The license renewal for Charlemont Ambulance is currently in process and for the first time in recent history, Hawley will not be included as an area of primary service coverage due to a stalemate between the two towns’ Selectboards.
The impasse arose from Charlemont’s request that Hawley pay $7,000 for ambulance service in fiscal year 2022, and Hawley’s refusal to do so without first reviewing Charlemont Ambulance’s financials, which Charlemont in turn refused to provide.
“Hawley has not been willing to work with us,” said Charlemont Selectboard Chair Marguerite Willis. “We had to make a decision.”
Willis and her counterpart in Hawley, Hawley Selectboard Chair Hussain Hamdan, explained that for the last decade, Hawley has not paid a fee for ambulance service due to there being no formal agreement between the two towns. For a brief period prior to 2009, Hawley made small contributions to the ambulance service each year.
“However, we finally went to (Hawley) Town Hall to have a meeting and one of our selectmen finally left,” Willis said. “It was somewhat of a disaster.”
During that meeting in November 2019, she said, Charlemont asked Hawley to sign a service zone agreement, which included a fee for service.
“Because we’re not sure of where we’re going (financially), we thought the best we could offer was a fee for service for one year,” she explained. “They wanted to see our books; they wanted to see all sorts of things no other service provider would provide them.”
Charlemont, though it ultimately didn’t provide the financial details requested by Hawley, returned with an agreement that included a $7,000 fee for fiscal year 2022.
“That fee doesn’t include fuel,” Willis said, noting that the cost was derived in part from a five-year rolling average of call volume and service. “It doesn’t include insurance for the vehicle; it doesn’t include housing or heating.”
Without the financials to review, however, the Hawley Selectboard refused to agree to the proposed arrangement.
“We’ve been asking to meet with them,” Hamdan said.
He noted that it is common for towns to provide a fee to the ambulance service, if the town doesn’t have an ambulance of its own.
“It’s not unprecedented and it’s not something the town of Hawley is opposed to, but we would like to see more of their financials,” he said. “We are not opposed to paying a reasonable fee for services.”
He said “reasonable” would be a matter of how the town arrived at its numbers.
“We’d like to have a real agreement that makes it clear what the party’s obligations and expectations are,” he said, adding that the town would want to have a clearer picture of what a longer-term agreement would look like.
According to Hamdan, Charlemont Ambulance responds to roughly 75 percent of Hawley’s calls — though because a large number of those calls require paramedic-level services, other mutual aid ambulances respond as well. Hamdan said that’s one reason the town signed a mutual aid agreement with Adams in 2019 — which Charlemont took issue with, for the potential it has for resulting in a “turf war” when multiple ambulances respond to a single scene, Willis said.
“We don’t have enough people in all of Western Mass. for all of that to occur,” she said.
Hamdan said the intention with that memorandum of agreement was not to “walk out on Charlemont.”
“We simply added Adams to a mutual aid list of services that respond if your primary is not available,” he said. “I don’t know why they took issue with that.”
Hamdan said the Charlemont Selectboard has declined recent requests to meet; while Willis maintains that her board had attempted discussion and Hawley failed to work with them.
“We had to make a decision,” Willis said. “We were renewing our license and we have to finalize our budget.”
Hamdan emphasized that with or without an agreement with Charlemont, “(Hawley is) not going to see ambulance service stop.”
“I want to make that clear — Charlemont is not the only ambulance service,” he said, naming mutual aid services such as Shelburne Falls, Colrain, Highland Ambulance and Hilltown Community Ambulance, among others. “We have mutual aid service with many services. People will still be getting ambulance services, and it will be coming from insurance providers. This is not going to cause a problem in terms of patient care.”
Mary Byrne can be reached at mbyrne@recorder.com or 413-930-4429. Twitter: @MaryEByrne