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Seven Figures

EMS, rescue price tag for parish $1 million
Thursday, August 18, 2022
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It will cost the Lincoln Parish Police Jury $1 million to provide ambulance and rescue service to rural residents for just one year, according to a pair of proposals sent to the parishwide Ambulance Service Committee.

That’s based on a proposed $360,000 annual charge from Pafford EMS for ambulance service, and a $643,000 cost from the Lincoln Parish Fire Protection District for 2023.

The ambulance committee meets today to continue discussing how to provide emergency medical and rescue service once the current contract with the Ruston Fire Department expires Dec. 31.

The Pafford and fire district proposals are the only ones the committee has received for the respective services. Though there are other private ambulance companies in the area, there are no other rescue agencies.

The fire district board on Tuesday voted 5-0, with two members absent, to send its three-year proposal to the committee.

The proposal puts Year 1 operating expenses at $502,000. That figure reflects a 5% contingency and includes hiring six new people, board chairman Richard Aillet said. Operating expenses for the second and third years would range between $478,000 without the contingency to $502,000 with it.

Year 1 capital expenses are set at $141,000. That number escalates in Year 2 to $212,000 but drops in Year 3 to $86,500. All the capital expenses are for equipment and trucks the district said it needs to update its rescue capability.

The capital expenses for the three years total $439,500. Those are onetime costs, while the operating expenses are recurring.

The district also wants to buy a $750,000 rescue truck that’s separate from the three- year capital plan. It’s proposed a cost share where the district would pick up $250,000 of the tab, with the remaining $500,000 to be picked up by the jury.

That means for rescue service alone, the three-year cost to the jury could be as much as $2.5 million.

So far, the jury has no way to pay for the emergency services.

“We were asked to put together a budget. We weren’t asked to provide a way to pay for it,” fire district Chief Kevin Reynolds said.

Aillet said the district is “excited” about its pending new role as the parish’s rescue provider, but it needs adequate tools to do it.

“We want to make sure we have the personnel. We want to make sure we have the trucks. We didn’t take that lightheartedly. We need to be able to respond 100%,” Aillet said.

The prospect of the fire district becoming the sole rescue provider didn’t come up until May. That’s when the committee decided it wanted to look at the cost of splitting EMS and rescue between two agencies to determine if doing that would be cheaper than a proposal on the table at the time from RFD.

That $645,604 annual proposal for both ambulance and rescue has since been withdrawn.

That left the fire district as the only potential rescue agency. But until this week, the district hadn’t released any numbers.

Aillet said that was partly because the district needed to know what agency was going to provide ambulance service.

“This is about ambulance service. It’s not about rescue,” he said.

The amount of money the district would need for upgrades would have been different if RFD had continued to be the primary provider and the fire district mostly mutual aid, Aillet said.

But with Ruston out, “we’re no longer mutual aid,” he said. “We’re it.”

The district will perform rescue in addition to fighting fires.

“We have to respond full force to the fire. We have to respond full force to rescue calls. We need to make sure we can do that,” Aillet said.

Frustrations prompted by the entire EMS and rescue situation bubbled out between at least one police juror and one fire board member early in the meeting.

“I’ve just been a little bit disappointed and frustrated that we’ve yet to receive any inkling or range of numbers from the fire board,” juror Logan Hunt said.

“ I’m disappointed in you that you’ve made the comment (tonight) and some other negative comments in the past… There’s enough negative out there among the residents of this parish,” board member Layne Parnell said. “We don’t need public officials or employees of the various governments — if they’ve got a problem, they need to come to us… To express those opinions in a public forum, I personally don’t appreciate it.”

Reynolds said the fire district expects its call volume for rescue services to increase from the roughly 50 they’ve answered thus far this year to about 210 when the district becomes the primary rescue provider.

“When the phone rings Jan. 1, we’re going to respond, whether there’s a revenue stream already dedicated or not,” Aillet said. “We’re going to be there.”

Caleb Daniel contributed to this story.

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