By James Burger
The Bakersfield Californian
KERN COUNTY, Calif. — The fate of Kern County’s ambulance service system dispute continued for a second day of hearings as a state legal challenge proceeded before Administrative Law Judge Samuel Reyes.
Kern County and the California Emergency Medical Services Authority all but wrapped up their cases before a judge on Wednesday after witnesses for the County of Kern were interviewed on the stand.
At the core of the issue are Kern County’s exclusive ambulance operating areas — zones that divide up Kern County’s more than 8,000 square miles into manageable service areas and hand the exclusive right to run ambulances in those territories to a single ambulance company.
The issue is of critical importance to Bakersfield’s Hall Ambulance which holds exclusive rights to serve roughly 90 percent of the county.
Officals with EMSA oversee all county ambulance plans.
And the state agency has rejected the most recent county plans because, it says, the county has handed exclusive operating rights to ambulance companies without a proper competitive bid.
Many of Kern’s exclusive operating areas have been awarded through a grandfathering process that allows businesses that were in operation prior to 1981 to hold an exclusive operating area without a competitive bid process.
Wednesday’s hearing focused on how state law determines if an ambulance company has been properly grandfathered.
Steven McGee worked to show that many ambulance companies who now hold EOA contracts with the county were inappropriately grandfathered.
Deputy Kern County Counsel Gurujodha Khalsa argued that EMSA has failed to create regulations that interpret state laws and, in the absence of those regulations, Kern County was free to adopt its own interpretation of how grandfathering worked.
On the stand, former Kern County Emergency Medical Services Director Edward Hill said the state had not created clear rules about what constituted a major change in ambulance operations in any exclusive operating area.
Any major change that took place after 1981 would force the county to hold a competitive bid process before an exclusive operating area could be granted by Kern County.
Without state rules Kern didn’t know what the state believed was a big enough change to require a competitive bid process.
Hill said the county focused on the more detailed rules created by the Kern County Board of Supervisors in 2005 to make a decision about whether ambulance companies including Hall Ambulance, Kern Ambulance and other providers had a strong enough history of serving the exclusive operating area they had been granted.
“There were no rules, regulations or guidelines setting forth what the change in manner or scope consists of,” Hill said over and over again as he was asked about his appeals to EMSA rulings on various exclusive operating areas.
He said he appealed the 2012 ruling from the Emergency Medical Services Authority though, on cross-examination, he noted that he didn’t participate in creation of the plan.
Hill acknowledged, under questioning by McGee, that Kern County established its own rules for exclusivity.
Liberty Ambulance CEO Peter Brandon testified about the process the company went through in purchasing Care Ambulance in 2011, taking over coverage of the Kern River Valley which is Kern County EOA 6.
Brandon said that having an exclusive area, without competitive pressures, makes it possible for ambulance companies to serve Kern County’s massive geographical area and it’s rural areas.
But McGee questioned Brandon about whether Liberty acquired all of Care Ambulance and dug into details about the transfer, questioning whether the purchase actually justified Kern County’s decision to hand Liberty Ambulance the right to serve EOA 6 under a grandfather agreement.
The hearing on the case is expected to finish up on Thursday.
A ruling against Kern County could invalidate the current ambulance companies’ exclusive hold on their operating areas and set up a competitive process to claim the right to run an ambulance company in Kern County.
Copyright 2018 The Bakersfield Californian