The City of Jacksonville officially accepted ECHO Ambulance as the city’s second emergency services provider on September 9th.
The acceptance of ECHO’s ambulance service’s application by the city came after an approved second reading of an updated Ambulance Service ordinance that puts in place language and procedural updates as well as a fine and fee structures for licensed ambulance services for the city. The changes to the old ordinance happened after a series of meetings, often contentious, between the city’s Ambulance Commission, current emergency service provider LifeStar Ambulance, and community stakeholders.
Morgan County Emergency Services Coordinator Phil McCarty says that the changes to the ordinance and the acceptance of ECHO to split up the workload on 9-1-1 calls for the city is the culmination of months of work by several individuals: “It’s something we’ve been working on since February. It’s important for the community. I really think that this is just the start. There are a lot of challenges across the entire country when it comes to EMS, not just here in Jacksonville. We’re not alone. It’s just a lot of work and it’s not going to go away. We may not hear about it for a few weeks, months, years…I hope. I think we’ve found a resolution over where we’ve been for 9 months of the unknown or what the direction was going to be. I look forward to working with both providers to make sure we provide the best service we can to the community.”
The conversations were prompted to begin after statistics showed that LifeStar wasn’t meeting the standards of the old ordinance, which required 3 fully-staffed Advance Life Support (ALS) rigs each day for 9-1-1 service calls. From Jan. 1, 2023, until the beginning of 2024, LifeStar met the city ordinance 2% of the time and 80% of the time had only two units available. Pana-based ECHO Ambulance signed an exclusive patient transfer contract with Jacksonville Memorial Hospital, and began handling patient transfers for the hospital in August 2023. Danny Kloever, who co-owns ECHO, said in meetings in February that he decided to place an application and offer one ALS rig to the city after citizens asked him if they would start supporting 9-1-1 calls in Jacksonville. The city has not had two ambulance services since America Ambulance ceased operations in 2018.
McCarty says there is still work that needs to be done to ramp up ECHO’s service to Jacksonville and decide on procedures for rotation of calls to make sure that both services remain viable: “We had one meeting with both providers immediately following the first reading of the new ordinance at the end of last month. There’s a lot of work to do. We want to make sure we get input from the providers as well as talk about what we can and cannot make happen, and set expectations where we can meet, and then, continue a process for continually monitoring the system to make sure we are meeting everyone’s needs. That’s really what we have talked about. There’s going to be at least 2-3 more meetings as we come into October and service starts being provided on a regular basis by two providers.”
How those procedures and if they are going to meet the needs into the future remains to be seen, as an independent study sanctioned by the Morgan County Commissioners and the City of Jacksonville for emergency services adequacy and viability still has not been released to the public. The study was expected to be released sometime this month. LifeStar President Roger D. Campbell has regularly argued that the City of Jacksonville wouldn’t financially be able to support two ambulance services in operation. At one point during discussions over the ordinance changes with the Ambulance Commission, Campbell threatened to pull operations out of Jacksonville despite his company enlarging their footprint and regularly posting ‘Help Wanted’ ads on social media and in the local newspapers.
McCarty says that immediate changes might not be felt once ECHO goes into service, but he believes that it will set up more efficient services and provide Emergency Management a bit more of a strategic plan in the long term: “Competition is somewhat healthy. I don’t mean that to sound bad because EMS deals with people’s lives. In this regard though, it may make everyone look at how they do things and see if they can do things better – whatever that may be.”
The Journal Courier reports that ECHO’s expected on-board time for operations is some time in mid-October.