Even if the Baker City Council had decided to send a proposal to Baker County, outlining how the city fire department could continue operating ambulances, it likely would have been a fool’s errand, doomed to failure.

This was probably to be expected, considering City Manager Jonathan Cannon’s dogged insistence that the city can’t afford to continue operating ambulances for even one more fiscal year without a major cash infusion from the county. This despite a lack of compelling evidence that running ambulances, as the city has done since the 1930s, has been siphoning great amounts of dollars from other departments in the city’s general fund over the past several years.

The City Council voted 7-0 on May 10 to have Cannon prepare a proposal to meet the county’s June 3 deadline. Two weeks later councilors voted 4-2 to reverse that decision. The deadline came and went, and on June 8, county commissioners voted to contract with Metro West Ambulance of Hillsboro to replace the Baker City Fire Department.

Thus ended one of the more disappointing, and inexplicable, City Council actions in the past few decades.

The city initially refused to release the draft proposal Cannon was working on. The Baker City Herald appealed that decision to District Attorney Greg Baxter under Oregon’s Public Records Law. Baxter concluded that the draft was not exempt from public disclosure. It’s available on the city’s website, bakercity.com.

Although county commissioners Bruce Nichols and Mark Bennett have said publicly that they had hoped the city would submit a proposal, it’s difficult to imagine how commissioners could have picked the city over Metro West, based on the document Cannon was working on.

Most notably, the city’s draft proposal, which actually includes two scenarios, states that “Baker City will require the following non-negotiable amounts from Baker County for each year of the contract.”

Those amounts range from $850,000 to $1,600,000 per year.

Baker County contributed $100,000 to the city for ambulance service in the current fiscal year. It defies belief that county commissioners would — or, indeed, could — have agreed to the city’s “non-negotiable” request for such larger sums.

Metro West, which has the advantage of being able to collect a larger percentage of its costs, compared with the city, from the Medicare and Medicaid patients who make up a majority of local ambulance patients, did not request any financial subsidy for the duration of the five-year contract.

The other private company that sent a proposal, Capstone Transportation, which operates as Victory EMS in the Boise area, proposed a county subsidy of $1,280,000 the first year, with expected 3% annual increases thereafter.

The vast difference in the monetary terms between the Metro West and Victory EMS proposals is one reason that choosing the former firm was “basically an easy pick,” Nichols said.

Given that Baker City’s draft proposal called for a county contribution similar to Victory EMS’, it seems likely that the city would have been as distant a runner-up to Metro West.

Ultimately, it looks as though the city’s ambulance service — and the larger firefighting workforce it made possible but which the city is now losing — was all but doomed from the council’s March 22 vote to send the ultimatum to the county. The city’s budget for the fiscal year that starts July 1 includes 10.5 full-time equivalent positions, compared with 16.25 in the current budget.

Whether or not the city submitted the proposal, with its outlandish dollar demands, probably was a moot point.

— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor