East Hampton Village Prepares To Create New EMS Department, Completing Break With Volunteer Administration

East Hampton Village is poised to create a new emergency medical services department to run the village’s ambulance service, Mayor Jerry Larsen confirmed this week — officially removing the East Hampton Village Ambulance Association from ambulance operations.

Larsen said the Village Board will vote on March 17 to create the new department and appoint three volunteer chiefs to run its operations. The chiefs, who previously had been elected by the EHVAA membership, will be reappointed by the Village Board each July.

The new arrangement will give more control of policy and staffing decisions directly to the appointed chiefs, who manage both paid and volunteer personnel. Currently, the paid personnel are managed by the East Hampton Village Police Department and the volunteers by the EHVAA.

“All this does is give operational control totally to the chiefs and the Village Board,” he said on Wednesday, March 8. “We had a terrific meeting with the [EHVAA] executive board last week, and they are in support of this, and we’re meeting with the entire membership tonight. I think people will be very happy with the way it runs.”

A memo from the mayor’s office to current EHVAA volunteers said that the new department will “better serve the community’s health care needs,” and that the Village Board will control the new department.

The department will rely on a mix of paid staff and the current volunteer ranks, all of whom will be asked to register anew with the EMS department to continue responding to ambulance calls.

The move will relegate the EHVAA to the role of a fraternal organization for the volunteers, similar to that of police officer benevolent associations, the mayor said. But the association will still play a vital role in the ambulance service, he added, by recruiting volunteers and organizing training and events — for which the organization will continue receiving financial stipends from the village.

“The East Hampton Village Ambulance Association is a legal 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization run by its volunteer membership and was formed in 2004 as a ‘fraternal’ and benevolent organization to raise funds for the benefit of its membership,” the memo to volunteers reads. “EHVAA is welcome to continue to use their dedicated spaces inside the emergency services building.”

The EHVAA currently has about 40 volunteers, and the mayor said he hopes that all will agree to volunteer for the new EMS department — though he acknowledges that rancor simmering behind the scenes for the past year among some volunteers means there may be some defections.

“I think it’s unlikely that most won’t come aboard,” he said. “If that happens, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

But the memo from his office also lays down an ultimatum to volunteers, requiring that they join the new department or potentially lose length-of-service financial benefits they’d been accruing during their volunteer service. Those who choose not to join the new EMS department will be ineligible for the state benefits program for emergency services volunteers.

“All EHVAA members who choose not to join the village’s EMS Dept must return all EMS equipment and clothing identifying them as EMS members issued and owned by the village of East Hampton by May 1,” the memo reads. “All EHVAA members who choose not to join the village’s EMS Dept., will not be eligible to continue to receive LOSAP.”

The memo asks volunteers to notify Mary Mott, the current chief of the ambulance company, of their intentions. Mott did not respond to a call seeking comment.

The creation of the department would appear to be the final step in a gradual effort by the Larsen administration to wrest control of the ambulance away from the EHVAA. Last fall, an upstate attorney hired by the village — without any public notice or public discussion by the Village Board — contacted state officials and transferred the medical certifications for the ambulance from the EHVAA to the village, claiming the certifications had been issued to the association in error.

The mayor has said that his administration is simply trying to organize the ambulance corps in a manner that makes its operations more efficient and professional.

The village has plans to further expand its paid medical staff regardless of the level of volunteer participation, Larsen said, adding two full-time emergency medical technicians and a full-time paramedic — at a cost of more than $200,000 per year in salary and benefits. “It’s a lot of money, but it’s getting harder and harder to get young volunteers,” Larsen said. “Everyone is working two or three jobs to make ends meet.”

But some within the ranks of the volunteers fear that it is the moves by the mayor that could ultimately spell the end of a mostly volunteer ambulance service.

Few volunteers have been willing to speak with the media over the past year, saying they feared retribution from the mayor’s office, but some have said that dissatisfaction in the company runs deep. A handful of volunteers have jumped ship already, one member said this week, and begun volunteering for neighboring ambulance companies.

“I know there are volunteers who will back away, or already have, because of this,” the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said. “The volunteer system is going to disappear — if you listen to the responses during the day now, there are fewer and fewer volunteers showing up — and you will be heading quickly toward a fully paid department. That’s unfortunate, and I don’t think it was necessary in East Hampton. We were doing fine.”

The village has been employing both EMTs and paramedics on a per-diem basis, but the mayor acknowledged that it has struggled to fill shifts even so, because of the hurdles of commuting to East Hampton in heavy traffic. The move to more full-time staff, he hoped, would make it easier to fill shifts.

Answering some 1,400 calls per year, the East Hampton crew is one of the busiest companies in the region.

Discord between the mayor’s office and some within the volunteer ranks had begun building a little more than a year ago by most accounts, when the Village Board agreed to start hiring professional emergency medical technicians to augment the volunteers and paid paramedics the village had on call.

The mayor’s office said the move was necessary because of unacceptable wait times for ambulances and the need to call on other departments to pick up East Hampton calls too often.

But volunteers said that response times for the EHVAA were in line with other local departments, and that having paid staff would not speed anything and would dampen the volunteer spirit that has kept the EHVAA’s ranks robust, while other local companies have withered.

“I think volunteers tend to care more — it’s more personal care than the paid people,” one ambulance volunteer said. “They don’t live in the area. There is not that personal connection. It’s not the same level of care.”

Larsen said this week that the structure of the EHVAA made it difficult for common sense practices to be implemented without the potential of a veto by a vote of the entire association’s membership. He pointed to policies on when volunteers who are scheduled for overnight on-call shifts could respond to emergencies and requirements for all of the company’s ambulance drivers to be certified EMTs as cumbersome and illogical, but unable to be changed by a simple administrative order.

“Things that should just be a memo from the chief, the membership voted down — that’s silly,” he said. “Can you imagine if the police chief said we need a radar enforcement on such-and-such a road, because we have a speeding issue, and he has to take it to the PBA membership and they can say, ‘No, we don’t want to do a speeding enforcement there’? That doesn’t work. It’s things like that that we are going to fix with the new setup.”