AUSTIN, Texas — Emergency services may be getting split up in some areas of Hays County.
Right now, the San Marcos Hays County EMS Association provides ambulance and emergency services to most of the county.
However, staff with the North Hays County EMS, also known as ESD 1, could vote to cut ties with that association and provide its services.
Since 1983, San Marcos Hays County EMS has provided ambulance services to areas like Kyle, San Marcos, Dripping Springs and more to unify EMS across the county.
Association President Zack Phillips said the agency has deep roots in the community due to its reliable, high-quality service. However, cracks in the team are starting to show.
“Recent discussions about discontinuing their service agreements in favor of starting new, fragmented EMS services raise several troubling issues that I urge this court to consider,” Phillips said on Wednesday morning at the Hays County commissioners meeting.
For the past several months, Hays County ESD 1 in Dripping Springs has been considering severing its contract with the association to provide its own emergency services.
“These entities have the right and the ability to do this, but at the end of the day, it's a detriment to our citizens and the patients we serve,” Phillips said.
He said they currently provide ESD 1 with two full-time ambulances, two part-time ambulances, one backup and the staff to man them. Without the contract, the district will lose all of that.
Phillips said that may cause interruptions to service and aid to the community out there.
“You could triple it in some areas because it could go to 40-plus minutes,” he said. “The alternative of calling for mutual aid from other areas – to be honest, Austin-Travis County is extremely busy; Blanco County has very limited resources; Wimberley has limited resources. It's a very rural area, so the resources are very limited to help in that that need.”
Phillips also said the 23 people who currently serve ESD 1 would be out of a job if the contract is severed. He said fractured services are detrimental to the community because a team needs unified protocols, service and response to high-level care.
“It's not what the patients of the county deserve, especially when we're not talking about day-to-day business. We're talking life and death when minutes count,” Phillips said.
North Hays ESD 1 Chief Bob Luddy said trust in the association's ability to deliver services has started to crack due to things like instability in leadership. In the past seven months, two assistant chiefs on the association's board left for other jobs and the chief resigned on Monday night.
“Their chief resigned after a vote of no confidence against him that was signed by 90% of their employee body,” Luddy said.
He said they want to make sure they can still provide emergency services if the association is unable to. Luddy said it could happen at the same cost, or less for what they already pay the association now through the funds they receive from taxpayers' property and sales taxes.
With the plan they’ve created so far, they’d have all four ambulances on duty 24/7, all year round. They would retain a battalion chief position, as well as creating three additional positions for an assistant deputy chief, battalion chief over education and a chief over ALS first responders.
“If we end up doing this, the plan that we're going to work out, the citizens will never know that there was a change,” Luddy said.
He said ESD 1 already has the ambulances and medical equipment to make it happen. But what will be new if it had its own EMS service is being in charge of its own operational management.
“That's something that we haven't been able to achieve with the current terms of the contract. San Marcos Hays County EMS has the ultimate medical or operational control, and if we have concerns, if we want to change the start times of any of our ambulances, if we need to have personnel movements, we've not been able to effect those changes for our community. This would allow us to be able to do that,” Luddy said.
The meeting to decide whether ESD 1 will sever their contract with the San Marcos Hays County EMS association began at 5 p.m. on Tuesday. The story will be updated with the results as we get more information.