Without a clear exit path, Santa Rosa will remain with Sonoma County’s ambulance provider but seek future change

Santa Rosa City Council wants to leave the county’s contract with a private ambulance company and control its own EMS system, but on Tuesday learned it may cost too much to create its own service.

The city is currently covered by American Medical Response, a private for-profit ambulance company that has covered Santa Rosa, Sebastopol and Rohnert Park under a contract with Sonoma County since 1991.

The county is seeking bids for a five-year contract, and Santa Rosa city officials had hoped to extract the city from its relationship with AMR and focus on creating its own service or entering into a public-private partnership.

But on Tuesday, Fire Chief Scott Westrope told the council achieving that change would be costly and time expensive under a 1980 state law that gives county governments significant authority over EMS services.

Instead, the council directed Westrope to bring proposals for lobbying to change the state law and work further with the county to influence future contracts with the provider.

Last November, Westrope raised concerns over AMR’s response times, telling the council his staff and engines arrived at scenes first around 76% of the time at that point in 2021.

Fire crews had waited more than six minutes for an AMR ambulance to arrive over 2,300 times. On 149 occasions, they had waited over 15 minutes.

“We’re very proud of not just the long history of service to Sonoma County but also our track record,” Brian Henricksen, a regional director for AMR, said in a phone interview Tuesday night.

Westrope said his initial analysis was based on limited data, as AMR was not accountable to public record requests. But this week, Westrope said the company had provided them raw data in recent months. Those numbers, which officials continued to process, indicate AMR is in compliance with its contractual obligations, but that response times have slipped in recent years.

“This isn’t a fight with AMR,” Westrope told The Press Democrat.

The company met its contractually obligated response times on more than 86% of emergency calls in November 2021, down from 96% in May 2020, according to Westrope. When rebuttals submitted by the company, or certain exemptions to the response times — being stopped at train tracks or flooded roadways, for example — were included, ambulances were within the response times on more than 92% of calls in November, 2021.

Henricksen said impacts from the pandemic, including crew members sick from COVID-19 and backups at hospital emergency rooms, had slowed response times over the last two years.

The numbers weren’t good enough, two firefighter union representatives said during public comment.

“Down-trending response times are absolutely unacceptable and inexcusable,” Mike Stornetta, vice president of the Professional Firefighters of Sonoma County said. His more than 230 members work in Santa Rosa as well as in the Bodega Bay, Rancho Adobe and Sonoma County fire districts.

The current system was “broken,” he said.

Keith Jeffus, deputy director of the Santa Rosa Professional Firefighters, agreed. The city’s firefighters were sworn to protect citizens from “the scourge of fire, floods, earthquakes or even corporate greed,” he said. Just being fast enough to meet contractual obligations was not fast enough for lifesaving care, he said.

“This isn’t a garbage contract where everyone notices when someone doesn’t empty the can,” Jeffus said, but “when someone is in their darkest hour and a relative is having a medical emergency they will know the difference between an ambulance that arrives in four minutes and in seven minutes.”

But a legal analysis by the city attorney’s office found the road to extracting the city from the county’s service area would be a difficult legal fight under existing state laws. Such an effort might involve “significant court proceedings,” and would likely not conclude before the new contract was awarded in March according to Westrope’s presentation Tuesday.

The city would be better suited accepting the current contract, and working in the intervening years to position itself for a future change, Westrope said.

Reluctantly, council members agreed.

“Changing legislation that is keeping us from being able to move forward in that direction will be a heavy lift but I think its time that we tackle that,” council member John Sawyer said.

“I wish we could institute a public model today,” council member Victoria Fleming said.

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @AndrewGraham88