Town Board Workshop

uh on the short-term EMS in Webster and Dan was here three months ago I think on June 27th and gave us the first three months uh since Penfield volunteer ambulance has been covering the full 35 square miles of Webster um and now we're getting the next three months update uh on on various uh call statistics and whatever so Dan I'm going to hand the Baton to you thank you supervisor uh thank you for the opportunity to talk again tonight um has been a very very uh busy last three months since I last spoke to you um objective subjective ethos and posos um long story short we're doing very well um covering two Town 70 square miles uh about 75,000 residents between Penfield and Webster um but just in this community alone uh over the last um three months since I last spoke uh 1,411 calls um we've covered 96 a half% of those mutated 51 um when I say mutated means um it's impossible to cover every call um nobody can carry a business model of enough ambulances and

enough staff to cover fifth sixth or seventh calls or I should say sixth seventh and eighth calls because we staff five during the day um but I'm quite proud uh you know the regional Matrix or the Department of Health Matrix is to cover you know above 90% or Regional to cover above 95% uh we continue to do so um you know being handled being handed a second Town um on S such short-term notice uh probably our busiest three months in our course history um did a th calls in July and 1 th calls in August um and just went over a th calls in September before we hit the um October threshold um and I must say quite proud of our staff um you know again objective subjective ethos posos um you know we've had three calls alone in just the 30 days where we went to a call that was um a cardiac arrest meaning the patient was not conscious or not breathing um two of those three right in this community and two patients walked out of the hospital with all neuros intact um one of those was actually a 2-year-old um you know a lot of other calls you probably have seen in the news uh but our crews continue to do a great job and my thanks to them uh for the hard work that they've done um you can see East Webster is a bit busier than West Webster um being the

contractual provider for the town of Webster um EMS services that includes the East Webster numbers we already a certificate of need holder for West Webster um based on when the fire district transferred their Co to us in 2021 so that's why those numbers are separate um but under our contract with this town on board it's those calls in East Webster um 790 in the last 90 days next slide appr uh besides calls um Community engagement is is imperative um we've been involved with a lot of things the fact we were just involved with um at Ken Park uh Special Olympics um just a few weeks ago I forgot to list that up there um we did an amateur PGA event at Webster Golf Course uh Webster Carnival is obviously a huge event also a very busy event um some of those nights were really well attended uh the veterans meting Music Fest um barries did an Irish Fest at the carnival grounds West Webster Fire Department does a lot for the Fallen firefighter tribute um they did their Bike Rodeo through this town um Webster rocks which is for ALS awareness um we got the marching band event coming up and we continue to do radiological planning and training with Monroe County and G um

just to bring our folks up to speed because so many portions of East Webster are part of that evacuation Zone um so quite busy uh besides taking calls um just the commercial that is out there um Penfield ambulance does have a loan covered at 1585 Jackson Road that's open to our residents well that also includes our residents in Webster now um so if anybody does need Walkers canes or crutches or their Orthopedics office says hey go get this at these places um you are more than welcome in this community to do that same thing with the free CPR training um you can find all that on our website at Penfield ambulance. org um that's pretty much all I have uh thank you for your continued support um any questions sure I don't have any questions but I sounds like it's going great have not heard anything negative about the services that are being provided so that's a good news good no news thank you very much no news good news doing a great job down there and um I like to see the community engagement also um you know you show 130 man hours at the carnival Alone um so thank you for you know your service to our community yeah

you're welcome and that was one thing honestly um as we had to ramp up and prepare for this in January uh this community a little bit different than Penfield um very there's a lot happening uh there's a lot of Engagement um I wasn't really anticipating all this just this summer alone uh but we kind of had a ramp up for it a little bit last minute um I like to be proactive we were a little reactive about how much Community engagement that happens up here I'm a little bit of a surprise to us but uh we're getting through it and um you know we we actually like those events it's a lot better than sometimes handling a 911 call which are not people's best days how long was the list for uh volunteers for uh Bar's Irish Festival do you have a long list of volunteers wanted to attend that uh we had two we had a couple people interested um a lot of our volunteer members attended uh we did end up putting two employees on um I did have an ambulance there for the six we did have I did ask a lot of people but there was their preference to a tenser so uh versus work and I understand yeah it was it was a it was a great Festival I was there early on and it was very well attended yeah and 8,000 plus I heard yeah yeah thanks for your service I'm out there a lot and I saw your um you know cars go by and everything and a lot

