Officials with the Three Rivers Ambulance Authority, or TRAA, said they’ve made significant progress in restoring their services to acceptable levels throughout their coverage area. The biggest issue now is retaining staff.
Last year, TRAA Executive Director Joel Benz asked the Fort Wayne City Council for $3 million to keep the ambulance service afloat. Now, he said they’ve used roughly $900,000 of it.
“I think we’re not out of the woods yet, but I think we’ve made a huge amount of progress in the last year,” he said.
TRAA spent $150,000 on operations. And $750,000 went to a retention bonus to try to keep staff.
Even with that, Benz said that in the last year, TRAA has lost eight full-time employees, partially or entirely, to the newly -created Allen County fire districts.
City Councilman Russ Jehl (R, 2nd) said it’s time for elected officials to act.
“It is a wake up call tonight for the city officials and the county officials to fix this issue before it grows,” he said.
Allen County Council Vice President Paul Lagemann said the city should make TRAA a city service, and let the county fire districts handle calls outside of Fort Wayne.
Jehl said that would not fix the issue and make it worse.
“That just takes this competition that we have, this cannibalization we have, and that would just ratchet it up worse,” he said.
Lagemann said because the service TRAA provides county-wide is "vitally important, there may be willingness to help fund that," but beyond that there have been "no real conversations."
Lagemann said an EMS local income tax would generate nearly $20 million in new taxes. He said that's "not something I would support." nor did he know of anyone on the Allen County Council who would.
Jehl said he hopes to present a solution to the city council soon.