Baker City Fire Chief leads charge to bring back ambulance services
By Joe Hathaway on Thursday, November 2nd, 2023 in More Top Stories Northeastern Oregon News
BAKER CITY – In the wake of last year’s contentious decision to discontinue ambulance services, Baker City’s Fire Chief Todd Jaynes is spearheading the initiative to reinstate ambulance services through the city’s fire department.
Jaynes says he submitted an application to Baker County commissioners this week to reinstate services, which was ended by the city in September of 2022. In its wake, the county hired Metro West, out of Hillsboro, to provide ambulance service.
Jaynes says if the county moves forward with the plan, it would have to be approved by the state. He says he hopes to have city ambulances up and running by next fire season, if everything works out.
He says the primary objective is to deploy ambulances to major fires, providing critical support during emergencies. However, he emphasized a secondary goal — to offer backup for medical transports, reducing the wait times for hospital transfers and assisting if the current ambulance services – Metro West – are stretched thin.
“The plan is not to compete with existing services but to complement and support them,” said Jaynes. “We want to do our deployments where there’s some really good funds we can bring back to the city. Plus it gets some people out on these fires and gets some experience if we can get our paid part time guys or work through a staffing group to staff it.”
The decision by the city last year caused a tsunami of controversy and consternation throughout the city. A litany of reasons, including ambulances not collecting enough in ambulance bills to cover its costs to a budget shortfall after the expiration of a three year federal grant to fund extra firefighters, led to the city ending services. The ripple effect was the loss or resignations of firefighters and anger throughout the community.
“There’s a lot of emotional stuff around this but if they’d have kept the ambulance, we’d be financially better off today than we are,” said Jaynes. “Their premise was that the ambulance did 85% of the fire department’s calls. So if they cut the ambulance, that would save 85% of our budget, but it didn’t, we had to hire people back.”
Jaynes continued, “So the budget difference is only a few $100,000 and then you take away the revenue that was, was coming in from the ambulance just based on their billing, which the city probably could have done better with an outsource to a professional group there. We’d have more money now. Granted, it wouldn’t pay for the whole budget. It just never will. Fire departments don’t make money, but a lot more of our budget would have been covered.”
As for paying to reinstate services, he says funds would be included in the current budget.
“We just have to move funds from one line item to another,” Said Jaynes
He says the county has a few more questions about his proposal before deciding whether to move forward or not.
Jaynes says he’s ready to get services back up and running and that there’s two ambulances sitting at the station, collecting dust.
“We’re going to be an additional resource and it never hurts to have additional resources in the community. The current ambulance is doing their best job they can, but they’re not able to take all the transports. So if we can help either cover the county while they’re doing transports or do the transports, then it’s just going to help out the citizens of Baker City and Baker County.”
