Ambulance committee unclear on funding role

As the Lincoln Parish Police Jury Ambulance Service Committee fielded proposals for rural ambulance and rescue service Thursday morning, members appeared uncertain if finding a way to pay for those proposals was in their purview.

After roughly an hour and a half of discussing the offers from the Ruston Fire Department (RFD) and Pafford EMS, committee member and Dubach Mayor Mona Wilson steered the conversation back to the thus-far undetermined payment method.

“This is all well and good… but we’ve got to finance this somehow,” Wilson said.

The committee, and the police jury that formed it, for the majority of this year have been seeking to ink EMS and rescue agreements to provide those services to parish residents outside of Ruston in 2023, when the parish’s current contract with the RFD will expire.

Of the options now on the table, the police jury will, at minimum, be expected to pay $645,604 for those services next year, and that figure could be as much as $1 million.

The committee has not discussed any particular funding source options in its past three meetings.

“Every meeting we get ‘nothing to comment on,’” Wilson said. “Somebody’s got to be working on this. Who’s working on it, and what are they doing?”

Committee member and police jury President Richard Durrett said the funding is something the jury will have to work on.

“And we’ll be glad to,” he said.

Multiple committee members wondered if payment is part of what they were supposed to recommend to the jury.

“If you want to talk about financing, I believe that’s certainly within your authority to make a recommendation,” jury attorney Lewis Jones said. “Ultimately, the police jury will decide how to pay for it.”

The Leader on Friday asked committee Chairman Charlie Edwards whether he had been expecting the committee to make a funding recommendation to the jury or not.

“That depends on whether the jury asks us to,” Edwards said.

He also said the committee would have to wait until the jury made a final EMS and rescue provider selection before they could come to any financing recommendation.

“Until the jury makes a decision, we don’t know what dollar amount we’re going to have to talk about,” he said.

He said nonetheless he has had discussions with a few other committee members on the topic.

“We have looked at a few other options,” Edwards said. “So far nothing has jumped out at us as a viable alternative.”

He declined to specify what those options are.

Durrett could not be reached by press time Friday for comment on what research the jury has done into possible funding solutions.

Skip Russell, who chairs the jury’s Finance Committee, said Friday he expects the jury will fund year 1 of the contract it chooses out of several of its existing budget funds.

“However, our budget cannot stand this amount,” Russell said.

So he proposes a $5 increase to the existing $72 structure fee that funds the fire district. That change would need action from the state Legislature to go into effect.

“That would start with the second year’s funding,” Russell said.

Financing sources were last briefly discussed at the committee’s Aug. 18 meeting. Edwards informed committee members the panel’s one tangible idea for funding — a fee attached to residents’ utility bills — wasn’t viable because Entergy had “stonewalled” all attempts to negotiate such a fee.

He mentioned another possibility at that meeting: calling an election to unlock the jury’s $10 million in proceeds from the sale of the Lincoln General Hospital.

That money is currently bound up in a trust fund and can’t be spent without public approval.

Neither that option nor any other has come up again at subsequent meetings.

Parish Administrator Doug Postel said he and the police jury’s treasurer, Michael Sutton, have explored some possibilities on their own initiative but haven’t been approached by any committee members on the subject in “the last couple months.”

Postel said they are fairly deep into the budgeting process for the jury’s 2023 fiscal year proposal, which is usually presented to jurors in October, introduced as an ordinance in November, and adopted in December.

“We don’t know at this point (what to budget for ambulance service),” he said. “I’m hoping we’ll have some answers very soon.”

The next jury meeting is Oct. 11.