East Hampton Village Says Fire and Ambulance Volunteer Funds Will Be Apportioned as Usual, With One Catch

East Hampton Village officials have asked their counterparts in East Hampton Town to change the way the town apportioned budgeting this year for the emergency services coverage provided by the East Hampton Fire Department and East Hampton Volunteer Ambulance.

Village officials say the move amounts to “cleaning up” a dubious accounting practice that will have no impact on volunteers. But it also introduces a new strong arm tactic to the ongoing issues between the village administration and the East Hampton Volunteer Ambulance Association.

For at least the last 15 years, and probably longer, East Hampton Town has sent its contractual payments for areas of northern East Hampton that are covered by the village-owned fire and ambulance services in four separate checks. Two of the checks, the bulk of the more than $1 million in annual payments, went to the village itself, for the operation and upkeep of the logistics of fire protection and ambulance coverage.

But two smaller checks also were sent each year to the East Hampton Fire Department and to the East Hampton Volunteer Ambulance Association, the nonprofit organization that makes up the actual volunteers who manage and staff the EHVA’s operations. In 2019, for example, the fire department got about $180,000, and the EVAA received about $75,000.

These separate checks were for what is commonly referred to in the world of volunteers as “fraternal monies” and can be spent essentially however the volunteers for the respective agencies choose.

Fraternal funding is a common policy in all of the local volunteer departments, and the money is typically spent on social events for volunteers, creature comforts around firehouses, and public outreach like “open houses” at their respective stations.

The fraternal funding has been picked at by budget hawks in some communities but is seen by elected officials and budget officers as a minor incentive, or gratuity, for local residents who volunteer hundreds of hours of their time each year to provide the community with emergency services — services that would otherwise have to be provided by hired professionals, at vastly higher expense.

East Hampton Village Administrator Marcos Baladron said this week that the village asked the town to stop sending the two separate checks for each of the volunteer services and fold the fraternal funding into a single payment for the services provided to residents of Northwest Woods and the unincorporated areas of East Hampton surrounding the village.

The town has not traditionally issued separate payments to the other emergency services agencies — the Amagansett and Montauk fire districts — they contract with the village for fire protection and ambulance services.

Baladron said that the village simply sees keeping things in one lump sum as more accountable management of taxpayer funds and will give the money to the respective departments’ membership as it always has — but with a catch in the case of the ambulance corps.

“It’s purely an administrative change for accounting purposes, because we don’t think it should have been done the way it’s been done for so long — it’s not good accounting policy,” Baladron said. “We are the contracting agency with the town, so we should be taking in all the funding. We will cut them a check — the next day. I told the chief that, and Reed Jones, the treasurer there.”

But Baladron and Mayor Jerry Larsen said that the same will not immediately be the case with the fraternal funding for the EHVAA. They said that the village wants to ink a formal agreement with the ambulance association that guarantees the dedication of volunteers to providing medical services to the village before it releases fraternal funds.

Larsen’s administration has butted heads with some of the ambulance company’s membership over the last year as the mayor has tried to make what he sees as improvements to the services that the ambulance provides — and the withholding of the volunteer funds appears to be the latest salvo.

The bristling started when the village began hiring emergency medical technicians last year to augment the ambulance company’s 40 volunteers. The mayor and the Village Board approved the policy in response to what they said were unacceptable response times by East Hampton Volunteer Ambulance and unnecessary calls for “mutual aid” from other departments if an ambulance could not respond expeditiously.

While many other local ambulance companies have moved to hiring EMTs and paramedics in recent years due to dwindling numbers of volunteers able to escape to calls, especially during the workday, the move raised some hackles in the company — much as it has with other ambulance services, where volunteers say it dampens morale and dulls the sharpness of their skills due to lack of repetition.

The specter of “pay per ride” billing for ambulance responses to medical emergencies has also sparked push-back from volunteers, who would be required to start collecting insurance and personal billing information — which many also have said diminishes the altruistic spirit of the volunteer ambulance corps in the region.

Recently, the village took the unusual move of asking the State Department of Health to reissue the certificate of need for ambulance services from the EHVA to the village itself.

The mayor said that step was also a matter of more streamlined logistics, since the village owns all of the ambulance company’s equipment and is responsible under state law for ensuring the ambulance services for the village and its contracted protection areas. He’s claimed the certificate had originally been issued to the village in the 1970s, and was only taken over by the ambulance company’s 501(c)(3) association later on.

But other ambulance companies in the region — namely, the Southampton Village Volunteer Ambulance and Westhampton War Memorial Ambulance — also hold the certificates and handle the biennial recertification through their respective 501(c)(3) organizations, even when the company is a department within a municipality, as is the case in Southampton Village.

The mayor said this week that the demand for a new formalized contract with the ambulance association that will guarantee it continues to organize and train its volunteers grew out of the dispute with some of the ambulance volunteers.

“We’re the contracting agency with the town, and our attorney has advised us it is a liability risk to not have the [certificate of need] with the village, because what if the association went away?” Larsen said this week.

He said he’s been told that some of the ambulance association volunteers have threatened to leave the company and volunteer with a neighboring ambulance service, and have tried to recruit other volunteers to do the same.

“We need a contract between the village and the ambulance association that says they will handle the training and recruitment of volunteers,” the mayor said. “We just need that assurance — everything can go back to the way it has always worked.”

Mary Mott, the current chief of the EHVA, did not respond to a request for comment about the ultimatum the village administration has issued over the fraternal funding.

When the Town Board held a public hearing on the proposed contracts with the village for fire protection on January 19, East Hampton Fire Department Chief Duane Forrester had addressed the board with a simple question about whether there would be a separate dedication of funds for the department’s members. He was told by Town Board that the funding would come in one payment for 2023 and 2024.

Forrester did not respond to requests for further comment, but Baladron sent a statement that he said came from the chief: “The East Hampton Fire Department is getting a 5 percent increase with this new contract, for a grant total of [$300,000]. The mayor informed me that our check will be sent to us by the end of February, as usual. This is simply an administrative change, and we want to thank the village for negotiating a better deal for us.”

The message is footnoted “Chief Duane Forrester, EHFD.”