JAMESTOWN – Jamestown city officials have sent out Requests for Proposal (RFP) to various ambulance service businesses in hopes of finding a new EMS provider in the city.
The RFP process begins as Jamestown Mayor Eddie Sundquist and his team also look to address a soon-to-be cancelled service agreement with Alstar Ambulance Services, the current EMS provider in the city that is a division of UPMC Chautauqua.
Last month Alstar announced it was cancelling its long-term agreement with the city in April. Since then, Sundquist has met with Alstar and UPMC officials to further discuss the reasons for the cancellation as well as learn more about their involvement with future EMS service in the city. A sticking point with that agreement was the amount of money Alstar would reimburse the city each time the city fire department had to respond to an EMS call, due to Alstar being unavailable or offline. In recent years, the frequency of JFD responses have gone up, meaning the amount of money Alstar has had to pay the city has also increased.
While Alstar plans to cancel its service agreement with Jamestown, it doesn’t plan to pull its operation out of the overall service area and it will continue to serve communities outside of Jamestown.
Because of the upcoming cancellation of the service agreement, Alstar could submit a proposal to the city as part of the EMS Service RFP Process. The deadline is March 11.
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