By Pat Reavy and Aaron Falk
The Deseret Morning News
SALT LAKE CITY — Salt Lake City wants in on the ambulance business, but the capital’s current provider could be leaving town before the city can get its own operation up and running. With the possibility of a city-owned ambulance service roughly two years and $4 million away, officials say, Southwest Ambulance will leave the Salt Lake market when its contract expires Dec. 21 if a new deal cannot be negotiated. Southwest’s parent company, Rural Metro, said an inability to persuade the Legislature to allow the company to provide non-emergency services resulted in Southwest’s departure.
“We provide only emergency 911 response,” said Rural Metro director of communications Liz Merritt, speaking to the Deseret News from Arizona. “It was important for us to also provide non-emergency transport as well. We have attempted for four years to have that law changed.”
On Tuesday, city officials said the city hoped to obtain a 911 license itself, providing a number of options for handling ambulance service in the future.
“We would be in control of the license, and that gives us a lot of flexibility in the contracting,” said Salt Lake Fire spokesman Scott Freitag.
The city is exploring the possibility of a short-term cooperative agreement that would provide ambulance services until the city gets its own service going. Memos received by the Deseret News between the mayor’s office and council members show the mayor’s office believes self-providing ambulance service is in the best long-term interest of the city. The problem is start-up costs may be too much under the current economic conditions.
“There are significant start-up costs,” said David Everitt, Mayor Ralph Becker’s chief of staff, “and with the budget year shaping up the way it is, it would not be an easy thing to get done.”
Handling ambulance services in-house would help the fire department simplify its efforts, Everitt said, and could mean sending one emergency vehicle to a call where the department currently sends both an ambulance and fire engine. That would add up to savings over the long run, he said, but it could take more than six years to recoup the $4.7 million in start-up costs. Even in the short term, the city is looking at paying more for ambulance services, Everitt said.
“No matter what we do, it’s going to cost us more,” he said. “There’s no getting around that.”
How much more, Everitt said, remains to be seen.
But at Rural Metro’s Salt Lake office, hope for a new deal is still alive. Raleigh Bunch, division general manager for Southwest in Salt Lake, said while changes do need to be made to keep his company around, a final decision to leave Utah has not been made.
“We’re still in contract negotiations with Salt Lake City,” Bunch said. “We presented them with a proposal. We are working on some reworking of the contract with Salt Lake City fire. It’s not a guarantee that we are absolutely pulling out. But the contract the way it is written now, we could not stay.”
Three times Southwest has gone to the state Legislature and attempted to have the law that allows one non-911 service provider per geographic area changed, and each time it has failed, Bunch said. Non-emergency transport service would include transferring patients from one hospital to another. Those non-emergency transports are a guaranteed source of money for ambulance services as opposed to responding to an injured person who may or may not have health insurance. Everitt said the city would not be allowed to provide those services if it held its own license. The prospect of losing money on the venture doesn’t sit well with Councilman Van Turner.
“We should be a fire department first,” Turner said. “I’d hate to get into a position where this thing was losing us money and we had to close a fire station.”
No matter what the city decides to do for its ambulance service, Salt Lake fire spokesman Mark Bednarik said the average resident shouldn’t notice any difference in service. There are very specific stipulations that any ambulance service in Salt Lake City will be required to provide, including response times, the number of ambulances in the city and how spread out they are.
“An ambulance is not the only piece,” Bednarik said. “We never get away from firefighters being the first line of defense for care. No matter what model we end up with in the end,we have very stringent standards.”
Phoenix-based Southwest Ambulance took over 911 emergency transport service in Salt Lake City in 2006. The company replaced Gold Cross, which still provides ambulance service in other Wasatch Front cities. Gold Cross had provided emergency ambulance service in the city for 30 years before being replaced and left Salt Lake on a sour note.
Copyright 2009 The Deseret News Publishing Co.