Baker City’s revenue from its ambulance service has rebounded from the one-year dip that city officials cited as partial justification for the $3 per household monthly public safety fee imposed starting July 1, 2017.

That fee, approved by the City Council, remains in effect. The fee, which is $6 per month for businesses, raises about $180,000 per year for the city’s general fund, which includes the fire and police departments.

City officials said during the spring of 2017 that the public safety fee was necessary to prevent the possible layoffs of two employees in the police department and two in the fire department.

Ambulance revenue, which totaled about $789,000 for the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2018, equates to about 44 percent of the fire department’s annual budget of about $1.8 million.

City Manager Fred Warner Jr. said that although ambulance revenues have improved since the one-year decline, he doesn’t intend to propose that the City Council either reduce or eliminate the fee.

Warner said that although revenue from the public safety fee helped the city avoid layoffs in the police and fire departments, the city also budgeted for the increase in ambulance revenue after the city took back the responsibility for billing as of July 1, 2017.

Warner noted that the ordinance imposing the public safety fee will expire on June 30, 2020, unless the City Council decides to extend it.

When Warner introduced the proposed public safety fee in the spring of 2017, he pointed out that during the 2016-17 fiscal year, which ended June 30, 2017, the city’s ambulance revenue was running well below projections.

The city had hired a Texas company, Emergency Revenue Resources, on a one-year contract to handle ambulance billing for that fiscal year.

The city estimated that hiring the contractor would boost the city’s ambulance billing from about $723,000 in 2015-16 to about $813,000, the amount included in the budget for 2016-17.

Instead, the city ended up collecting about $640,000.

As Warner said in May 2017, that tactic “did not work at all.”

Jeanie Dexter, the city’s finance director, said an official from the Texas company made an impressive pitch to the city and seemed to have the knowledge and credentials to increase ambulance revenue.

But the reality was quite different.

Dexter said city officials learned, over a period of months, that the company in some cases billed the wrong company, and in others didn’t bill the patient at all.

The reduction in revenue of about $90,000 from the previous fiscal year, when the city was still handling billing, did not reflect a meaningful drop in the number of ambulance runs, Dexter said.

Rather, the contractor simply fell short on billing, she said.

For the 2016-17 fiscal year the company billed $1,431,000 — a drop of $185,000 from the previous fiscal year.

Dexter said she was able to recover some of the lost revenue, even though the time frame for submitting bills had expired, by filing appeals with Medicaid offices.

She tried the same thing, with somewhat less success, for patients who have private insurance.

The failures of the contractor became even more apparent during the following fiscal year — which ended June 30, 2018 — as the city’s ambulance billing, and revenue, rebounded to exceed levels from the three most recent fiscal years when the city also handled billing internally.

The city’s total billing increased by 19 percent over the year when the contractor was responsible for billing.

“We definitely saw a significant change in what we were collecting after we went back to doing ambulance billing on our own,” Dexter said. “It was definitely a bad choice (to hire the contractor). The results weren’t there.”

See more in the Dec. 14, 2018, issue of the Baker City Herald.