 - There is currently no agreement in place to provide ambulance service in Fremont County beginning Oct. 1.){kind=link}
(Fremont County, WY ) – There is currently no agreement in place to provide ambulance service in Fremont County beginning Oct. 1.
The issue was brought to the forefront this week, when the Fremont County Commission sent a letter of intent to Cody Regional Health outlining the proposed terms of a potential partnership for CRH to provide emergency medical services locally.
That move came as a surprise to members of the local EMS union, who have been providing emergency care in Fremont County for years as employees of the private company Priority Ambulance.
“Literally (during) the commission meeting a few days ago is when we all learned that Cody Regional is an option to come in,” Union President Dominick Sapien said this week.
The development wasn’t as unexpected for Priority Chief Operating Officer Phil Koster, however, who said Commissioners informed him “about two weeks ago” that Fremont County was “going to have Cody Regional take (EMS) over.”
“They told us … ‘We will not agree to a deal with Priority, (and) we are moving to Cody Regional,’” Koster recalled.
Representatives from Cody Regional Health told County 10 this week that they “have received their request and are diligently evaluating the financial and operational feasibility of providing the services needed,” and that “no commitments have been made.”
Regardless, Koster said Priority officials actually felt “somewhat encouraged” by the announcement, because it indicated that Fremont County at least had a plan for EMS service to continue after its contract with Priority ran out.
That contract was initially supposed to expire in June, Koster explained, and Priority had been reaching out to the Commission since January to discuss renewal, with a 1 percent increase – but they “never heard anything back” for months.
Finally, in June, Koster said the Commission responded, indicating that it couldn’t “afford” the proposed contract at that time, but noting that local voters were set to decide in August whether to approve a three-quarter percent sales tax that would help support ambulance operations moving forward.
After that conversation, Koster said Priority met with the union and “pledged” to utilize any revenues it might receive from the proposed sales tax to support labor costs.
“The union team said, ‘That’s awesome, we’re going to be behind this,” Koster said. “And they really rallied to gather support for the tax.”
The union also agreed to extend its current contract through Oct. 1 “to see how the tax went,” Koster said.
In the meantime, Sapien said local EMS workers knocked on “hundreds of doors” promoting the sales tax measure, largely motivated by promises from local officials that the sales tax funding would eventually be used to “transfer to a county service, which we all believed would (be) beneficial.”
Once the tax passed, however, Sapien said the situation got “weird.”
“We set up a few meetings that got cancelled,” he recalled. “Then we set up one between the union, the commissioners, and Priority Ambulance, and that one got cancelled by the commissioners.”
Around that time, Koster said county officials had informed him that they were planning to take over ambulance operations locally, instead of renewing their contract with Priority.
Then, he said the county contacted him again, this time asking for another contract extension – so he returned to the union and “had some negotiations.”
“The union … wanted to make sure that they were recognized and their workers were taken care of – which is the same thing that (we want),” he explained.
“That’s where it fell apart.”
It was in the midst of those negotiations that the Commission sent its letter of intent to Cody Regional, Koster said.
The county sent the letter of intent to CRH so they could begin officially discussing the prospect of Cody Regional potentially filling the “gap” in ambulance service between Oct. 1 and the spring of 2027, when revenues from the three-quarter percent sales tax will start coming in to fund the Fremont County Association of Governments’ new ambulance system, Commission Chairman Larry Allen said this week.
Koster said the move “upset” the union, which now plans to strike “because they do not have an agreement that recognizes them and takes care of their wages.”
Strike
The majority of union members met with Cody Regional’s EMS Director Phillip Franklin on Wednesday to learn more about the company’s potential plan for providing ambulance service in Fremont County, Sapien said, noting that, according to Franklin, the Commission had been talking about possibly shifting ambulance operations to CRH “for a year.”
During the Wednesday meeting, Franklin indicated that the local union members could apply to work for Cody Regional under the proposed new partnership with Fremont County, but that their employment would not be “guaranteed,” Sapien recalled.
Franklin also indicated that Cody Regional would likely establish new wage structures and shift schedules and essentially build a new EMS system in Fremont County “from the ground up,” Sapien said.
“That means they’re going to burn down what we have and start new,” Sapien said. “That really rubbed us the wrong way, (because) we’ve worked really hard for four years … building a system that provides a good service to Fremont County.”
The whole thing felt like a “scare tactic” intended to convince the union to back down from its contract demands, Sapien noted.
The union didn’t back down, though, he said – instead, they voted to strike.
“(We) stood up and said, ‘No, we won’t tolerate this,’” he said. “(We’re) standing our ground.”
The strike is currently set to start Sept. 28 – though Sapien said it may be pushed back a few days “depending on how conversations go” between union lawyers and Priority officials.
The strike won’t happen at all, he added, if the county agrees to provide a “sustainable” EMS service “that won’t disrupt the community.”
That scenario could play out in two ways, Sapien said: The county could sign a year-long deal with Priority and “smoothly transition” ambulance operations to the Fremont County Association of Governments, as planned, or the county could allow FCAG to take over ambulance operations “right away” – although that option would be “rocky,” since FCAG is still in the process of setting up the administrative framework required to take on ambulance operations.
On Friday, Commission Chairman Larry Allen said he would “love to negotiate an extension” with Priority, but based on his conversations with Koster this week, that is no longer a viable option.
“It’s possible, (but) it’s extremely unlikely at this point,” Koster confirmed later on Friday. “We’ve started wind-down procedures, (because) we’re at an impasse. … I can’t agree to anything with the county without an agreement with the union. And even upon having an agreement with the union, I need to make sure that we have the runway and the bandwidth to make sure that we’re going to be reimbursed by the county. And we don’t have that.”
The second option Sapien mentioned – transitioning ambulance operations to FCAG sooner than anticipated – is “a possibility,” Allen said, but he couldn’t say whether that was “the option” the Commission would go with.
“We’re looking at all options,” he said. “The main objective is not to have a lapse in service.”
Sapien said the union feels the same way when it comes to a potential lapse in EMS service locally.
“None of us want to strike,” he said. “We don’t want a work stoppage at all. We feel sick that this is even something we’ve been pushed to do, (because) we want to be here in perpetuity. We want to serve the people of Fremont County. We want to provide excellent service.”