Grand Coulee fire chief reports on new ambulance district, fire plans

It may be next fall, or perhaps in February 2025, but local voters will be asked to decide on forming a new taxing district to support local ambulance service.

Fire Chief Ryan Fish told the city council Tuesday night that a lot of work needs to be done between now and then, but demand for services is only growing, and at a rate that can’t be supported long-term doing business the way it has been done for decades.

In 2015, Grand Coulee’s ambulance service went on 391 calls. In 2023, the number was 628, including only 240 within the city, according to a report Fish gave to the council.

Ambulance personnel are paid, Fish noted, but “the call volume is so high it’s taxing our volunteers’ time pretty hard” so help is needed for “readiness.”

Those “volunteers,” also have to be on call, unpaid. So a district can be formed to help pay them and reduce the time it takes to get help locally.

“Instead of it taking 15 minutes for an ambulance to be there, it might be there in five,” Fish said.

Fish has talked with Electric City and Coulee Dam councils about the problem, too.

He said those towns are willing to help with funding but they want the money to go into a dedicated fund used only for the ambulance.

Mayor Mike Eylar said Grand Coulee is shouldering most of the cost currently, except for a small surcharge billed to out-of-city users of the ambulance.

Given the growth in use over the years, Eylar said. “There’s no way the city is going to be able to sustain that.”

Setting up a district will involve four different county commissions, Fish said.

That has happened before, locally, when the Douglas, Grant, Lincoln, Okanogan Counties Hospital District 6 was formed to support what is now Coulee Medical Center.

Fish also had given the council information in their packets on forming a “regional fire authority,” which is also a complicated beast that would combine local fire stations.

The local departments work together, but “we don’t have the volunteerism we used to,” Fish noted.

Former mayor Paul Townsend noted that the fire department has no income, while the ambulance does charge for the service.

A fire authority could be “as big as you want,” Fish said, but a lot of analysis has to be done before it could be undertaken.

Councilmember Gary Carriere said a study he recently read found that in Washington state there were 19,000 volunteer firefighters in 2001, but only 10,000 by 2023.

“It sounds as though we’re all agreed that it is something that needs to happen,” Mayor Eylar said, “and we’ll do what we can to make it as smooth and painless as possible.”