HARDIN CO.—The appearance of the Hardin County Ambulance Service’s union representative wasn’t enough to immediately sway the county board from a recent decision to sell the service…but it appears the overwhelming force of the presence of employees might have gone a long way toward at least causing them to reconsider.
At a county board meeting held Thursday, December 6, that’s exactly what happened. And now at issue is whether or not the board is going to follow through with a mid-November deal of sorts that they made with Richard “Doc” Collier, of Williamson County, to purchase and operate the floundering ambulance service…which got into the shape it did due to abject mismanagement by former county board chairman Wayne Eichorn and former Elizabethtown town marshal, fire chief and ambulance director, the late Ed Conkle.
Disarray before ED (Ed’s death)
Since long before Conkle’s death a year ago this month, the ambulance service had been in complete disarray (with infighting comparable to a soap opera script, complete with allegations that Conkle was only running the show there so he could curry sexual favors with certain EMTs; vehicles that weren’t being maintained; and, judging by the numbers discovered earlier this year, at least Conkle, if not others, using the service’s diminishing funds as their own personal savings and loan).
But after Conkle’s death, closer scrutiny of the finances revealed that the ambulance service was in worse shape than previously believed. Billing was completely out of control and uncollected. To remedy this, Darlene Austin, who had worked in a similar capacity before, was brought in to handle billing and ensure collection of what the service was owed. Checks and balances were put into place so that certain ones among the staff were no longer able to take advantage of “perks” Conkle—and those whom he favored—had taken advantage of over the years (although that didn’t work out initially, with some more well-versed in “signing names for others,” commonly known as forgery, being able to get by with such a thing while pinning the blame on the unsuspecting….resulting in the termination of some decent employees.)
Add to the turmoil the possibility, discussed within recent months while Eichorn was still on the board, of the service being bid out to a private entity, and the employees felt that to have the union rep, Bill Trout, present at the next county board meeting would probably be of benefit to all.
Trout asks for clarification
Trout opened his portion of the agenda telling the board that the main thing he needed to know from the board was if they could work on the situation the ambulance service was in now, or if it was the board’s intent to “move things on.
“If it’s the intent to keep the service here, we’re willing to sit down and get it done,” Trout said earnestly. “If it’s handed off to another agency, we’ll have to ride it out to the end and see where it goes. It’s in your ballpark.”
Newly-seated county board member Mike Burton (who beat Wayne Eichorn for the office, but who is said to be an Eichorn acolyte in that he had Eichorn’s approval despite running against him, a common practice in Hardin County so the status quo can be maintained) advised that there hadn’t been much communication between the county and Collier.
“But as of December third, I was newly-elected to this county, and I’m going forward,” Burton seemed to bull up a little bit. “Everybody knows about a little about this and a little about that but not a lot of everything. As of this morning at 7 a.m., the Hardin County Ambulance Service went back to one ambulance which had to be done.
“What we expect is,” Burton continued, “I run some figures on it and we’re looking at somewhere between $100-$120,000 in savings just by doing away with one. We’ll still have ALS (advanced life saving) status, and will be with one rig. We’re looking at pushing some numbers and seeing what’s going on but it doesn’t look good,” Burton told Trout. “If it takes awhile, maybe a year, okay. Then if things turn around, it could possibly come back.”
The subject of privatization
Trout asked if it was Burton’s vote, then, to let someone (Collier) take the ambulance service for a year at least.
“We have to explore the privatization of the service,” said county’s legal counsel and new prosecutor Tara Wallace.
“It has to be,” Burton said definitively. “It’s in bad shape.”
Board member Larry Stewart said he wished the county had looked into privatization three years ago, noting that they’d tried two or three in-house directors and it’s “still not working out” to operate it that way (avoiding the punchline that Conkle had been one of those in-house directors).
“I think you’ve had really good employees down there and have worked hard getting service out to the people,” Trout noted. “I don’t think it’s been any of their faults,” he said, underscoring the fact, without coming right out and saying it, that the latest in-house director, Conkle, undermined practically every good employee the service had ever had the benefit of.
Ultimately, Trout told the board, everyone at the service wanted to stay.
“If that’s something you ultimately allow us to try to do, we’ll sit down and try to help save those extra dollars; we’ll do short-term contracts. But I don’t know what else we can do other than that,” he said.
A year since ‘new management’ takeover
Wallace pointed out that it had been a year since “new management” had taken over, and pointed out that the billing department was having trouble according to figures she had available before her: 28 runs that couldn’t be billed because of lack of paperwork, 18 of which were because signatures weren’t obtained from a physician.
Robinson noted Medicaid cuts of 23 percent that had occurred and the agency didn’t even know it for six months.
