discussion was not necessarily about taking the ambulance away but potentially folding it into the fire district to be used as an asset for it, not to a nonprofit over which the district had no control.
Myers maintained the community would continue to get excellent care if firefighter/paramedics responded to calls with advance life support equipment on engines and let someone else handle transport – as all other Lincoln County fire agencies do.
“If you want the fire department to be in the ambulance business, then get into it … and that way the ambulance becomes a benefit instead of a liability,” he said.
He pointed out that the similarly sized and staffed Crooked River Ranch Fire District in central Oregon generates income of $275,000 a year by operating an ambulance. Also, he said, if the fire district operated the ambulance it could to apply to the federal government for higher insurance reimbursement designed to help rural responders.
On Monday, Myers suggested major changes in the 2025 fire district/ambulance contract to include:
- Providing a framework work for merging the two organizations;
- Striking language that the fire district would “hold SLA harmless” for claims resulting from employee actions;
- Moving ownership of office equipment to the fire district;
- Raising SLA’s monthly contribution to the fire district from $1,605 to $6,000; and
- Improving transparency by requiring SLA to provide monthly income and expense reports, quarterly balance sheets, and an annual report.
The board did not act on Myers’ proposal, but instead agreed to continue the current contract but use a 90-day notice of termination if it concluded a change was beneficial to the fire district.
- Quinton Smith is the editor of YachatsNews.com and can be reached at YachatsNews@gmail.com
Comment Policy