The city of Murray and Calloway County have moved closer to a new deal to make the Murray-Calloway County Hospital's paramedics the primary provider of extrication services in the event of a vehicle accident within or outside the city.
Thursday night, the City Council approved 8-4 the transferring of the Murray Fire Department’s rescue and vehicle extrication equipment to the Hospital’s EMS unit.
The move comes weeks after Mayor Jack Rose announced an end to a decades-old deal which provided MFD extrication throughout Calloway.
In response, county officials drafted a memo of understanding to designate the EMS extrication provider for both city and county, as well as transfer a rescue vehicle and equipment to the EMS. The issue has had some contention over cost and jurisdiction, but councilman Greg Taylor says despite that, ensuring that an alternate service was available was the right thing to do.
“We can get caught up on how we got here to this point, and maybe we don’t like the way we ended up here, but we are where we are," said Taylor. "The only thing we were really voting on tonight is whether to give the truck the EMS or not and so I felt like we made the right decision in voting yes to do that, otherwise we would have left them without a truck."
The county previously paid the city an annual $10,000 fee for the service, but Rose had deemed that too short of the approximate $75,000 cost. The county’s $10,000 will now be paid to the hospital.
The MFD’s service to the county ends July 15th.
