A contract was approved between Brown County and LifeGuard, Inc. for ambulance services at Monday’s regular meeting of the Brown County Commissioners Court.
According to consultant Steven L. Athey, president Health Care Visions, the new contract with LifeGuard is a performance based contract, which contains certain required elements of staffing, equipment, and response times to live up to in order to avoid penalties. The term of the contract is for 5 years, renewable in 1 year extensions up to a maximum of 10 years. Yearly evaluations would take place after the second year.
The contract includes a compensation or subsidy amount of $105,000 annually during the five year term of the contract. Athey explained that the subsidy is paid by Brown County as well as the cities of Brownwood, Early and Bangs. Although there is enough geographic territory to need an ambulance service in Brown County, there is not enough call volume to support an ambulance service strictly by users of the service, explained Athey. He stated that it is necessary to utilize combination funding through user payments and the subsidy payment of tax payers.
Athey stated that LifeGuard will begin service on January 1, 2016 and are in the process of getting ready for business.
“They have been in town for about 60 days with staff gathering employees and looking for a local director for this area,” said Athey who explained they have new ambulances and a supervisor vehicle on order which will be put into service in January.
Athey stated that the process to secure a new contract for emergency services was very sophisticated. It began in July of this year, when a Request For Proposals was released. According to Athey, this request led to a number of qualified ambulance services expressing interest. These companies met with the Brown County ambulance committee in a question and answer session, and from those 5 ambulance services submitted detailed proposals (60-200 pages in length). The following week after the proposals were received, they were presented to the committee along with another question and answer session. The proposals were then scored and tabulated.
LifeGuard was the highest scoring company, according to Athey.
“This is a good company. When you look at scoring, they did very well on 5 out of 6 scorecards, which were scored on quality points,” said Athey who clarified the best service isn’t always the cheapest, but the best quality of performance. However, LifeGuard offered a lower subsidy amount than the current provider, according to Athey.
Commissioner Joel Kelton stated that he had a lot of questions and that he wanted to find a service that would dispatch communications locally; however through this detailed process of selecting the new provider, he found that local dispatch would cost around $450,000 just in staffing costs, which was more than Brown County could afford.
In other matters on Monday’s agenda:
*Commissioners approved County Holidays for 2016.
*Brown County Sheriff’s Office received approval of employee changes. A new jailer, Amanda Goodwin has been hired to replace David Joyner who left the position in July.
*A resolution was passed to authorize the publication of notice of the issuance of Certificates of Obligation to finance the capital renovations, remodeling and improvements to county buildings and the construction of a new building (McKinstry Project). County Auditor Nina Cox explained that this is the beginning of the process to finance up to $7.5 million for the project.
