By Dusty Ricketts
Northwest Florida Daily News
Santa Rosa County officials will have to decide between attempting to keep costs for ambulance service down and improving response times countywide when it seeks new bids for its ambulance program later this year.
For the past 10 years, Arizona-based Rural/Metro Ambulance has been contracted to provide ambulance service throughout Santa Rosa County.
The county’s contract with Rural/Metro was set to expire in May of this year.
The Santa Rosa County Commission extended the contract for one year in March to allow time to hire a consultant to study the performance of Rural/Metro and examine the county’s emergency medical service, said county Administrator Hunter Walker.
The final study is expected to be complete in November, and the county would then request bids from ambulance providers in December or January, Walker said.
The plan is to have a new contract for ambulance service in Santa Rosa before the extension with Rural/Metro expires in May 2007.
Nikki Gast, Rural/Metro’s spokeswoman, said the company plans to look at the study and is likely to submit a new bid for the Santa Rosa County contract.
Under current price structures, a trip to the hospital by ambulance for the most serious of life-threatening injuries, in which a patient has to be resuscitated during the trip, will cost less in Santa Rosa County than in Okaloosa County.
That comes despite the fact that Okaloosa County taxpayers contribute $2 million a year to subsidize the county’s $7.5 million EMS program.
Walton County also subsidizes its $4.1 million EMS program; only $900,000 is expected to be collected from user fees in the 2006-2007 fiscal year.
The rest comes from government subsidies and grants, said Eddie Rivers, chief of Walton County EMS.
While EMS programs in Okaloosa and Walton counties receive subsidies to offset the cost of the programs, Rural/Metro’s contract with Santa Rosa County is completely user-based.
“It means the people who need the ambulance pay for it,” Walker said. “But then they also have to meet certain performance standards.”
Rural/Metro would not release its annual budget figures for this story. Rural/Metro has averaged about 12,000 calls a year the past two years, Gast said.
Under its current rate structure, which has been in place since 2005, Rural/Metro would have collected about $5.4 million a year if a patient was transported to the hospital in each of those calls.
Rural/Metro Ambulance’s contract with Santa Rosa County regulates its response times.
The ambulance service must respond to a call in an urban area within 12 minutes 90 percent of the calls. In rural areas, Rural/Metro must arrive within 20 minutes of the calls 90 percent of the time.
Both Walker and Gast said Rural/Metro is meeting the contract’s parameters.
“They seem to be a good company,” Walker said. “In 10 years, we’ve had some ups and downs with them, but overall they do fine.”
That’s not good enough for some. Jim Fix, a member of the Holley-Navarre Fire District’s board of commissioners, said Rural/Metro’s response times have been lagging.
“I’d rather pay the extra money and have an ambulance there in a reasonable amount of time rather than waiting for an ambulance to come from Pace or Milton while the ones here are busy transporting someone,” Fix said. “The south part of the county has never been adequately covered.”
The extra money collected in Okaloosa County is being spent to improve response times to calls countywide, said county Public Safety Director Dino Villani.
Okaloosa EMS raised its rates for the first time in 10 years in May of this year, Villani said. With the additional funds, Okaloosa EMS is purchasing a new Advanced Life Support ambulance as well as two Basic Life Support ambulances — one for the north part of the county, one for the south, Villani said.
That will bring the department’s total fleet to 10 ALS ambulances and two BLS ambulances when the new vehicles arrive in November.
Rural/Metro utilizes seven ambulances that are used for both ALS and BLS calls. More ambulances will be added to Santa Rosa’s fleet if its response times fall below what is specified in the contract, Gast said.
Rural/Metro currently has contracts with 350 communities in 24 states. In Florida, the company also provides EMS service in Orange County and fire protection in Sarasota and West Palm Beach.