Cedar County is looking to implement a public measure to help establish a county-wide emergency medical service in the upcoming election.
Public Measure DO in Cedar County asks if the county is able to establish an essential county-wide emergency medical service ambulance, with an amount of $0.75 per $1,000 for all taxable property within Cedar County and a 15-year time span for that levy rate.
The additional emergency medical service would provide blanket coverage for many of the communities in Cedar County unable to field a crew of volunteers to handle an emergency medical call.
According to the Tipton Conservative, MCM chief executive officer Mike McGrady outlined the issues for many services in the communities of Cedar County at a meeting Oct. 17. Many services struggle to field a full crew during daylight hours when volunteers may work in other communities not in Cedar County.
The new ambulance service would be paged in those situations if a service can’t field a crew, from one of the stations in the county. The closest to Lisbon and Mechanicsville would be in Clarence. Currently, some of those calls not answered by a community bounce to other communities before crews are even en route to the emergency, taking upwards of three additional minutes when an emergency call has been made. Those three-minute delays are critical in some medical emergencies, and the goal is to have a faster response time for the county.
The new service, paid for via the levy, would have paid staff at the ambulance station who are ready to go when an emergency call comes in, especially during the daylight hours.
Supervisor Bruce Barnhart compared this to the support of a sheriff’s office. While small communities in many of the towns of Cedar County may have their own law enforcement, they also pay for the Cedar County Sheriff’s Office which also provides service to towns and rural communities.
The county service would operate similarly, McGrady said, providing extra medical service to the county, but allowing the independent services in each community to continue. In cases of calls for advanced life support (ALS) services, multiple ambulances are paged to those emergencies, and a call on who transports the patient will be made as the patient is being stabilized.
For citizens in the Lisbon and Mount Vernon areas, especially those along the border area of Cedar County, Lisbon-Mount Vernon Ambulance Service director Jacob Lindauer said that while the plan in Cedar County is still being finalized, he doesn’t think the ambulance service would impact the operations of LMVAS for residents in their area. LMVAS coverage range goes to Charles Avenue from the Jones County line south to the Cedar River.
“Our service also routinely provides advanced life support assistance and mutual aid to agencies along the Highway 30 corridor,” Lindauer said. “It is a rarity we are unable to respond to a callout, as we are incredibly fortunate in our community that we have a strong volunteer base with a proactive board of directors as well as city administration that is dedicated to seeing LMVAS flourish and continue to provide a high quality of service to our community within Linn, Jones, Johnson, and Cedar counties.”
Lindauer said that with Cedar County Ambulance serving as a backup for LMVAS, it has not been communicated if LMVAS would receive tax funding for the coverage of areas of Cedar County. LMVAS does receive a portion of the essential service tax from Jones County for the areas they cover in that county.
Ambulance service proposed for Cedar County
November 2, 2023
About the Contributor
Nathan Countryman, Editor
Nathan Countryman is the Editor of the Mount Vernon-Lisbon Sun.