HCFAS Prez Responds To Planned Funding Cuts
/By Jano Tantongco
jtantongco@longislandergroup.com
Huntington Community First Aid Squad President John Palmieri issued a statement critical of the Huntington Town Board’s plans to cut the squad’s contractual agreement with the town from $1.58 million down to $200,000.
“HCFAS will still provide the very best emergency medical service to the people of Huntington, but now it will not be free,” Palmieri stated, alluding to squad’s move to a pay-to-play model, in which patients will be charged for emergency medical services provided and ambulance rides.
In total, the town plans to allocate $856,535 to the squad in its 2017 budget. In the 2016 budget, $2.18 million was allocated to the squad.
The planned 2017 budget line for the squad does include increases including bumps in retirement funding from $450,000 to $500,000, and interfund transfers from $149,819 to $154,035.
A.J. Carter, town spokesman, previously said the proposed funding cut -- which is show in the town’s proposed 2017 budget -- reflects HCFAS’s decision to bill patients for services, a move the town recommended to the squad when its funding was cut last year.
In September, the HCFAS hired paid paramedics to support emergency response operations.
These hires were suggested in a study of HCFAS that was commissioned by the town. It recommended that the squad hire paid staff.
In the 2016 budget, the squad’s contract was cut by $194,901, down to $1.58 million. Palmieri stated that the squad provided the town a “spend-down plan,” which included using money from an escrow account to help pay the final bond payment for the squad’s building. The proposed funding cut from $1.58 million down to $200,000 came as a surprise.
“...A reduction in the contract fee from $1,585,000 to $1,000,000 was not unexpected,” Palmieri stated. “But the town’s continued insistence on the squad using money collected over the years, through fund drives and donations for the benevolence of its members, is misguided.”
Carter affirmed that the spend-down plan was “taken into account when the appropriation for 2017 was determined.”
Further, Carter said, the reserves cited by the town comprised of “taxpayer money accumulated over the past four years, as noted in an analysis of the ambulance squad's filings with the Internal Revenue Service,” and not money that the HCFAS had collected from fundraising drives.
“Those two elements, combined with the expected revenue from medical billing -- money that will come from insurance companies, not town residents -- help explain the reason for the cut in the appropriation,” Carter said.
The town and the HCFAS clashed last year over an inquiry into the squad’s use of reserve funds, which Huntington Supervisor Frank Petrone argued could be used toward expenses.
