Augusta GA Ambulance Service Bid Process Fire Department Firefighters

Sept. 26 -- Augusta will have to start over in its quest to find ambulance provider partners for its bid to become the city's designated emergency service provider after problems surfaced with all five bids, a city official said.

The restart and the required number of days the process has to be open will leave Augusta Fire Department with a tight window to submit its bid as required by Oct. 22, but Fire Chief Chris James said he remains hopeful it can still be done.

The Public Safety Committee of the Augusta Commission had been scheduled Tuesday to take up the results of a Request for Proposals for one or more contractors to provide nine or more ambulances for the city's bid to become the designated emergency provider. But two of the five who submitted bids, Grady EMS and SouthStar EMS, were found to be non-compliant and apparently were missing some paperwork, James said.

Of the other three vendors – Capital City Ambulance of Augusta, Amerimed EMS of Buford, Ga., and Central EMS of Roswell, Ga. – none of their bids were considered "responsive and responsible" and could not be recommended by the evaluation committee, Procurement Director Geri Sams said in a memo Monday to Administrator Janice Allen Jackson and James. Sams also sent a letter Monday to vendors telling them the RFP had been canceled as a result of no bidder meeting the minimum standards.

Sams said the committee found a number of problems with the three vendors who were evaluated. Without specifying which company, she listed those problems as including:

Wanting a subsidy in advance, while the city has said no contractor would receive a subsidy;
Offering only one ambulance;
Offering ambulances but wanting city personnel to staff them;
Apparently wanting to be guaranteed a certain number of calls.

Public Safety deleted those items from its agenda, although Commissioner Marion Williams asked that they be put on next week's commission agenda for discussion. Sams said the new proposal would go out for bids again, although her memo notes that the proposed scope of services could be changed.

The earliest the city could start the required advertising is Wednesday, according to Sams' memo, but the deadline had already passed Tuesday for Legal Ads for The Augusta Chronicle without receiving an ad from the city. Procurement rules normally require a minimum of 15 calendar days between when the notice appears and when the city can start accepting bids, the memo notes.

A committee meeting on the proposals could be held Oct. 9 with the full commission taking it up Oct. 16, according to the memo, but that would leave only six days for Augusta Fire Department to put together its proposal in time to get it to the Zoning Committee of the Region 6 EMS Council, which will evaluate the proposals and make a recommendation to the full council on Nov. 1.

The council will then make a recommendation on a designated provider to Georgia Public Health Commissioner J. Patrick O'Neal, who gets the final say. James said he hopes that the process can be done swiftly enough to still abide by the rules set up by Procurement "and that we can get some vendors in line in time to put our application in."

That application requires a lot of detailed information, such as all personnel and their license status and all ambulances and their age and mileage, but ambulance services have to keep much of that information current as part of maintaining their state license so it should be readily available, he said. Under the city's plan, the fire department would run three of its four ambulances, as it is doing now, and the contractor or contractors would be responsible for the rest but would have to abide by city changes that have been proposed but have yet to receive final approval.

The sudden change and the fact current provider Gold Cross EMS is suing the regional council over how the designation was reopened – it claims James, as its chairman, is manipulating the process – was a cause for concern for some commissioners. Mayor Pro Tem Mary Davis said she is "not 100 percent comfortable" moving forward on it. Davis added that she was "always in favor of trying to get the zone" designation but is not comfortable with how the city is going about it.

The sudden reversal was a surprise to Gold Cross officials who came to the meeting expecting something to be done but ultimately it may not matter, said Chief Operating Office Steven Vincent.

"We still expect to be the zone provider because there's no reason to take it away from us," he said. "I think they are just wasting their time."