The City of Gilroy Fire Department has a pricey $268,000
vehicle. The STAR car, or Supplemental Transport Ambulance Resource
vehicle, is a specially designed heavy-duty rescue ambulance that
also carries an assortment of fire-fighting tools and rescue
equipment.
The City of Gilroy Fire Department has a pricey $268,000 vehicle. The STAR car, or Supplemental Transport Ambulance Resource vehicle, is a specially designed heavy-duty rescue ambulance that also carries an assortment of fire-fighting tools and rescue equipment. What it doesn’t carry is patients, and fire officials officials in numerous Santa Clara County cities are pushing to change that. But the truth is that cities like Gilroy, San Jose and Santa Clara would be fiscally insane to consider such a change.
Putting expensive firefighters in the driver’s seat when it comes to ambulance transport would not only drive up medical costs for everyone, but it could put the city at even greater financial risk.
Does Gilroy really want to entertain the idea of going to binding arbitration over how many firefighters have to staff an ambulance? And what happens when ambulance drivers/firefighters demand a 26 percent increase in pay and benefits?
The truth is – as City Council Candidate Dion Bracco pointed out two years ago – the purchase of the expensive STAR car made little sense. It’s a decision that should have been further scrutinized by the Council, and probably scrapped.
Now that fire department has the cart, they want the horse, too. The problem is that the horse – turning firefighters into ambulance drivers – is going to be incredibly expensive over the long run.
Currently, there’s a countywide contract with American Medical Response for ambulance service. That contract keeps costs reasonable.
The cities like Gilroy, where the expensive transport STAR cars often sit unused, shouldn’t throw away good money by hopping into the ambulance business.
“We’ve got units that are underutilized,” Gilroy Division Chief Phil King told The Dispatch recently. “We realize there have to be some restrictions, but we think we can serve the county better (if the restrictions are loosened).”
Chief King points out a great irony: the vast majority of calls that firefighters respond to have nothing to do with fire. Most calls are medical in nature. Shouldn’t Gilroy be responding to those calls with medical personnel in ambulances? What if AMR ambulance vehicles and personnel were housed in city fire stations? Instead, Gilroy bought an expensive STAR car, and now fire officials are lamenting the lack of use and asking to usurp the services provided by a cost-effective organization that contracts with the county as a whole.
It makes little sense. What County Executive Pete Kutras had to say, however, makes perfect sense: “There’s a long history here. Some of the fire departments have purchased auxiliary ambulances that they would like to use and earn revenue. But if you start carving into the revenue of AMR patient transport, you’re creating a situation where we may not be able to maintain service countywide.”
And if we do that, firefighters will be in the driver’s seat. Let’s sell the STAR car.
