HOULTON, Maine — Town councilors on Monday evening questioned the local fire chief about what some saw as excessive overtime expenses for the community’s ambulance service.
Milton Cone, who oversees the department that handles both fire and ambulance services, noted during the lengthy meeting that there were a number of positive aspects about his report concerning the ambulance service.
While the operating budget for the department is $787,588, the projected revenue is $1.3 million, according to Cone, and in the first four months of the year, the town collected $463,400 in revenues.
“It looks like we are right on line and we may reach our projected revenue for the ambulance service,” said the chief.
Several councilors, however, took issue with the amount of overtime that has accumulated in the department and spent nearly an hour of the meeting discussing the matter.
From January through April, the ambulance crew made 113 trips out of town that resulted in 1,772 hours of overtime. That equates to each of the six employees receiving an average of 17 hours of overtime per week.
Council Chairman William McCluskey said that so many hours of overtime in that time period was “unsustainable at any level.
“One thousand, seven hundred and seventy-two hours of overtime for the first few months,” he said. “Why aren’t we hiring more help? We just had an ambulance accident, did we not? I live in a different world than the municipal world, but in my world that is unsustainable at any level.”
In February, a Houlton ambulance sustained extensive damage after striking a Maine Department of Transportation plow truck on Interstate-95 near the Stillwater Avenue exit in Orono.
Councilor Rosa McNally noted that 1,772 hours of overtime equaled 443 hours a month or 110 hours a week.
“That is two full-time positions,” she said. “Those are huge numbers on an annual basis. … We are running a business and we have to run this like a business.”
Cone said that the overtime hours were impacted by numerous trips to take patients out of the area. He said that ambulance crews made two trips to Boston in March and April, a trip to Vermont and multiple trips to Portland. Cone said that it takes two people to do such a transfer out of the area.
“But there are ambulance services that do not have paramedics driving the ambulance, they have drivers,” said McCluskey. “It is just too expensive. I understand making money, but the town needs money, too. Just because you are making money doesn’t give you carte blanche to spend it. I am not saying that anyone is doing a bad job, but we have a fiscal responsibility. The overtime hours are staggering. I feel we need to start doing something about this massive overtime. It is massive.”
Town Manager William MacDonald acknowledged that overtime was an issue in the department and said that hiring more people was an option. He cautioned that hiring new staff also required paying benefits, which would impact the town’s budget.
The councilors discussed ways to save money in the department, including exploring new billing options. They also requested that Cone provide them with additional information about the department at a future meeting.
They took no action on the update Monday evening.