of people saying good things thank you about what you do so thank you thank you so much and your support is vital but West Webster Fire districts and Northeast joint fire districts um housing us strategically on Gravel Road and Phillips Road has been um it's been enormous and pivotal for us to be able to cover response areas and and meet response times Matrix um which is important you know we don't always but 90 to 95% of the time we're on scene within 8 to 10 minutes yeah thanks for G giving them that recognition it is very um very to to allow that your team to to Stage there yeah and not in the ambulances like actually in the buildings right we're lucky yes we're lucky it's interesting Dan because you know EMS Ambulance uh uh today alone unsolicited um I had two people ask me what's going on with ambulance and Webster um one was at a board meeting I was at this morning for the Webster Economic Development Alliance and I was able to give some high points but also said you know you really want to hear it watch or come to the 7 o'clock meeting tonight um but I had the uh what was great was that one of our advisers for

the Webster Economic Development Alliance is Greg chambry who owns Maplewood nursing home and I said Greg how has the experience been the last 6 months since Penfield volunteer ambulance has been covering and he was like it's been fantastic that was at 7:00 7:30 this morning Bridget Harvey director of communications will tell you that I was at a speaking engagement at CDs Monarch if that's what you want to call it it was a Q&A um and one of the citizens uh from CS Monarch asked Bridget what's going on with ambulance in Webster um and I was confidently able to say well kind of the same thing watch it tonight on YouTube or come to the meeting but um tangibly the statistics showed in the last six months that Penfield volunteer ambulance uh has done a wonderful job for us and uh can't say enough about that and I also told him you know come and watch this because I'll I'll warm the seat for you Russ because you're about to give the long-term thing uh long-term update but I will say this um you know just just in case and you use some acronyms and and whatever that maybe

people watching at home live or watching later or even attendees here today uh might not quite understand um one of the things that was great about Penfield jumping in uh in late in late March of this year for a short-term contract through the end of this year uh through the end of 24 was that they had the ability with their relationships with the Northeast joint fire department and also the West Webster uh fire department to Stage their ambulances at The Bays that they had on Philips Road for Northeast joint right across from the rec center but also at the Gravel Road um fire department that West Webster built several years ago which was built to house ambulances and I think the importance of that is is that anybody that understands the ambulance business if I'll call it that Russ is that seconds matter these are traveling a hospitals at some in some of these cases now and if you get a call from dwit road which is West Webster and you're coming from Jackson Road where your base is I don't care how fast you're going your Li your lights are on and your ambulances it's going to take you longer

to get there than if you're staged at Gravel Road that's just common sense and the reality is that people that live on salt road if they have a major problem it's nice to have you guys staged at the Phil Road station and not for nothing your main base on Jackson Road probably is one mile from the border of Penfield and Webster over there uh about 1.2 right I've been very happy with the fact that that triangulation of the 35 square miles of Webster has resulted um in being able to to have those calls be handled uh by the closest ambulance now the last thing I'll say but you gave me some time because we got until 7:30 and I know Russ won't take that long Mutual Aid is something that I think that we you know you talk about it this and that this 97% and I think the average person doesn't quite understand I didn't understand it until I was educated on it is that you cannot cover 100% of your calls in your town because if you're Staffing your ambulances 247 which is a 247 business

and if you have five ambulances up during the day that has 10 staff probably one EMT one paramedic unfortunately 911 calls for ambulance don't come in on the hour they come in when they come in and all a lot of times what happens is that five calls come in in an hour and all five of those ambulances are out and then a minute later the sixth call comes in what do you do well what all these EMS agencies have done either catified or just by custom is that you cover me I'll cover you that's Mutual Aid correct so that when they can't cover it because people ask me all the time why was a Ronda quite ambulance at the call in Webster why was West Wayne or whatever it's called Ontario ambulance at the call that's why it's because we just had our sixth call within a certain amount of time and we only have five ambulances up you can't put up an infinite a number of ambulance and an infinite number of Staff now what Dan didn't report on and I don't mean to you know Penfield volunteer ambulance historically in the areas that they

