Is Greenfield about to go into the ambulance business?
Greenfield mayoral candidate Brickett Allis says one way to pump some more money into the city’s chronically under-funded fire department is to expand it to include a local ambulance service similar to what currently exists in Northampton.
“All of our firefighters are EMT basics and they would be able to run a basic level ambulance service, and that could bring in between $1 million and $1.3 million in revenue, which might free up money to do things like build a new fire house,” Allis said.
Allis said, for years, Greenfield’s ambulance service was provided by a hometown company run by a local family, which handled all of the billing related to that service. Now, said service is provided by AMR Ambulance, which Allis says may not be the best long-term solution for Greenfield.
“It’s a huge nationwide company and I’m not sure how much longer we are going to be able to rely on them,” Allis said. “From what I’ve seen, they aren’t always able to make the runs that we end up making, but we can’t transport so we don’t get paid for that.”
Allis says establishing a city-run ambulance is in line with his philosophy of developing services that both improve safety and pay dividends fiscally.
“We need to focus on those types of things that are public safety-related mandated services,” he said. “We need to prioritize because if we don’t, and we say everything becomes important then nothing becomes important, and we can’t allow that.”
When Northampton did this a few years back, I remember it being a tough sell initially, until it started making money, which seems to be the tonic to make most resistance disappear.
Last week’s column on the potential pitfalls of school regionalization had barely hit the streets before it generated some interesting reaction, including from a guy whose been involved with this discussion almost from the beginning.
Franklin County Sheriff Chris Donelan was representing the Second Franklin District in the Massachusetts House of Representatives about a dozen years ago when talk of regionalization first began to percolate among the commonwealth’s power brokers.
“At the time, (Sen.) Stan (Rosenberg). (Rep. Steve (Kulik) and I convened a working group to study this very topic,” Donelan wrote.
“We all knew population and enrollment was declining and that the time would come when Franklin County would not be able to sustain nine school districts for 7,000 kids,” he added.
Donelan said he, Kulik and Rosenberg shared the same concerns I have about the potential unintended social consequences that could accompany regionalization, and hoped to find a way to head it off.
“We thought if we centralized all administration, we could save enough to keep all community schools open, which would keep kids in their hometowns and close to their schools,” Donelan wrote.
Donelan said the idea ended up getting “squashed” by some local superintendents, whom he declined to name. Meanwhile, the predictions Donelan and others made regarding enrollment and sustainability appear to be materializing more quickly than expected, which may make it tough for those districts to control their own destiny much longer.
Sometimes, towns make the right move at the right time.
That appears to be the case in Sunderland, which tomorrow cuts the ribbon on its new eight-acre “Riverside Park” project that has been five years in the making.
“It’s very exciting,” said Sara Snyder, chairwoman of the Community Pathways Committee, which spearheaded the project. “We’ve been working on it for a long time.”
The park is located behind Sunderland Town Hall and links a series of playing fields and the veterans’ memorial with a pedestrian loop that leads to the nearby Sunderland Public Library, and a boat ramp and trail that runs along the Deerfield River.
Working in that building every day, I’ve had a front row seat to the construction and I can tell you that people are going to enjoy this new feature, which will be officially unveiled as part of a day-long series of activities that starts with the aforementioned 9:30 ribbon cutting which will include an appearance by First Franklin District Rep., and Sunderland “home girl,” Natalie Blais.
If you want to take a gander at an example of the best of what government can do, stop down for part of the day. I’m pretty sure you won’t be disappointed.
Chris Collins is a Greenfield native and a former staff reporter for the Recorder. He can be reached at sourcechris.collins@gmail.com.