The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Choco-Latté Café.
SOUTHWEST HARBOR—The calls sound over the emergency scanner in uneven rhythms, occasional at times, relentless at others. Each one a reminder of how swiftly calm can turn to urgency.
A visitor has fallen on rocks at the Bass Harbor Light.
A local man is having a heart attack down by the village green
A child has been hurt in a car accident by Eagle Lake.
All these calls require medical help. On the west side of Mount Desert Island that help almost always comes from the Southwest Harbor-Tremont Ambulance Service, a nonprofit organization that is meant to give people in Tremont and Southwest Harbor quality emergency medical care.
That care is needed all day and all night.
Every year, the medical professionals and drivers respond to approximately 500 calls. Sometimes there will be multiple calls in one day. Sometimes, between calls, there will be gaps of days.
The problem is that this coverage requires the emergency medical professionals and the ambulance drivers to be available to help, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That requires people and it costs money. So does keeping up the service’s ambulances.
The community has been coming through for the Southwest Harbor-Tremont Ambulance Service even as the service and the communities try to determine what the future of the ambulance service will precisely be as it takes care of the emergency medical needs in the two towns.
“It’s really been heartening,” said Kristin Hutchins, the ambulance service’s secretary and crew chief.
The service remounted the ambulance box, which saved the nonprofit service that provides emergency medical help to Tremont and Southwest Harbor. That saved $100,000 on the cost. That should be here in the early year.
“We asked the community to help us raise $211,000, and people being aware of our needs said, ‘We need to do better than that and help you restore your investments.’ And with the goal of raising half a million dollars, we’re in $490,000, so it’s pretty darn good,“ Hutchins told the Southwest Harbor Select Board, Tuesday, October 28.
The campaign both refurbished and remounted the service’s older ambulance, Rescue 6, and replenished investment reserves, which had been depleted as the service met growing expenses.
COSTS AND THE EMS PLANNING COMMITTEE
At the same time, there was a bit of discussion about whether or not a goal of the service was to lower the costs to the town.
“It’s not going to get cheaper, but it might get more expensive more slowly,” she later said.
Vice Chair Chapin McFarland said that he thought one of the goals of the EMS Planning Committee (which was a joint committee between the two towns) was to lower costs and look at options to do so.
Those committee meetings were tabled and haven’t continued.
Southwest Harbor-Tremont Ambulance Service Board President Andy Cline said, “While the long-term EMS planning committee is on pause, because I agree with Kristen in that I don’t think their work is done.”
They are still working to find a clear vision, he said. He said all possibilities—including having Southwest Harbor and Tremont taking over the service—need to be further investigated.
“I think that committee stands at the ready to continue work,” said Town Manager Karen Reddersen. “I think that was paused just so that there could be an ambulance service board vote that set a direction for that committee, and you’ve referenced hiring this director but I think that that committee is there, ready, from a community perspective to continue the work that was happening in determining what’s best for the ambulance service and supporting you in the long term.”
Part of that is investigating costs and structures.
“I do not anticipate continuing to provide the services we’re providing as lowering costs. Manage the raising of costs, but lowering them? I do not see that, no. I don’t believe it’s viable,” Hutchins said in response to McFarland’s original question, “because our labor expenses continue to be challenging. It continues to be more difficult to find people to do the work. We’re in a competitive situation with all the other fire departments and ambulance services in the area. As we heard before, Southwest Harbor and Tremont are at the end of the line. People like me, who can reply remotely to a call at $5 an hour, are going away fast. I just don’t see it.”
McFarland said there was some grumbling about the director position rather than a service chief and also because it is not a municipal position and would have those benefits.
“It does open up a pool of people who might be willing to work for us, who have the administrative skills we need,” Hutchins said of the majority of the board’s decision. “We’re talking about, you know, grant applications and people with experience in nonprofits who, if we can prolong this nonprofit model and parts of this per diem model, that will mitigate the inevitable rise in costs of providing this service.”
“Our board chose to shift the focus to this executive director position because we felt like we needed administrative help more than anything,” Cline said. “There are members of our board who are doing a lot of work that should be done by other people.”
STAFFING
McFarland also asked about staffing.
“It’s been a challenge since day one, and it is my very first worry at all times,” Hutchins said. “We have always been, with the exception of COVID. I’ll see in worst of the spring of 2020, we’ve been almost 100% staffed month after month after month, notwithstanding public media, social media, to the contrary, we’ve almost always been 100% staffed. Every time I think we’ve got it solved, something else comes up, and I’m always worried about it.
“I’m worried about this month, for that matter. I am always worried about it. We had a couple of shifts open this weekend, and I think it is the defining problem that we do not have enough people.
“We are one more, I said this years ago, and it’s still true today, we are one catastrophe away from not being able to staff the ambulance, which is why we need to move forward.
“And we’re doing a lot of good systems work, but having enough people do the work is a challenge. And what kind of kills me about it is, we have all these agencies on the island, all struggling to be fully staffed, some doing a better job than others, and all of the people, really, if you think about it, underemployed, sitting around with not enough to do, so it’s a pity, you know, we’ve got 500 calls a year….”
She said she can see the merits of focusing on just medical service, but everyone on the island is wearing a lot of hats to get all the jobs done on MDI.
“I mean, in my dream world, you’d have one fire department and one police department and one ambulance service on the entire island, and I don’t know if I’ll live long enough to see it, but I live in hope,” Hutchins said.
ADVERTISING FOR A DIRECTOR
The service is currently advertising for an executive director, which is a new position meant to help with writing grants to support the service, guide it into its immediate future, help with the vision for the future, and do other administrative aspects.
Both Carolyn Ball and McFarland were worried about the benefit package for the director’s position. McFarland also asked about the cost and town support required. The most it would be for the salary would be $80,000 split between the two towns.
“I think that’s modest for that position,” Hutchins said.
The organization has “four levels of licensure; we got drivers; we got basic EMTs, advanced EMTs, and paramedics,” Cline told the Tremont Select Board in September. “For a number of years, we have been operating with the model of having an EMT or higher licensure on duty at the office in Southwest, where the ambulance is, and a driver on call from home.”
The drivers were initially volunteers and then they started getting paid $2 an hour to be on call. Now, it has been bumped up to $5 an hour and the drivers get paid the regular hourly rate if they are called out.
“You know when you showed up at someone’s house, it mattered,” Hutchins said.
HOW OTHER AGENCIES ON MDI WORK
Northeast Harbor Ambulance Service became part of the town of Mount Desert in 2023 after staffing issues. That transition involved renovating the Somesville fire station for almost $1 million and the Northeast Harbor station for more than $5 million.
The paid full-time staff for the Mount Desert Fire Department also increased to allow for paid full-time staff during the night as well rather than just on-call firefighters. The department now has 16 on staff.
Bar Harbor’s ambulance service is also part of the town government and has been for decades.
Bar Harbor Deputy Chief John Lennon explained in 2024 the two different services that neighboring ambulance services often provide for each other. There are paramedic intercepts and mutual aid services.
Lennon defined paramedic intercepts as one agency “responding to another agency to provide a paramedic for advanced life support, when the requesting agency does not have advanced life support (ALS) available.”
Mutual aid is when “emergency medical services, and other emergency personnel and equipment, respond to a request for assistance in an emergency when local (another towns) resources have been expended or not available. i.e.; incident with multiple victims, local agency cannot respond,” Lennon said.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE:
To learn more about volunteering at the fire department, click here.
To learn more about Southwest Harbor/Tremont Ambulance service, click here.
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