Napa Valley Register
NAPA, Calif. — Closed within a glass cabinet above Gary Piner’s desk sits a tattered, faded billing ledger filled with Napa history.
The fastidiously ordered — mostly penciled in — entries list the first emergency responses of Piner’s Napa Ambulance service from the mid-1940s.
It appears, after 65 years of praised local service, those books are about to close.
Amid a flood of protest and vitriol, the Napa County Board of Supervisors unanimously followed a widely unpopular staff recommendation Friday to award the next local ambulance service contract to Denver-based American Medical Response (AMR), effectively putting Piner’s out of business within a few months.
Throughout the summer, the board was bombarded by support for the hometown stalwarts despite the company’s third-place finish in a process designed to elicit the best improvements to emergency services.
Napa’s local Piner’s service is already terrific, much of the community argued. Why make a change?
The simple answer is the state requires that opportunity. Because ambulance service in California cities comes from a single provider, that monopoly must be examined every 10 years and reopened to competition.
That Piner’s proposal finished third in that competition in consecutive attempts mattered little to most public sentiment.
It had to matter to the Board of Supervisors.
We elect leaders with the expectation that they will make decisions more with logic than emotion.
Clearly defined needs for service improvements were identified in the county’s ambulance bid request, and American Medical Response met those needs best, according to a panel of five impartial industry representatives.
The supervisors, too, studied the more than 600 pages of proposals and listened to both support and opposition for the recommendation before voting to support it.
That the recommendation was not for Napa’s longtime local provider is unfortunate, said Supervisor Brad Wagenknecht on Friday. But to show that local company favoritism and ignore a process established to eliminate such preference would be criminal.
The request for proposal process exists to ensure county leaders don’t just hand contracts worth $200 million to friends, family or the one that’s always done it well.
We want our county leaders to make the tough — sometimes unpopular — decisions. In a representative government, we rely on our leaders to do our homework for us, to read those 600 pages,
To examine the process and to ask questions in order to find the best answers.
This time, the answer was one many didn’t like. But the supervisors supported it knowing full well it could cost them public support or even votes in future elections.
Some have argued for the right to vote for the county’s ambulance service themselves. That option, however, doesn’t come with the same promise of proper research and informed decision-making. It’s borne more of the desire to save the jobs of friends and neighbors.
It is hard to see a local family-owned company fall to a behemoth from the outside.
It feels wrong.
But the proposals, an impartial panel, county staff and its leaders say otherwise.
Reprinted with permission from the Napa Valley Register