“The key here is control. We have control of the ambulance, we have control where it goes, and the hospital is only three miles away from wherever you are in the city. The ambulances are for the city residents.”
—Kingston fire chief Chris Rea
The Kingston Fire Department is immediately taking over all emergency ambulance responses in the City of Kingston.
“To effectively run a program and be able to guarantee high-quality service here for our residents, we feel the best option is to be able to have a city run-EMS system,” said mayor Steve Noble. “We already have over 50 EMTs and a couple of paramedics working for us.”
Mobile Life, which previously provided emergency services in Kingston, was sold to Empress EMS in June. The service rendered by the latter company has so far failed to meet civic expectations.
“In the last six months, the Kingston Fire Department has responded to over 100 emergency medical calls with our own ambulance due to a lack of private ambulance availability in our city,” said Noble.
Fire chief Chris Rea relayed his own dissatisfaction with the service provided at an October Public Safety Committee meeting. “We’ve been to calls where we get a call for an unresponsive child due to a seizure,” Rea said. “We were there in three minutes. We get there and the child is seizing. We get the child stabilized, and then the parent is, ‘Where’s the ambulance?’”
Noble had the sense that a crisis was brewing in September.
The city balked at renewing contracts because of Empress’ demand that city taxpayers “contribute over $500,000 to a million dollars per year for service beginning on January 1.”
No revenue projections have been shared so far to predict the cost of the city government providing the services. Residents will have to wait to see how the cost shakes out. A request for bids to retain the services of a third-party billing provider for emergency services operations has been discussed. Noble expects the numbers to be evaluated in January and February by the common council Finance Committee.
Meanwhile, Kingston government is providing immediate coverage.
“We will have two ambulances,” said Noble, “with the third ambulance continuing to service mobile mental-health calls and be a backup if there ever were the need for three transports at the same time.”
Under the initial institution of the plan, one of the ambulances will be staffed with a paramedic and an EMT, the other with two EMTs.
“This spring, if the common council approves, we would hope to hire additional paramedics and EMTs,” said Noble.
Noble indicated Empress has suffered from a lack of staffing availability because “the pay hasn’t always been great for these types of positions, and there’s a lot of part-timers.” He believes it will be less of a challenge for the city to operate an ambulance system with the kind of benefits and stability a municipal job offers.
Rea expresses confidence that staffing the ambulance service won’t be a problem.
“We’ve got people lining up,” he said. “We will do whatever needs to be done to protect the citizens of Kingston and the visitors and give them the best EMS service possible that we can give.”
Rea says the fire department responded to over 3300 medical calls in 2023.
Rea pointed to other municipalities, like Johnstown and Auburn, which are arriving at the conclusion that operating their own ambulance service provides improved accountability and control.
“Because they’re private Industry, they control it,” Rea said. “So if we want to keep under contract with them If there was a contract for x amount of ambulances it doesn’t mean they’re going to have x amount of ambulances here. They control it, and if they fail to show up, what is the penalty? And then it is a large corporation — that is traded on the stock exchange — that owns them. So if [our] corporate counsel sends a letter to them to penalize them, where’s that going to go?”
Mobile Life was sold to Empress EMS after reaching a settlement with the state attorney general’s office regarding illegal billing practices by the emergency-services provider.
Empress provides ambulance service in Westchester, Manhattan and the Bronx. It belongs to the PatientCare family of companies, which also has operations in South Dakota, Florida and Texas.
“We feel like we could provide a higher level of service and a more compassionate level of service to our residents,” said Rea, “being able to be both the firefighter-first responder, but then also to be able to help transport those patients to the hospital.”
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