By Charles Romans
Carter County Times
The Carter County Ambulance Board held its regularly scheduled meeting on Monday April 21. On the Board’s agenda were items such as a blown motor in one of their secondary vehicles, the proposed purchase of three recertified heart monitors, and investing money from a secondary bank account.
In the financial report, income for the month of March was reported as $289,980.15, which was $13,870.15 more than budgeted for the month, and $102,778.35 less than the same month of the previous year. Expenses for the month of March 2025 were $298,116.09. Those expenses were $12,284.91 less than budgeted for the month and $3,410.23 more than the same month of the previous year.
Payroll expenses were calculated at 6815 percent of the year-to-date income. Those expenses for the month of March 2025 were $245,074.93, were $19,925.07 less than budgeted for the month, and $20,717.77 less than the same month in 2024.
Unscheduled overtime for the month of March 2025 was at 4.9 percent, increasing from the previous month (February 2025) percentage of 3.78. The year-to-date percentage of unscheduled overtime is currently 5.10 percent. The unscheduled overtime increase is due to an employee normally scheduled on the day truck being off work due to an injury, which necessitates those hours being covered by another full-time employee.
“The way we were figuring overtime was if someone called in, and someone else picked up that shift, then we were counting that as unscheduled overtime,” CFO Dora Roe explained. “It is unscheduled overtime for that person, but not for the company because the company already has that scheduled as overtime.”
The reason the company is not into unscheduled overtime is that the overtime was already part of the schedule, Roe told the board.
“Everyone here is scheduled overtime,” she said.
The framework of calculation for the company is the hours worked as a total, and though it adds overtime to an individual’s schedule, the ‘company’ overtime remains the same for that period.
“And what I am counting as overtime,” she told the board, “is if someone gets a late call, and because of that they are here an hour or hour and a half too late. And that counts as unscheduled overtime because the next shift is already here as well. That is truly the company’s unscheduled overtime.”
Roe explained that scheduled overtime applies because employees are scheduled 56 hours per week, resulting in 16 hours overtime for each employee. So, if someone from one shift picks up time on a different shift due to the sickness of another employee, for instance, it would put that employee into unscheduled overtime.
In other financial business, Roe said she had spoken with Rob Roar at WC Wealth Management about investing service revenue from the company’s Madisonville checking account into a money market account or CD.
“He suggested a safe investment would be a money market or CD,” Roe told the board. “When I asked which one he would do, he answered probably both.”
Roe said that Roar had suggested a 70/30 split, with 70 percent of the funds they wished to invest being placed in a CD and the balance in a money market account.
“The CD is at 4.1 percent interest right now, and a money market is at 4.1 percent also,” Roe said. “He said that what some churches do is that they invest the money, then take the earnings from it and invest in higher yield investments.”
This way, she explained, the principal was at no risk whatsoever, and only the earnings from it would be risked on the higher yield investments.
“Like I told him (Roar), I would like to have at least six months, preferably a year, of investments for money to run the service.”
The board considered the proposal to purchase three recertified heart monitors at a cost of roughly $50,000. Purchasing the recertified monitors would ensure that all the trucks had the necessary monitors, and would be approximately one third of the cost if the monitors were purchased new. The board voted to purchase the monitors outright, rather than take out a loan for the purchase amount which, at eight percent interest, would have the board paying nearly $10,000 in interest.
The motor on the truck designated Carter 7 experienced a blown motor, Director Tim Woods told the board.
“Mike has been looking for a motor, and what it would take to put a motor in it,” Woods said. “But the problem is that Carter 7 is the one that has the A/C on the top and it’s been in and out of the shop about ten times for that air conditioner,” he said.
“So, we have a couple of calls in to different agencies to see if we can just remount it, take that air conditioning completely off, and put it in the front like all the other ambulances,” Woods said.
In its current design on top, Woods said that no company wants to work on it.
“I really don’t want to put an engine in it as it is, because it has all the other issues it had before,” Woods said.
The board determined the best course was to check into possible repair costs and revisit the issue at a subsequent meeting.
In other business the board went into a lengthy executive session early in the meeting to discuss personnel. Then later in the meeting the board returned to executive session after being made aware of complaints involving personnel, one of whom was not present at the meeting. In both executive sessions no action was taken.
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