By Jason Stuart
Ranger-Review Staff Writer
The Glendive Ambulance Service will soon be adding a brand new ambulance to its fleet.
The Glendive City Council unanimously approved the purchase of a new ambulance from Sawtooth Emergency Vehicles of Boise, Idaho, at a cost of $198,500 at their Jan. 17 meeting.
The new ambulance will take approximately six months to reach Glendive, according to Ambulance Service co-director Mary Jo Gehnert. The company begins with a basic vehicle chassis and then builds the ambulance from scratch to the exact specifications provided. The new ambulance will be slightly longer than the service’s existing three, be four-wheel drive and has an automatic cot loader.
The expense of the vehicle is somewhat more than the $165,000 to $180,000 estimate Gehnert and Ambulance Service co-director Todd Opp gave to the city council when they began looking for a new ambulance.
The primary reason for the higher cost, Gehnert explained to council members at the Jan. 11 meeting of the city Finance, Utilities, Property and Recreation Committee, is new federal regulations which require the ambulance cot to be bolted directly to the vehicle frame, rather than mounted to the floor.
Gehnert stressed to council members that the increased cost was not due to festooning the new ambulance with unneeded options.
“The only convenience items we’ve added were a backup camera and cell phone booster,” Gehnert said. “We didn’t load this up.”
Opp added he and Gehnert just happened to have the opportunity to inspect an ambulance from Sawtooth which almost precisely fit the specifications they had submitted for their ambulance, which he said helped justify in their minds the increased expense.
“It worked out really well that we got to see a model almost exactly like the one we specked in the bid when it came through on the way to another community. It helped us validate the costs,” Opp said.
One wrinkle which may end up costing more money in the not-too-distant future is that new federal regulation which requires cots to be bolted to the ambulance frame.
Gehnert said regulators want all ambulances across Montana to be in compliance with the new regulation by 2018. If forced to retrofit their three existing ambulances in that manner, she said it would not come cheap.
“To retrofit them, it would be anywhere from $7,000 to $15,000 per ambulance,” Gehnert said.
She added that whether the state will actually try to force local ambulance services to retrofit existing ambulances remains an open question. Gehnert believes that possibly not, simply because the cost of doing it would be unduly burdensome for far too many of Montana’s smaller, rural ambulance services.
The Ambulance Service has the money in its fund to cover the cost of the new ambulance. The funds for the purchase are not tax dollars. The Ambulance Service operates as an enterprise fund, meaning it is wholly supported by the fees the service charges patients and receives no city taxpayer funding.
Reach Jason Stuart at rrreporter@rangerreview.com.