West City Council votes to defund the West Volunteer Ambulance Association

KWTX
By Alex Fulton
Published: May. 2, 2023 at 9:14 PM CST

WEST, Texas (KWTX) - The City of West will no longer provide subsidies to the West Volunteer Ambulance Association.

However, that doesn’t mean the city won’t have an ambulance service going forward. They will now operate only with AMR Medical Services, which already serves all of McLennan County.

On April 17 the EMS department received a letter from the city saying that it would cut ties with them.

”It accused the group of fraud, but gave no specifics that constituted that fraud,” David Dickson, the attorney representing the West Volunteer Ambulance Association, said.

Then on Tuesday night the West City Council held an informational meeting to answer questions from a crowd of dozens of local ambulance workers.

”Until tonight we got no answer about what they were accusing us of,” Dickson said.

The city alleges that the EMS department presented false or misleading monthly reports to the city council.

Secondly, they allege that the department made untruthful statements to the council about their Logis devices not working. These devices track emergency call response times.

”When they were reporting that the device wasn’t working I asked the question is the device really not working?” West city council member Matt Miller said. “I want to fix that and I want to make sure it’s working. AMR said what they alleged isn’t true.”

Thirdly, the city also accuses the department of failing to perform administrative functions. The now-ended contract with the department specified that the two first responders who were paid by the city had to answer calls in 10 minutes or less.

”When I ran the numbers, the average response times from April to November was 23 minutes and some seconds,” Miller said.

The council’s decision to no longer fund the West Volunteer Ambulance Association goes into effect immediately.