Making due with limited resources is a common theme in Johnson County and the Paintsville Fire and EMS crew is no exception, according to the Paintsville City Council.
During the council’s regular meeting on Monday, Nov. 14, the council praised Paintsville Fire and EMS for the tremendous amount of help they provided during the Nov. 14 bus crash that left 18 children and the driver hospitalized, according to Magoffin County Schools.
“I think our hearts and our prayers need to go out to our neighboring county, Magoffin County, they had a pretty bad school bus wreck over there today, and I want them to know that they are in our hearts, and I want them to know that anything that the City of Paintsville or the city school system could do, we would be more than willing to do so,” said Paintsville Mayor Bill Mike Runyon.
Paintsville/Johnson County Emergency Management Director Gary McClure spoke about the efforts already put forth by Paintsville Fire and EMS in response to the crash.
“Mayor, me and (Paintsville Fire and EMS Chief) Ed (Pack) just came from the fiscal court meeting and Ed and I were in our offices this morning at about 9 a.m., when all of that happened over there, and I just wanted to kind of commend Ed and all of his guys,” McClure said. “It was during shift change and that was good because they actually had some extra guys and they just jumped right in. You actually had four ambulances on the road, some of them were going to the scene and bringing them here and most of you heard the helicopters coming in and out pretty much all morning, so I’m sure a lot of those kids they brought in here, they got them flew on out to Pikeville or Huntington or wherever they went.
“In one particular case, there was, I believe he’d said, an 11-year-old boy and he was hurt and he needed to go to Cabell, but he couldn’t qualify because there were children laying up here that were in worse shape than he was,” McClure continued. “So, Ed’s crew threw him in the ambulance and went straight on to Cabell with him and probably had him there within an hour’s time so they just did a heck of a job helping out.”
Runyon said the council owed Paintsville EMS their commendation.
“It’s my understanding that Paintsville EMS responded efficiently and effectively and immediately and they need to be commended for that,” Runyon said, before being joined by council members and those present in a round of applause.
Runyon then opened the floor to the council members, and Councilman Bo Belcher brought up ongoing complaints of long wait times for ambulance services in Johnson County.
“The ambulance, we’re going to have to do something, we’re going to have to get some help somewhere, from the fiscal court if we’re going to do county wide, I had another complaint of an hour to get out to Little Mud Lick the other day,” Belcher said. “We’re going to have to do something and I don’t know what the answer is, but we’re going to have to do something because it all comes back on us.”
Runyon said that he and Pack have had discussions about staffing difficulties and that leads to needing to look at salaries and the difficulty with finding qualified paramedics.
“We don’t seem to have the workforce that we used to have when we were all growing up and it’s really hard to get people to work, but we have to take a look at the ambulances, we really do,” Runyon said. “As a council, the ones even leaving in a month and a half and the ones coming in, and as Coach Belcher said, we probably need to work a little better on partnering with the fiscal court and finding a solution to that.”
Belcher said that, although he wasn’t criticizing past judge-executives, he knew that current Johnson County Judge-Executive Mark McKenzie was always willing to work with the city government.
“We actually want to keep one unit in the county all of the time, so that hinders us on taking transfers, so we’re really not able to take transfers unless we call in additional resources,” Pack said. “Sometimes we have them available and sometimes we don’t … we only had two crews available on Saturday and they were on other calls. So, we weren’t delayed in response, but they had to take care of the ones in front of him before they could go to him. They were backlogged and that doesn’t happen to us often, but it does happen.”
“If you had more crews and more ambulances on the road, you wouldn’t come into that problem,” Belcher said.
“You wouldn’t have it as much,” Pack agreed.
Councilman Brandon May asked if it were feasible for Pack and his employees to prepare a list of what’s needed to improve both the fleet and personnel issues emergency services were facing, which Pack agreed would be doable. Runyon said that the biggest problem facing Paintsville EMS was staffing, regardless of an aging fleet, as Pack has advertised and hasn’t been able to attract new paramedics.
“What they’ve done now, according to Chief Pack, is to become a paramedic, you now have to go four years of college,” Runyon said. “That puts you in a bind, whereas before you actually had to take a class to be qualified as a paramedic.”
Pack said that was the same number of years required for registered nurses, which most opt for over being ambulance drivers.
McClure said he believed it needed to be said that Judge-Executive McKenzie was always supportive of first-responders and had, just that evening, made measures to help Paintsville EMS and that the staffing issues weren’t isolated to paramedics.
“Mayor, may I take just a couple more minutes? When we talk about Ed and we talk about EMS and I’m sure if (Paintsville Police Department Chief) Mike Roe was sitting here, I’m sure he could tell us things about law enforcement, and I can tell you things about 911. They’re first responders, too, and we’re all one big family,” McClure said. “I have a staffing problem, too. We all do … the whole thing you’re all discussing and what the mayor’s saying, I’m sorry, but it’s the time we’re living in. It’s changed. Let me touch on a couple of things, the judge and I have talked about this … but we’re trying to figure out some way to help bottom line revenue … We were at the court meeting and the judge surplused a brand-new CPR compression machine they had just bought at a cost of $17,000 and the mayor just finished buying one, correct? A brand new unit.”
Movement needed to be seen in this regard, McClure said, and Judge-Executive McKenzie “gets it.”
“The judge gets it, you know, he was on council forever, he understands that, you know,” McClure said, adding that the fiscal court and grant writer Regina McClure were going to bid next week for a generator for the new dispatch center at a cost of more than $55,000, that won’t rely on local taxpayers to cover the costs. “We need a better plan to get more substantial revenue there, you know, so just be thinking about that, we’re on the right track. As the mayor said, all this other stuff’s over with, so let’s move forward.”
“We appreciate what you’ve said Gary, but I think you’re preaching to the choir here, because Judge McKenzie and I, this council and the fiscal court, we work well together, so I’m telling you, this county’s going to move and this city’s going to move and we’re going to do it together,” Runyon said. “That’s a problem we’re going to be thinking about and we need to address and we’ll do the best we can with it and I can promise you we will get something done.
“That’s one of the major problems we definitely have to address. Everybody’s calling for movement and ‘You’re not moving, you’re stagnant,’ and all that,” Runyon continued. “Well, you’ve got to start at the bottom sometimes to get to the top and move on from the top. That’s the way city governments are run. We’re here as a city council and as the mayor to keep our citizens safe and make sure they have the services they need to be a citizen of the City of Paintsville. We’ve done that for six years now and we’ve been financially, financially solvent, to the point now that we may be able to address some of these problems that everybody, during the election time, decided they were going to harp about. I think we’re alright, we’ve been moving forward, you just couldn’t see some of it, and we’re going to continue to move forward and, like all of these people said, Judge McKenzie and I work well together. That’s one of the most important parts of a community, is for the county and city government to work well together. There, I’m off my soapbox.”
The Paintsville City Council meets on the second Monday of each month at the Paintsville Recreation Center at 6 p.m. and all meetings are open to the public.
