Trumansburg considering third ambulance

The village of Trumansburg is considering the purchase of a third ambulance for its Emergency Medical Services (EMS) Department, a move that would shore up current pain points in service and position the department well for ever-growing needs for response capacity, village officials say.

The village board of trustees discussed potentially buying the new ambulance at their Nov. 12 meeting. They said that other nearby departments have had to take on calls from within Trumansburg’s service area because one of the two ambulances Trumansburg EMS relies on has had too many mechanical issues lately. That process, which involves other departments helping to cover external service areas, is known as mutual aid. 

Trumansburg’s service area encompasses the towns of Covert, Hector and Ulysses, but Trumansburg EMS often tends to calls outside of its area of service, up and down Tompkins County, as part of mutual aid. 

A lack of ambulance capacity has made it difficult for the department to take on second calls, something Deputy Mayor Ben Carver says the department is not obligated to do but that ultimately helps county residents.

An EMS second call refers to a situation in which an ambulance crew is dispatched to a new emergency call while still actively engaged with a previous patient.

“It is something that obviously we would prefer to be able to do, and it has a very real impact on the health and well-being and lives of the people covered,” Carver said at the meeting. 

Reading the EMS report at the meeting, Carver said that the department has responded to four calls in Covert, one in the town of Enfield, four in Hector, five in the village of Interlaken, eight in the city of Ithaca, four in the town of Ithaca, one in the town of Lansing, five in Mecklenburg, two in the town of Newfield, seven in the town of Ovid, 32 in Trumansburg and 42 in Ulysses.

At the meeting, the board approved a resolution to spend up to $50,000 from an EMS equipment reserve account on a new ambulance. Some of that could be recouped if or when the department is able to fix its needy ambulance. The department would then sell one and keep two, Carver said. Other village officials suggested the department should keep all three, as EMS needs continue to rise.

“For the last six months, one of our two ambulances has been in the shop and it has been stuck,” Carver said. “There have been a number of issues. We have gone to a number of shops. We were dissatisfied that it was just sitting at one for so long. We moved to another shop to try to make it work. They diagnosed something, repaired it. Then, they found out they were wrong in their initial diagnosis. It has been a gigantic headache to deal with.”

Carver said that the issues with the second ambulance have made it very difficult to handle calls. 

“When I started 10 or so years ago, it used to be that we accepted mutual aid from neighboring departments … five to 10 calls a month, at a fairly regular pace,” Carver said. “The last few years, that has either zeroed out so mutual aid was neutral or more often positive. Now, we are kind of back to those historic numbers, now that we don’t have the second call capacity.”

Carver said that even diagnosing what is wrong with the ambulance has been an issue.

“Now, the difficulty is that the second ambulance is still stuck. We don’t know when it will get out,” he noted. “Every time we’ve gotten a diagnosis that feels conclusive, it’s turned out to be something else.”

Selling an ambulance after all three are in service was Carver’s initial preference. 

“We either sell one or the other, or we keep three,” he said. “My inclination at this point is to sell one of them, but the question really would be which one?”

Mayor Rordan Hart said he’d lean toward keeping all three ahead of more EMS needs and also the eventual replacement of the oldest ambulance in the village’s fleet.

“So, let’s say we run three through the summer next year,” Hart said.  “So, my ask for [Carver] is that as we get to budget season next fall, and we are looking into 2026, that you think whether we need to bump up that reserve number in next fall’s budget, so that we can get a new ambulance in 2028 or 2029 and then we can start to stagger them.”

Ulysses Connection appears every week in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@vizellamedia.com. Contact Eddie Velazquez at edvel37@gmail.com or on X (formerly Twitter) @ezvelazquez.

In brief:

The HEAP program, which helps residents of New York cover heating bills, is up and running. An application and more information can be found at: https://www.ny.gov/services/apply-heating-and-cooling-assistance-heap.

 Who is eligible to receive HEAP?

• The members of a household who are U.S. citizens, U.S. non-citizen nationals or qualified non-citizens.
• Those members must provide a valid Social Security member each.
• The members of said household must have a monthly income that is at or below the HEAP guidelines.
• Members of a household who receive government benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, temporary assistance through Tompkins County or Supplemental Security Income (SSI).