County boards address EMS privatization proposal at joint session, Part 2

Editor's Note: This is Part 2 of our coverage of the Sept. 8 special joint session on the proposed privatization of Pulaski County EMS. Part 1 ran last week. Councilman AJ Gutwein recalled what happened at the Aug. 24 budget session, when they had gotten to EMS. He said there was a long silence and then he proposed that they just go through the budget line by line, like they did with the rest of the budgets they went through that day. "I started at the first. No one said anything. Finally, Mike [Tiede] says, 'You know what? I think we should go with what we'e talked about before, $550,000. We can privatize it.' But did we ever go through this and see where we can cut?" Gutwein asked. He said that he did, and he found that they could probably trim off about $97,000 off of a $1.4 million budget. Gutwein said that EMS brings in roughly $673,000. If that is taken off of the $1.3 million, it would be about $628,000. "We decided – let me rephrase that – they decided, $550,000 to privatize. That means we just saved $78,117. That does not make sense," he commented. "A drastic change for $78,000 savings."