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Multnomah County plans to finish mediation with debt-laden American Medical Response on Wednesday, ending months of negotiations aimed at improving poor ambulance response times.
“I look forward to bringing that process to a close,” County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson said at a meeting of county commissioners last week.
Multnomah County Health Department head Rachael Banks and Dr. Richard Bruno, the county health officer, are scheduled to brief the board Thursday about the mediation, which began in March.
The county has given no indication of what solutions may come from it. Commissioner Sharon Meieran, an emergency room doctor, has been pressing the county to stop requiring AMR to staff all ambulances with two paramedics, a profession that’s in short supply, and replace one of them with a less-trained emergency medical technician. All other Oregon counties use that one-to-one model.
Meieran brought a resolution calling for a paramedic-EMT pilot program to the county board last week, but it didn’t pass. She herself didn’t vote for it after Commissioner Jesse Beason succeeded in amending it to say that a temporary change in staffing should be allowed, based on the county’s “best and final mediation offer,” only if the mediation didn’t settle by Aug. 1.
Meieran said she has no idea what the county might announce about the ambulance system this week.
“I’ve heard absolutely nothing,” Meieran said. “If there’s a loop, I’m not in it.”
But, Meieran said, she’ll be surprised if EMTs aren’t in the mix. “That’s the only way to address the crisis we’re facing,” she said. “There is no magic well for paramedics. We can’t clone them.”
The county’s press office declined to comment on whether EMTs would be allowed.
AMR has been out of compliance with the response times described in its contract with Multnomah County since 2022. The company says it can’t hire or retain enough paramedics to staff the 30 to 35 ambulances on duty within the county at any given time.
AMR is a subsidiary of Global Medical Response, a Texas-based company that is in turn owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., a New York investment firm that buys up whole companies using borrowed money. GMR, as its known, had $5.4 billion of debt on its balance sheet as of last July, and that debt was trading at 55 cents on the dollar, suggesting that at least some investors were skeptical that it would be repaid in full.