Ambulance board hears new-truck and mold-abatement updates, changes meeting frequency

BY MELINDA J. OVERSTREET
GLASGOW NEWS 1
Barren-Metcalfe Emergency Medical Services received last week one of the two ambulances it was expecting and was due to have the striping applied to it in the next several days, plus the airport station got some mold remediation and a facelift in the process recently, said Joe Middleton, executive director for the service.
Complications occurred, however, with an ambulance that was expected this week,
“I got notified by the vendor that someone inadvertently put ‘bad fuel’ in the truck,” he said of the latter one during Wednesday’s regular meeting of the board of directors for the organization. “It’s a gasoline engine, remember, so it fouled the plugs, stopped up the injectors, melted something off the top of the engine, and he called and said, ‘I’ve already called GM; they’re sending me all the parts. We’ll get that fixed and we’ll send it out to you.’ I said, ‘No, thank you. We don’t want that truck. Build me a new one,’ just due to the warranty and the implications of what’s going to happen down the road. So that truck has been delayed, because I did ask for another truck. … It’ll be about a month, month and a half before delivery on it. I thought that was the most advantageous thing to do, being that half the motor melted.”
Middleton said that, in October, they had complaints about the possibility that mold was growing in the airport station.
“Those who have been around awhile know that that is has been an ongoing moisture issue …,” he said. “We had ServPro come out and do an investigation, and indeed there was mold in the insulation around the climate-controlled ducts. We had all that abated, all of the mold removed, everything cleaned out. During this time – it was about a two-week period – we shut that station down. Nobody was in that station; well, we took advantage of that time. We removed all the mold, all the insulation, removed the majority of the ceiling tiles, had all the insulation replaced, had the HVAC inspected, had all the filters changed in the HVAC, had the ceiling replaced. While everything was moved out of the building, we had the building painted and we also went ahead – the floors had not been cleaned in many years, so we had the floors cleaned, stripped, waxed and rebuffed,” he said. “So, walking into the building, it looks pretty much like a new building at this point. After that two-week period, we opened the station back up; we went back into full operation of the station.”
The total cost of all that was $10,475, Middleton said.
“That, unfortunately, is an unbudgeted item, but it was going to cost $4,000 just to get the mold out,” he said.
He said they have climate-control thermostats in every building they can preprogram and control remotely.
“We speculate that that someone felt that the temperature we were utilizing was not most advantageous for them,” Middleton said, adding that the belief is that the master “kill” switch outside, next to the unit, had been used to adjust the temperature, and with the HVAC system off, “the mold decides to do its own thing.” They have now locked up the kill switch, he said.
The main action item for the meeting was the second reading on amendments to the bylaws for Ambulance Service Corp., the formal name of the entity, primarily related to frequency of meetings. With this change, regular meetings are only in the even-numbered months, meaning the next meeting is not until April; most remain at 4 p.m. on the fourth Wednesday of each month, but in December, it’s on the second Wednesday. April and October meetings are still to take place in Metcalfe County, as they have for years.
Other adjustments to the wording in the bylaws included: 1) making references to “T.J. Regional Health,” rather specifically than the Glasgow hospital under its umbrella, with regard to the corporation’s involvement on the board and its financial contributions, for example, and 2) changing the maximum number of directors for a committee to three, as the number of directors on the full board has decreased in recent years to six, so having more than that on the committee would constitute a quorum of the full board.
The vote was unanimous among the five members present to make the changes; Larry Wilson was absent.
Other items of business included the following:
— Shawn Estes, chief financial officer and assistant director, reported that the adjusted cash receipts stand at $3.5 million through January for the fiscal year to date. Total adjusted expenses are at $3.4 million, for a net income of $101,510. We should be at 58.33 percent of budget, and we are at 56.9 percent.
The organization ended January with $1.5 million in the bank, Estes continued. It has an additional note on a new ambulance, with a balance of $141,277. That brings the total balance on all notes to $333,985.39, according to the documentation he provided.
On the financial breakout by county, expenses were running at nearly 86 percent for Barren County and just more than 14 percent for Metcalfe County.
— Middleton provided documentation showing ambulance-run statistics, noting that they have increased slightly overall both based on calendar year (4.4 percent) and fiscal year (3.1 percent). He briefly discussed the breakdown of runs by fire district that he has begun tracking and the volume by station, as well as average chute times, response times, scene times and turnaround times (from time called to time completed).
— A 10-minute closed session for discussion of a personnel matter after which no action was taken. An hour prior to the full board meeting, the Personnel Committee had met and also had a closed session, this one of nearly half an hour, after which no action was taken.