Jamestown’s hiring of 12 additional firefighters with federal funding from a SAFER grant and ARPA funding doesn’t solve the city’s ambulance response problem.

The additional staff are a band-aid, especially if the number of firefighters comes back to pre-2022 levels when current grant funding expires in 2026.

In 2020 ALSTAR Ambulance officials signed a new contract with the city to be Jamestown’s primary ambulance responder. ALSTAR does handle the majority of ambulance responses, but the number of EMS calls Jamestown firefighters respond to has continued rising even after ALSTAR Ambulance officials said in 2020 they were planning to increase hiring so the agency spent less time out of service. Since then, Jamestown firefighters’ EMS responses increased by 110 from 2020 to 2021 and a whopping 395 from 2020 to 2022.

That’s why Councilman Jeff Russell, R-At Large, is sounding alarm now about ALSTAR Ambulance’s difficulties meeting levels of service spelled out in the current ambulance service contract. Russell expressed doubts about the contract when it was voted on in October 2020. On Monday Russell was even more frank about the state of ambulance responses in Jamestown.

“There’s been this push lately, obviously by the mayor, for public safety; having news briefings on public safety. But this contract has been pushed to the wayside. I think as a municipality, and as an administration, we are not holding UPMC as an entity to this contract because this is getting violated every single day, or nearly every single day, and no one is saying anything about it,” Russell said during Monday’s City Council meeting. “Instead, what we’re doing is we’re continuing to push more and more on our firefighters. We’re allocating millions of dollars to hire more firefighters. We’re buying second ambulances, and everyone is ignoring this contract.”

Russell is right to be frustrated, as we’re sure ALSTAR officials are frustrated by being out of service. It is, after all, money out of ALSTAR’s pockets when the agency can’t respond to a call in Jamestown. This isn’t a time to point fingers or assign blame, but a thought that the next contract must be a realistic one. City officials need to know realistically how many calls ALSTAR can respond to each year and then figure out the most cost-effective way to handle the calls that remain.

That could mean dusting off the plan to create a separate non-profit ambulance company in Jamestown as was proposed by former Mayor Sam Teresi in 2019. An option could be a contract with a secondary provider rather than asking firefighters to be the primary backup to ALSTAR. Jamestown is better able to respond to EMS calls now than it was in 2020 thanks to federal funding — but that may not always remain the case.

That means now is the time to create a plan that protects city residents from a public safety and a financial perspective as the city and ALSTAR move into the future.