ROCHESTER, N.Y. — The City of Rochester wants to extend its contract with AMR despite increasing response times and a recent situation where EMTs kicked a man off an ambulance who later died. 

AMR has provided emergency ambulance services for the city since 1988. Its current contract expires at the end of November but Mayor Malik Evans is asking City Council to approve an amended agreement that would extend it through November of 2026. 

The city isn’t in a position to be able to take over ambulance service and AMR is the biggest agency with reinforcements in the area.

“Having that contract in place gives us the ability to sit at the table with AMR to understand what is going on with performance, what’s going well, what’s not going well, what they’re doing to address it…” said Michael Burns, Deputy Mayor of the City of Rochester.

Like all EMS agencies, AMR has struggled with staffing shortages since the pandemic. That has led to increased response times.

Thankfully, city residents have a buffer: their firefighters. RFD responds to all priority 1 911 calls — those are the ones that could be life or death.

“On average, once a call is dispatched, RFD arrives at the scene to provide basic life support within four minutes of being dispatched,” Burns said.

The new proposal requires AMR to respond to those priority 1 calls within 8:59 seconds, that didn’t change from the previous contract but the City did give the ambulance company a little more wiggle room on the lower priority calls.

It added two minutes to the benchmark, so for most lower priority calls,  AMR now has 16:59 to get to you. If those benchmarks aren’t met at least 70% of the time, the company can be fined $2,500 per month.

“Have you made it clear to AMR that those penalties will be executed if they can’t meet the benchmarks?” Lewke asked.  “So, I think as we’ve worked through this contract with AMR, that is a point that we made clear. That these zone penalties that are in this proposed contract, that we will act upon those,” Burns said.

Patient care and respect were also points at the negotiating table after a man was forced off an AMR ambulance back in November while on the way to the hospital. He later died. “There are two clauses in the proposed contract around equitable treatment in response to the very unfortunate incident that occurred on November 30th 2023,” Burns said.

The city is hoping the company learned from it and will move forward and be better. 

The city also upped funding to the Rochester Fire Department so it has more equipment and vehicles to be able to get to those priority 911 calls as soon as possible while they wait for AMR.

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