By Caleb Sprous
Merced Sun-Star
MERCED COUNTY, Calif. — Poor response times led Merced County supervisors this week to sever ties with the ambulance company that has served the area for roughly 80 years.
Beginning Jan. 1, American Medical Response West Inc. (AMR) will replace Riggs Ambulance Service as the county’s medical transport service. The board vote was unanimous at its Oct. 7 meeting.
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County officials said Riggs met contracted response times only six months of the current five-year contract.
“The department chose to go out to bid because (Riggs) has such poor response times that they were putting residents’ lives at risk,” Merced County Public Health Director Dr. Kristynn Sullivan said at the Oct. 7 meeting. The bidding process began in May.
“I’m here to tell those folks today that I believe that we are correcting the past unresponsiveness and out of compliance in our in our ambulance system, and that I will dedicate my time to making sure that going forward, AMR holds up to their end of the deal, and that the citizens of Merced County are well taken care of,” Supervisor Lloyd Pareira, Jr. said.
Riggs representatives said at the meeting that the county’s bidding process was biased, lacked transparency, included a conflict of interest by a county consultant, and further alleged bidder requirements were inconsistently enforced by the county.
“We’re not just questioning the judgment of the evaluators,” Riggs Operations Manager Michael Swenson said. “We went point by point and showed how evaluators failed to follow the scoring process. The county withheld information and asked us to take its word for us.”
Supervisors rejected Riggs’ dissent, determining that no evidence of substantial flaws existed in the bidding process.
“It doesn’t necessarily have to be a perfect process,” Supervisor Scott Silveira said. “I feel like the process was fair … I don’t think that anything was brought to my attention that would make me believe that our process wasn’t fair.”
An AMR representative told the board that they plan to offer jobs to “all eligible incumbent field employees” of Riggs, effectively keeping jobs local.
Is swapping out an EMS provider really the fix for slow response times, or just treating the symptom instead of the cause?
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