‘We can’t sustain this’ — Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps says it lacks funds needed to serve residents

Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps, the nonprofit organization that provides emergency medical services to nearly all of the Town of Riverhead, is so underfunded it cannot hire and retain the paid responders it needs to do its job, according to the presdient of the ambulance corps.

The organization is coming off a couple of tough years because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which stretched its volunteer base and its budget to the limit, RVAC President Garrett Lake said.

The nonprofit serves the Riverhead Ambulance District under a contract with the district, which is a special taxing district, governed by the the Riverhead Town Board, that takes in the entire town except the area within the Wading River Fire District. The Wading River Fire Department provides rescue services with the fire district.

The Riverhead Ambulance District is 78 square miles and includes a large number of senior communities, a regional retail hub and some of the town’s most densely populated areas. The Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps answers over 4,000 calls a year.

“The town’s just allowing all this growth but they’re not growing our budget,” Lake said. “We can’t sustain this any longer,” he said.

“We told them five years ago that we have to raise our budget every year for the next five years to get up to the proper staffing levels to cover Riverhead Town,” Lake said.

“We need to have three ambulances staffed all day every day from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. or we can’t cover our calls,” he said.

While RVAC has about 85 members, it must rely on paid responders to handle the calls that come in, Lake said. And its budget does not allow the corps to pay EMTs and paramedics competitive wages relative to what other ambulance districts are offering. The net result is a huge recruitment and retention problem.

The ambulance corps’ budget is actually one line item in the ambulance district’s budget: the amount allocated for the contract between the district and the nonprofit corporation, Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps Inc. Ambulance district taxes also fund the purchase, repair and maintenance of vehicles, rent paid to the town by by the district for the ambulance headquarters on Osborn Avenue, phone service and utilities, as well as administrative charges.

The 2021 district budget is just under $1.65 million, of which just over $1.2 million represents the contract with RVAC. The ambulance corps sought a $544,690 increase for 2022, to bring its contractual amount to a little less than $1.78 million — with $1.16 million going directly to personnel expenses.

“We need more people and we need to be able to pay the people we have a higher hourly wage so we can keep them,” Lake said.

“The corps is providing an essential service to the people of the town,” he said. Its board members and several dozen other trained EMTs and paramedics are volunteers.

But the days when an all-volunteer corps could handle the calls are long gone. “The town has just grown too much for that and the budget to support the service just has not kept pace.,” Lake said. Other ambulance services in nearby areas cover geographically smaller territories and far less busier districts have much bigger budgets to work with, he said.

The corps president said the town treats the organization like it is trying to take advantage of the town somehow, which Lake says he and other RVAC board members simply can’t understand.

Lake said the town supervisor’s tentative budget was set without input from the ambulance corps.

Supervisor Yvette Aguiar said the ambulance corps did not respond to requests for meetings.

“We have been trying to get a meeting with them in the last, I would say, six weeks to two months,” Aguiar said in an Oct. 20 interview. “We’ve sent emails. We gave them dates. They’ve never responded,” she said. Aguiar said she tasked Deputy Town Attorney Dan McCormick, who has been negotiating RVAC’s contract, with “the responsibility of trying to set up a meeting with them before my budget was due,” she said. “Apparently that didn’t work out,” she said.

Not true, said Lake. McCormick sent an email to him at an old personal email address, rather than his RVAC address, advising him of a meeting date and time.

“When noon on the appointed date arrived and we didn’t show up, don’t you think he’d pick up the phone and call us, to ask where we were? No. They just went ahead and set the budget without us,” Lake said. The ambulance corps didn’t learn of it until the supervisor’s tentative budget was filed and the RVAc contractual allocation for 2022 was 1% higher than it is for 2021, he said.

“Apart from personnel, our expenses have gone way up. Before COVID, we paid $136 per box for gloves. Now, the same box costs almost $400. That’s just one example. The corps’ workers compensation insurance costs skyrocketed, he said.

RVAC’s most recent contract with the ambulance district, which had a term of five years, expired over a year ago.

“They’re asking for a 44% increase, which is beyond possible,”Aguiar said Oct. 20. “This is very common. It’s very common for them to ask for a huge increase. We give them what they need, the supplies that they need, but we have to assess what their needs are and they have to provide us with their with their audit, and in 2020 and 2021, and then, then they sit down and it gets negotiated,” the supervisor said.

Financial administrator William Rothaar said last year RVAC asked for a 22% increase, “which obviously we can’t afford.”

Rothaar said on Oct. 20 the town is “giving them other money besides the 1% that’s required in their contract,” referring to the $120,000 allocated to RVAC from the NextEra/L.I. Solar Community Benefits Agreement. In that agreement, the solar power company agreed to pay the town $1.5 million to be allocated for various purposes, including public safety and emergency medical services.

Pursuant to the community benefits agreement, Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps is being allocated $50,000 for equipment and $70,000 for paramedic response training. The $50,000 is going to purchase a specialty ATV that will allow RVAC to reach victims that ambulances and the corps’ “gator” vehicle can’t access. The training funds are supposed to be for training to handle emergencies related to photovoltaic cells (solar panels.)

Lake and other RVAC representatives as well as the corps’ attorney met with McCormick and Rothaar on last Monday. RVAC reiterated that the “barebones” budget increase they need is $50,000, over and above the 1% increase included in the supervisor’s budget. That $50,000 would cover workers compensation insurance cost increases and “very small raises” for paid staff — who, Lake, noted, are not paid any fringe benefits such as health insurance.

“The $50,000 is going to come from somewhere,” Lake said, “but it’s not going to increase our budget. So next year, we’re back in the same place.”

Rothaar confirmed that there is no plan to increase the corps’ budget by $50,000. The money will come from revenues and fund balance, he said. There is no need to change the budget allocation, according to Rothaar.

The town board will hold a public hearing on the proposed 2022 budget at its Wednesday afternoon meeting. The supervisor filed her tentative budget with the town clerk by Sept. 30, as required by state law. The town board has not had any public budget discussions since.

Councilman Tim Hubbard, the town board liaison to the ambulance corps, acknowledged in an Oct. 20 interview he had not met with the RVAC board about the budget. He did not attend the meeting last Monday, Lake said. Hubbard did not return a phone call today seeking comment.

Lake said today he couldn’t believe the language used in a resolution on the town board’s agenda Wednesday approving the allocation of funds under the NextEra community benefits agreement. The resolution refers to RVAC’s 2022 budget request, even though the community benefit agreement funds have nothing to do with the 2022 operating budget, he said.

“It’s like the town is going out of its way to say knock us,” he said.

The resolution begins with recitations about the ambulance corps’ requests for a 44% contract increase “with a 56% in salaries” [sic] having the potential to “override New York State 2% tax cap,” it states.

It states that the financial administrator, supervisor, and McCormick “on September 14, 2021 and on October 25, 2021, met with representatives of Riverhead Ambulance Corp. [sic] to discuss” the budget. But, Lake said, there was no meeting on Sept. 14 and the supervisor never met with the ambulance corps at all.

“It’s just false,” Lake said.

The resolution doesn’t even have the ambulance corps’ name correct, he noted. It states Riverhead Ambulance Corp. throughout, using the abbreviation for “corporation.” But the organization’s name is Riverhead Ambulance Corps Inc. The nonprofit has been serving the town since 1978. “It’s so disappointing,” Lake said.