Charge nursing homes more for emergency response? Park Ridge leaders table the question

About an hour into a May 1Committee of the Whole Meeting, Park Ridge Mayor Marty Maloney turned to Fire Chief Jeff Sorensen with a question.

“How close are we to the tipping point?” Maloney asked.

Maloney wanted to know how many more calls the fire department would need to field every year before the need for more staff and more equipment became acute.

Council members and staff were knee deep in a discussion of what to do about the fact that assisted living facilities and nursing homes in town place a high volume of calls for emergency services. Officials are considering whether to charge these facilities for emergency service calls above a certain threshold to cover the costs of higher demand.

Fire department brass explained that the department fielded a record of more than 6,000 calls for service last year and that assisted living facilities accounted for 13% of that volume.

Their concern, they said, was that demands from those facilities could prevent them from staying under their target of a five minute response time to any call for service.

“We have two ambulances ready to go at all times in Park Ridge,” Sorensen said. “Last week both ambulances were called to facilities on this list within a minute.”

Representatives from several assisted living facilities in town told council members that they saw a potential move to charge for emergency services as unfair to the businesses, who pay taxes, and to the nursing home residents, who they said were likely to shoulder the burden of increased costs through a bump in fees.

“I would like to point out that it’s very easy to talk in terms of charging the facility,” Sheridan of Park Ridge Director Kim Clark said. “All senior living facilities would have to pass that charge on to residents. That monthly fee that we charge residents is how we maintain our operations.”

Summit of Uptown Director Ryan Jones said the ordinance council members were considering made assisted living residents seem like a burden to the city.

“We are a good neighbor — we provide a lot of services to the citizens of the greatest generation, we provide jobs to hundreds of staff and we provide sources of a lot of meetings,” he said.

Park Ridge Care Center administrator Rebecca Granrath said she and her colleagues use a private ambulance service when possible, but “wait times can be hours.”

“When you have a resident who is having a change in condition and the medical director or their physician is saying they need to be sent to the hospital, sometimes we don’t have hours to wait for a private ambulance,” she said.

Council members voted to delay a vote on the question until December, noting to fire department leadership that they could return to council and request more resources over the intervening seven months if need be.

1st Ward Alderman John Moran made the motion to table the matter in part because he saw a need for further legal research into the question.

City attorneys have told aldermen at past meetings that charging facilities that are expected to have a high demand for emergency services when they arrive in a municipality isn’t unusual. Many towns levy an “impact fee” on nursing homes or other businesses expected to use emergency services to help cover the costs of increased demand for service.

But the lawyers have noted that to charge facilities that are already established in town would be a new way of approaching the matter.

The city has received a letter from American Seniors Housing Association attorney Paul Gordon arguing that the ordinance as proposed would constitute “unreasonable and unlawful discrimination against disabled seniors.”

The letter goes on to call the ordinance both illogical and illegal, arguing that if the seniors requiring emergency services lived around town, the fire department would see the same volume of calls spread out over a larger area.

Fire officials said they were considering hiring another staff member to help coordinate a response to the demand for emergency services.

They estimated that it would cost about $1 million annually to staff a third ambulance, not including the cost of the vehicle itself.

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