“It’s getting tough trying to get money in. We’ve borrowed $66,000, we used up last year’s, the year’s before, and this year’s taxes. I think we have $8,000 to get us through this month,” Robinson said. “Every payroll, we fall short. It ain’t what you guys are doing,” he said to the audience of EMTs and other employees. “We’re just not getting revenue in that we got in two months ago. We’re just outta money.”
Communication
Trout noted that billing went back to ‘communication.’
“We can do in-house training to keep everything up to speed,” Trout said. “If they were allowed to do the billing, we could get software to do it at no cost, then have training on what they need to stay on top of it. A lot of this fell through the cracks.”
Tax levies were discussed, as well as a county public safety tax to support the ambulance service being placed on the ballot.
New sheriff JT Fricker noted that with one rig down, neighboring Pope County was helping cover the county.
Then Fricker’s wife, Jessica, an EMT at the service, took a turn at trying to explain what the county board perhaps wasn’t aware of.
She advised that the run sheets Wallace had been presented and was referencing had been corrected, and physician’s signatures, difficult to obtain to begin with, had been done so on all but six Wallace had before her; that the union employees had given about $60,000 in concessions in the past week; that they were bringing billing down to a manageable amount; and that all of them worked jobs elsewhere, yet were working on-call hours, but with no on-call policy in the current contract.
Burton advised that that was why he felt they needed to go back to one ambulance: he didn’t feel it was fair to ask them to work and then the county not be able to pay (a circumstance that happened frequently when Conkle was in charge, although that wasn’t mentioned.)
Collier in the ambulance barn
More discussion ensued about Pope County helping cover with just one ambulance available in Hardin, and then Wayne Lane, union steward, spoke up.
“While on call today,” he said, “that person we were talking about earlier is under the assumption that he’s taking the service.”
The room stilled, as it was Collier that Lane was talking about.
“He was down there today at the ambulance hall (in Rosiclare) going through paperwork without anyone in the office.”
The EMTs started murmuring quietly as Lane continued.
“He don’t need to be going through personnel files, but he was, looking for a phone number to call one of our employees,” Lane advised. “Doc Collier was looking for a number to call someone at their house. He’s told some of us we will lose our jobs because we work for other services.”
Wallace apologized for that.
More discussion ensued about bringing payroll down, just a couple of people on staff doing billing so that “not everybody has their hands in it” (which would alleviate some of the billing backlog), and other sundry items before the subject got back to Collier.
The tentative agreement
The board noted that they’d come to a tentative verbal agreement with the man, who lives in Williamson County, to begin operations with him January 1 if he were to purchase the service and run it privately. They would retain the Hardin County Ambulance Service name, and the one-year agreement would be a trial with either party having 30 days to terminate the agreement.
Part of the board and ambulance staff believed that, regarding the 30 days, this meant 30 days from January 1 and a takeover; others believed it meant 30 days from the mentioning of the agreement, which was on November 16.
Wallace said she’d contact Collier the next day and see what his take on it was.
However, disturbed by the fact that someone who had no claim at all to the ambulance service or anything in it could just walk into the ambulance hall and start going through personnel files, Disclosure publisher Jack Howser asked the board and Wallace if there was a mechanism in place to keep Collier from “walking into the ambulance hall, and what’s the board’s directive to stop him?”
“It’s a public place,” said Robinson. “But if he’s gonna get into the filing system, no. Darlene (Austin, who is acting as the service’s director) has every right to call the sheriff’s office and have him removed.”
Fricker chuckled from his seat in the front row.
“But he’s already done it,” Howser pointed out.
“Then he’s in violation,” Robinson said.
“Next time, I’ll call you and you’ll remove him?” Lane said to Sheriff Fricker.
“You guys see him there and sign a statement, and we’ll give him free room and board,” Fricker answered.
“Should I make a statement about the incident today?” Lane asked, and both Fricker and Wallace gave their assent.
Darlene clears a lot up
The meeting ended with Jessica Fricker explaining the odd way overtime works for the service, and then Darlene Austin came to the board table and gave a report on what she’d been doing managing the service and handling billing.
The report was a lot more positive than anyone expected, and by the end of the meeting, which in all lasted several hours, the board seemed to be much more satisfied with how the service was running than they were when the meeting started.
It was noted that at the next meeting (scheduled for Dec. 20 at 5 p.m.), the ambulance staff should put themselves on the agenda, and a decision would be made as regards whether the service would actually be sold to Collier, or if they were going to make it go as a county service but keeping only one rig on the road, thus asking for assistance from neighboring counties like Pope when the rig was out on transfers and kept from emergency calls.