City Newspaper Archives - 7/2007

CITY HALL: Keep the ambulance contract with Rural Metro

Published on Jul 17, 2007
The city may not retain Rural Metro as EMS provider, and thus 200 of us will lose our jobs. Rural Metro will not stay in this area if the contract goes to Monroe Ambulance. This other small hometown company will hire only a few of us at lesser wages and without our union.

It will be catastrophic to the already strained health-care system in this region if our services are no longer here. The Code Red status will worsen, because all of the transfers that we do from the facilities will not be done as efficiently, if at all, and patients will pile up in the emergency departments with no beds to go to in the facility: thus Code Red.

Not only city but county residents will lose EMS services as well. Many nursing homes and doctors offices call us directly for service. Can Monroe really pickup the additional 70,000-plus calls for service that we provide - on top of their present call volume?

Please encourage the city to retain Rural Metro. Lives depend on it. Many of our employees are already displaced workers from layoffs at other companies. Where do we go now?

Lynn Gerger, Hartwood Drive, Henrietta (Gerger is an Emergency Medical Technician with Rural Metro)