City, county continue discussion of rural ambulance service

The Hill County Commission met with Mayor Tim Solomon and Havre City Clerk Doug Kaercher as well as Havre Fire Chief Mel Paulson to discuss the creation of a boundary line that would determine the range of the Havre City Ambulance District’s service.

The Commission said the creation of this boundary line will allow for the calculation of the taxable value of the area the city’s ambulance district covers and subsequently determine the mills that would be required to meet the city’s request for funding to the service.

The City of Havre has sent numerous letters to the county over the past few years asking for more funding for the service, saying the county was not paying an equitable amount compared to how many call the service gets from outside the city limits. In February, the city sent a letter that said ambulance services outside the city limits would be discontinued if the letter was ignored, and two weeks ago the county began communication with the city about the issue.

Hill County Commissioner Mark Peterson said the plan is to use voting districts as a framework for determining where this boundary line should be.

The choices presented at the meeting were to use the boundary between Precinct 20 and 15 as the boundary line, or to place the line to include Kremlin, which would result in a split ballot for voters in Precinct 20.

Hill County Clerk and Recorder Sue Armstrong said such a divide would require some work on the part of the county, but it was doable if somewhat complicated.

“It’s not a big deal,” Armstrong said. “There are other counties that have split ballots all the time, but we try not to because it’s less confusing.”

Paulson said the ambulance service occasionally takes calls from Kremlin, but that is as far as they generally go unless the Rudyard Rural Ambulance service, which generally handles calls beyond Kremlin, is having trouble.

“Kremlin has always kind of always been the dividing line,” he said.

It was decided at the meeting that Paulson would sit down with representatives from the Rudyard service at a public meeting and see whether or not they would be able to take responsibility for calls in the area between Fresno Tavern and Kremlin.

Peterson said he suspects that this meeting would reinforce the need for Havre’s ambulance service to provide for that area unless it is shown that very few calls come in from that area.

“If there’s not a lot of calls out there, we’ll probably just leave it like it is,” he said.

Armstrong said she would bring the two versions of the proposed boundary line to the Department of Revenue to get the taxable value for each, which she said, she hoped she would be able to do by the end of the week after some research.

Another meeting will be held in the Commissioner’s Office next Wednesday at 9 a.m. to continue the discussion.