cover which was penfield's 35 square miles and now Webster so 70 square miles you just told us what you have had to have other agencies come in to cover your calls and Webster how much Mutual Aid did Penfield ambulance do for other municipalities that needed your help in the last 3 to six months it's about 6% used to be higher um just because we had the share border withth Webster but now that we're covering it uh our mutual Aid boundaries typically include perington arate Village of East Rochester Brighton and a little bit in the city um and a little bit to Wayne County right yeah so we theoretically you'd like to think that all agencies of all factors are equal they're all at 95% coverage and you're getting 5% of the other agencies coming into town and of your all your calls 5% of them you're going outside of town correct about yes right but in this case you only needed 3% to come into town correct and you guys were helping on 6% of your calls outside of town which means you are helping more than your share which is great yeah so thanks Dan for what it's worth there you have it I I just want to thank you and

your wonderful Organization for the willingness to jump in and help us when we really needed the assistance and to um to integrate yourself into the community and show that you really are interested in Webster um you've done a tremendous job and I want to thank you and all the people of the organization yeah I just want to close with the Kudos I just kind of GM this uh from a brain and being perspective as to my 30 fulltime employees my 35 part-time employees and about 30 volunteers and nine volunteer board of directors uh they deserve you know so many disc kind the quarterback it um and steer the ship but I we wouldn't be as successful without them so the Kudos goes to those folks that do this 30 to 40 calls a day on the road so thank you folks thanks tamy thank you hey Ross even with my diarrhea of the mouth I'm still one minute ahead of time for your slot so the next agenda item up tonight is an update from Russ zisin who is uh actually the co-chair of a committee uh along with councilman John Cahill who is the liaison from the town board to EMS Ambulance in town and Russ is going to give us an update on the long-term EMS and Webster which we assume knam would to be January 1st 2025

and Beyond yeah Russ the batan is yours yeah so you know this is not a reflection certainly on on Penfield um I mean the town in its in doing its diligence is looking just to ensure that you know there's they're looking at a fair and balanced long-term solution um and and I get that question a lot by the way why don't you cover 100% of your calls get an accident on the throughway takes 30 ambulances 10 years ago so that means to cover 100% of your calls you have to have 30 ambulances right that would put you guys be out of business in about 3 months you know so that's the easy answer I mean it's just not possible so on the long-term solution um you know we've been at this Podium a couple times and I'll just recap um we decided to to to investigate the possibility of putting out an RFP for ambulance and the first thing we did is just before we took the time to you know which it is timely or it does take a bunch of time to put together an RP P formal RFP we said let's gauge the interest with an RFI you know uh basically a request for interest and we did that that was done

um a couple months ago and we got responses back only from two agencies who said yeah we'd be interested in in providing a formal request or a formal response to an an RFP that being Penfield and Monroe uh there were five ambulance cores out of the um I don't have it on here from my notes that I gave you but uh there were five who formally declined to respond to respond and 14 who just didn't respond so by default was a no um so we said we looked at the response to the RFI said he just to pre-qualify the the respondents we had a few extra questions and sent out a pre RFP questionnaire both agencies respond with reasonable answers so now now what we have is basically the RFP process and the committee I'm working on with John um we're putting together a formal RFP that we'll send to the two agencies um The Hope being in about two weeks with about a 30-day response turnaround and then a decision in the 30 days following that so that's really it in a nutshells I'll be

uncharacteristically short in my py you're what I have to say tonight py thank you very much those of you who know me I hear the chuckles it's all right any questions all right thank you looks like you guys are going to get a 10-minute break no no you're not gonna but keep going do you have any questions or comments at the board level I no I just want to thank Russ for again his willingness to jump into this and be a part of the process um other than the fact that you're a Webster resident and you do have a lot of experience in the ambulance business as well as other businesses you don't you don't have a horse in this race and um it's just been really very kind of you uh if you will to be a volunteer in this effort so thank you and to that point he has contributed hours upon hours upon hours and shown a great deal of leadership um in these Endeavors given your background and your decades experience in the uh ambulance business so we are all extremely appreciative of all that you've done well like Dan says I mean you know I'm not doing it by myself I got a group of people helping out including including John kahill himself so so I'm not going to go up to 7:30 but

