County emergency medical service officials are considering implementing a response plan without the City of Warren signing on.

“It doesn’t sound like the city is in any hurry to line up,” COG Fire Services Committee chair Paul Pascuzzi said during Thursday’s meeting, suggesting the effort “might as well just go forward with what we have.”

The City of Warren and Sheffield, which left the EMS business late last year, are the only two agencies that did not sign on to the plan.

A county-wide response plan has been in place for several years but lacked teeth and was largely unenforceable. The new plan will bring a third-party plan administrator on board to assist with department staffing.

“The current plan in our view is the better plan,” City of Warren Fire Chief Dave Krogler said Thursday. “The new plan takes the responsibility off of the individual departments” and places it on the 911 Center.

Previously, if an agency needed to go out of service they could call a neighbor and request coverage, a procedure not broadly complied with.

“The new plan doesn’t allow for that,” Krogler said. “I don’t see us moving anywhere with the new plan. It doesn’t affect us for staffing.”

He said the 911 Center dispatching the city is “another path we’re venturing down.”

RECRUITMENT EFFORT UNDERWHELMS

Late last year, EmergyCare announced the offering of an EMS academy in the county that would pay applicants while they were being trained and then guarantee them a job at the end.

Todd Steele, the agency’s director of operations, said three individuals applied. They declined to offer two applicants and a third turned down their offer.

That information turned into a broader discussion about possible funding streams for EMS.

“We can’t continue to go to the taxpayers but that’s the only direction we can go,” Pascuzzi said.

Krogler said “small municipalities can’t afford it individually” but suggested a county-level approach that “could cover those areas…. The state has to realize they have to do something else and they don’t want to do anything.”

Dave Basnak, EmergyCare’s executive director, said he is interested in the idea of a small charge on cell phones.

“When you look at the number of devices out there, what that has the potential fund is a big chunk of what we’re talking about,” he said.

Basnak pointed out that other initiatives across the state will get funded while “we’re talking about people’s lives and the health and safety of our communities…. That’s what’s unfortunate… because EMS and fire have been so resilient through the years.”

If the funding won’t come down the line, other ideas will have to be explored.

That includes inter-agency collaboration.

To that end, Pascuzzi said five municipalities — Sheffield, Cherry Grove, Clarendon, Mead and Pleasant townships — are “looking at an intergovernmental agreement as it related to fire and EMS. Initial meetings have just started.

“(We are) looking at what we can do collectively, that there is a move afoot to try to come up with a solution in that neighborhood.”