By Rachael Conway
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
MARS, Pa. — The mayor of Mars wants council to investigate how an entire ambulance service, along with its two ambulances, its financial books and presumably everything else, could disappear from the small borough without a trace.
“Don’t our taxpayers deserve an answer?” Mayor Dick Settlemire asked council members Monday night. He said the borough should investigate why Mars Emergency Services Inc. closed up shop earlier this year without notice, a violation of at least two provisions of state law governing emergency service providers.
Council members, however, refused to get involved. The small nonprofit that had been Mars’ primary ambulance service for nearly 15 years was a private entity that operated independently of the borough, council President Mike Fleming said.
“I don’t know what happened. Don’t want to know,” he said, adding that it’s none of council’s concern what happens to a private business. “If it was a drug store that went out of business, we wouldn’t investigate that.”
The borough did not annually donate money to Mars EMS, Mr. Fleming said.
While details of the demise of Mars EMS are scarce, a few things are clear:
- The ambulance service abruptly closed its doors for good in January. Quality EMS, a rival ambulance service also in Mars, has been answering calls since that time.
- Local, county and state officials who have been trying to inquire about Mars EMS can’t get anyone formerly affiliated with the ambulance service to talk about what happened.
- Two ambulances that sat for months in the Mars EMS building are gone. Who moved them, when they were moved and where they’ve gone are not known.
“They are bigger than a breadbox,” Mayor Settlemire said. “It’s hard to misplace an ambulance, let alone two.”
Mr. Settlemire said his phone has been “ringing off the hook” with people asking what happened to Mars EMS. While the mayor has done some unofficial investigating, mainly in the form of asking questions around town, nobody will admit to knowing much, if anything, about the internal workings of the ambulance service.
Calls by the Post-Gazette to a variety of people known to be involved with Mars EMS were not returned.
A woman who answered the phone at the home of William Swaney, a man listed as the president of Mars EMS when it was incorporated in 1994, said her husband was a former treasurer and he wouldn’t want to talk about Mars EMS.
Dorothy Riesmeyer, the office manager at rival Quality EMS, said nobody from that ambulance service would comment about Mars EMS.
While details are sketchy, it appears the downfall of Mars EMS started late last year.
In December, Mars EMS contacted the Butler County Emergency Services 911 Center and asked that ambulances in neighboring Buffalo Township be put on standby for a few days, said Frank Matis, the 911 center’s director.
“That was the last we heard from them,” he said.
Mars Councilwoman Chris Clutter, a volunteer with Mars EMS since it started, said she resigned from the Mars EMS board of directors late last year before the service closed. She was only a volunteer board member and was never in charge of daily operations at the ambulance service.
At the time of her resignation, the ambulance service was having serious financial problems, she confirmed.
The service leased its space on Irvine Street from the volunteer fire department next door but had no other connection with the fire department.
The fire department wanted to change the lease agreement with Mars EMS, which would have resulted in higher monthly payments, Ms. Clutter said. The ambulance service wasn’t able to collect money it was owed. There were problems with accounting and with paperwork, she said.
Employees weren’t getting paid and they stopped going on calls. The service was dealing with an outstanding loan from Mars National Bank.
“It just ran out of money,” she said.
Mr. Settlemire said he was invited earlier this year to look over Mars EMS’ finances. He said the records he was shown indicated the ambulance service was in arrears to the fire department and that it was waiting to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for services rendered.
The financial picture certainly didn’t look good, he said, but nobody indicated the ambulance service was ready to close.
Mr. Fleming, who said he has no affiliation with Mars EMS, said nobody from the service asked the borough for money even when its finances apparently were becoming a problem.
“I think the call volume dropped so low they weren’t making any money,” Mr. Fleming said, stressing that is merely presumption on his part.
Mr. Matis said the Butler County 911 Center dispatched Mars EMS 212 times in 2007.
The mayor is frustrated. “The powers that be, whoever they are, should give us some answers,” Mr. Settlemire said.
He isn’t alone in wanting to know what happened.
In May, the state Department of Health, which licenses ambulance services in Pennsylvania, wrote a letter to Mars EMS informing the ambulance service that it had broken the law by closing its doors without warning.
The letter stated the ambulance service was required by law to give state and local officials 90 days’ notice before closing and it should have advertised the dissolution in a newspaper.
In addition, the letter indicated the health department wanted two ambulance decals necessary for licensing returned, something that should have happened when Mars EMS closed.
The decals turned up at the health department’s office in Pittsburgh last week, nearly two months after the May letter was written, said Holli Senior, health department spokeswoman.
Late last year, Mr. Fleming, council president, attended a few meetings with Mars EMS officials at its building on Irvine Street.
He said he could not remember the names of everyone who attended the meetings.
At one meeting where the solvency of Mars EMS was discussed, Ms. Clutter was present as a representative of Mars EMS, as were another woman and a man whose names he could not recall. A Mars Volunteer Fire Department liaison also was present.
When asked who was in charge of Mars EMS, Mr. Fleming said, “There was never any defined leader. Maybe that was part of the problem.”
Ms. Clutter would not name other members of the Mars EMS board and said she doesn’t know what went on among the remaining members after she resigned. She never saw a letter from the state health department and said she has no idea what happened to the ambulance service’s two vehicles.
She did say nobody from Mars EMS did anything illegal and the service’s failure was the result of too many bad things happening at one time, combined with poor management.
“We were basically forced out of business. There were greater forces at work against us,” she said, but she would not elaborate.
Ms. Clutter said the ambulance service was not actively fundraising at the time it closed.
“It hurts that this happened,” she said. “It hurts real bad.”
That an ambulance service would go belly up isn’t unusual, Mr. Matis said.
“Others have gone out of business, but they always give us a plan,” he said. “In this case, they didn’t.”
Because Mars EMS broke the law by not telling anyone before it closed, anyone who was affiliated with Mars EMS in an official capacity could face licensing problems if they ever wanted to start another ambulance service, Ms. Senior said.
In the meantime, Mr. Settlemire said he will ask council again on Aug. 25 to look into the ambulance service’s closing because someone needs to explain exactly what happened.
“We owe it to our taxpayers,” he said. “Somebody has to look into it.”