I I do feel as if I should add a few things to this um it'll be interesting to see um by November 15th around then what Monroe Andor Penfield volunteer ambulance uh reply on this more robust RFP that this committee is drafting um one of the things that I'm hoping we will do sometime in late November which I think the November 21st is a board meeting and then there's two board meetings in December I think the 5th and the 19th is that we will also uh John Ross and I have talked about the fact that we owe it to the community to at least uh report back on some due diligence we did on um a long-term option that is the town government running an ambulance department we are in a position where we can do that and the reason why we're in a position that we can do that is that we have a municipal Authority a municipal certificate of uh need with the state of New York that was obtained back in the 2016 range it was finalized in 2020 we're the only town in mon County

that has it because we have that we have the authority at this point to run a business uh of an ambulance business we can we have the authority the legal authority to go and hire W2 employed EMTs and paramedics put them into the state pension system have them have town uh uh benefits we can go out and Lease or buy an ambulance base we can go out and lease or buy ambulances and we can run the government can run that business we have the authority to do that I'm going to say that again the government can run that business now am I not supposed to say anything the government can run that business did I say that a third time okay well by November 21st we will present back what we found as far as some um precedents of other municipalities have done it uh how they've experienced uh what they experienced uh up to this point but also what we're seeing is indicators of this

industry which is is it's an industry the ambulance is a business industry that is going under a lot of changes right now and uncertain future and we are going to be able to report back that if if we want to look at that option long term how many millions of dollarss would have to be invested up front in capital to do so but we are going to report on that Russ yeah and I would imagine that would be November 21st board meeting or sometime in December we owe it to the community to show that we you know looked into that um and maybe that's the way we go um but the other thing will be what Russ just described is that uh two agencies Penfield volunteer ambulance and Monroe have uh we think that they'll respond to this RFP and then and then we'll we'll go from there so Russ I've got a question for you Dan would you I've got a question for you also if you could go up to the mic just to give a point of fact on what we're going to be doing the due diligence Dan how many how many ambulances do you have in Penfield right now that is Road worthy uh seven and next week will be at 8 when they put the hydraulic right

lifting equipment on it so Russ this question is to you Dan you can you can opine in also what is the cost to purchase and equip a new ambulance including the power lift so interesting you asked because I just yesterday signed a check because I also run an ambulance company out in on aaga County it was $216,000 for the ambulance empty right the powerlift stretchers that he may be talking about all in about 40,000 um the life pack now the standard is a a life pack 35 retails at 58,000 so that's an ambulance and two pieces of equipment I mean you know somebody the could do the math real quick but it is not cheap right we have eight ambulances need to replace all 30 all of those life packs um and some of the other devices you know we we're at about a million right now to just just to replace some two or three pieces of equipment in the eight ambulances we have so right they're expensive yes they are thank you yeah and we just we were lucky we received an arpa grant for the safe ambulance the total Grant is $350,000 is from Monro County all purchases to Russ's Point were about 360

361,000 um and to Russ's point we became an ALS agency in 2017 we had five or six life pack 15s we just purchased and took delivery of eight life pack 35s is a $400,000 um ticket uh that we just paid but for the betterment of our community and our patients because we have to be up with the technology to time's point to the everchanging demand of healthare right I mean the medical standards required at this point like these life pack 35s they can do things that we are required to do and the previous models which you can would keep as long as you could like in our in our situation out in in Syracuse um the contracts are out and they are not renewable if they break after the contract runs out at the end of this month they you can't even pay to have them fixed they work ours are working great but they refuse to fix them they said you know that's it see luckily the stretches those $445,000 stretches the contracts another two years big box thank you gentlemen I would think to put our agency together right now would probably cost about 15 million yeah I uh we got five minutes until uh the regular board meeting

starts so I'll just leave you with this I I I would beiss if I didn't say that John and Russ is co-chairing of this committee this committee is I called it the Dream Team back at the you know uh Paul you've been on that committee from a finance uh Director of Finance of the town but some of the other people that you've gathered on that committee that have EMS and billing and operation and it's really an impressive committee and there is zero chance of patronage from a standpoint they don't have a dog in the fight they they actually as they were developing the uh the 20 agencies that got the uh 21 I think they got the what was it called it a request for uh interest 21 um if if one of them one of the people on the committee worked at one of those agencies they were ineligible we didn't want any semblance of patronage in this it is a really talented group of people and and Russ to John's point you put in hours and hours and hours of time and you know I can say it because it's not going to be taxpayer money I I told you I'll take you out for a steak dinner and a nice bottle of red wine that's on me that was two years ago I think wasn't Russ we're not done yet

Russ think the cup of coffee I bought myself than thanks Russ and that concludes tonight's Workshop um so Mark uh we'll cut it loose and then we'll come back with