LEGISLATURE STUFF- Where It’s At and Not At

By Michael Ryan

CATSKILL - So where is it at?

The next special meeting of the Greene County Legislature is scheduled for August 4 at 6 p.m. in the Emergency Operations Center in Cairo.

Lawmakers, with town officials and emergency services professionals, will be continuing discussions on the possible formation of a countywide ambulance system.

Those talks have been ongoing monthly since last October, taking a hiatus in July to give everyone involved an opportunity to take a breather.

It is a hot button issue and, if put in place, is fully expected to be expensive, in the neighborhood of $12-15 million, county officials says.

On the surface, that is a staggering leap from the current figure of between $7 to 8 million, spread over the Greene County flycars and various municipally-owned squads.

Officials say there are valid, and more importantly, inevitable reasons for the sharp rise such as the need to greatly increase worker benefits and wages, form an administrative team and provide equipment, rigs, etc.

While there are uncertainties about the major change, town supervisors, in an unprecedented display of solidarity, have told lawmakers the unified network is the direction they want to go.

That decision has been years in the making as ambulance service went through financial and operational ups and downs.

Nearly a decade ago, the same exact conversations unfolded, reaching the point of shifting to the county system before the plan died amid a split in proponents and opponents of the concept.

While there have been intense and potentially deal-killing debates over how the change would happen, it appears there is no turning back, this time.

But it also appears the changeover will not occur until 2027, a year later than initially thought and with sundry details still to be ironed out.

So, entering next Monday night’s session, the multi-million dollar question is, where is it at in terms of getting this thing off the ground and running?

Legislature chairman Patrick Linger heads the monthly gatherings along with county administrator Shaun Groden, each saying the time for a countywide system has come and not because they say so.

“We’re hearing from some towns, ‘Hey, let’s slow this down a little bit,’ but we’re also hearing from a couple of towns that, ‘Hey, we need out of the ambulance business now. It’s killing our budgets,’” Linger says.

Nothing formal has emerged, as yet, that would show the change is underway, although two ideas have been bandied about.

First would be securing a county Certificate of Need (CON) from the State Department of Health, replacing individual, municipal CON’s.

Second would be hiring an administrator, probably an emergency medical services veteran, to begin laying the groundwork for the transition.

To do either, “we need one-hundred percent commitment from the towns,” Linger says. “I think we have an agreement but we want to hear it.”

Securing the county CON could be a painfully bureaucratic process. “From what I understand, the DOH would not allow us to have an open-ended, county CON with all the individual CON’s,” Linger says.

“We would need a specific timeframe to drop the individual CON’s, so we need to have a bigger discussion on that with the group,” Linger says.

And as for bringing in an administrator now, setting up all the protocols and personnel matters, “there is some disagreement about this,” Linger says.

“Disagreement is too strong a word. There are different ways being offered for how this would be done. Maybe through the sheriff’s department which has a whole hierarchy in place already,” Linger says.

“Or possibly it could be run through the existing Emergency Operations Center or under a whole new county department,” Linger says.

Questions also exist about precisely when and how the countywide system will be put in place, at a precise moment in time or piece by piece.

Groden has voiced support for essentially having everything ready to go, and at the stroke of midnight on some predetermined day, pulling the switch, rather than attempting to go piecemeal.