.jpg)
by Nick Wognum
Ambulance issues were part of a two-hour council meeting Tuesday.
The council approved the resignation of Christine Jarvis, the city’s ambulance director, who will stay on the department.
Council member Joe White will move to the director position through the end of the year. Emily Jaeger will be the training officer and assistant director.
White asked that the motion be backdated to Oct. 17 when Jarvis resigned. The motion passed with White abstaining.
“I would just like to say thanks to Joe for stepping up when we’re shortly this and you’ve got a lot of stuff on your plate, so the community appreciates it,” said mayor Duane Lossing.
The council also approved a request from White to increase ambulance on-call wages from $5 an hour to $15 an hour for Monday to Friday from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.
“So, I requested this. Right now, our department is pretty solid on night shift coverage, semi-solid on day shift we’re probably about 30% on day shift, we’re really struggling with day shifts. So I’m kind of hoping that if we increase the wage rate, now it’s five dollars an hour for on call, I’m hoping that maybe some of the retirees will step up a little bit,” said White. “We’ve had Ely ambulance have to respond I want to say six times this year so far during the day shift to emergency calls.
“Thankfully, they weren’t heart attacks or strokes or real serious events where we needed an immediate ambulance covers. If somebody has a heart attack or a stroke or a serious event, and we don’t have coverage on call, that’s life threatening, that person is not going to survive if we don’t have somebody on call, that we can’t have. So we’re looking at trying to desperately feel that.
“I have another backup plan we’re working on. (City clerk) Rebecca (Jaeger) is getting the numbers we’ll address that with a special council meeting in the next couple of weeks, um to fix that,” said White.
Lossing asked what other communities are doing. White said those communities hire people to work day shift.
“Ambulance departments are going have to go to a living wage, and that’s what Rebecca and I are working on right now. To change our department to a half-time living wage department and a volunteer evening department. We can handle the evening. That’s going to increase our costs. Right now we can handle $170,000 a year right now with the way we operate right now. To go full-time for six to six, it’s in a jump us up to about $350,000 a year to give them benefits.
“So that requires us to do transports which we can do. So we’re the crunching the numbers. We have a one time federal grant coming that’ll supplement us to be able to prove that we can do this in a year. If it fails this year, we’re going to lose our ambulance department because we can’t sustain what we’re doing. We don’t have the volunteer staff to be able to continue this on without hiring people on.
“The Ely option is not a viable option. The hospital has not been good stewards with financing in the past. They want proposed a tax, which really, contrary to what the paper wrote, I don’t support it, I do support hearing them talk more, but the problem is they want to tax our PSA area, which if they tax it now, we have the money we need to hire people and we wouldn’t have a financial problem to hire people full time,” said White.
He said Babbitt would need to do transports to pay for the additional labor costs. “I cannot justify doing transports right now if I don’t have a shift covered.”
The council approved increasing the on-call wages from $5 to $15 an hour for day-time shifts effective Nov. 15.
White said if the increase in on-call pay solves the problem, the proposal to go to full-time pay would be dropped.
The council accepted the resignation of Ronan Littler from the ambulance department. In his letter of resignation, Littler wrote, “I recently moved to Duluth and the updated scheduling requirements are not attainable for me. I have also made this decision based on having to be on call by myself multiple times and the lack of confidence I have that I will have a partner. I also have struggled with the dynamic changes which resulted in me not being able to be active on calls as members were taking supplies out of my hands on calls and not allowing me to work at my capacity. This makes me uncomfortable to continue to work in this environment.”
The council also approved hiring Kaleb McEwen for the ambulance department.
