County paying price for meager EMT pay). That's lower than any of the surrounding counties pay their ambulance crews. Is it any wonder why we're losing our emergency workers to those counties?
One of those who left to take a better-paying job driving a delivery truck lamented that while he loved being an EMT, he could no longer support his family of four on the pay, which was less than $300 a week.
Another EMT, with nearly five years of experience, noted that even with the modest raises she received over the years, she was still earning less than grocery store cashiers or fast-food workers.
With all due respect to cashiers and burger flippers, we don't ask them to save lives routinely on their jobs.
This situation is pathetic.
We look for people who answer the special calling to be an emergency worker, who are willing to put up with the long hours and demanding work of being a first-responder, and we pay them considerably less than the folks we hire to cut the lawns at the government buildings.
In order to get a decent paycheck, the EMTs have to work unreasonably long hours and bank a ton of overtime. One emergency worker who has left the county says she once worked 156 hours in a two-week period and made less than $1,000.
These conditions mean that there is virtually no time left in a week for things like training or, say, having a life. Even taking into account that paramedics and EMTs everywhere work strange shifts that often include 48 hours at a time at work, this is a situation that can correctly be called an accident waiting to happen.
The workers are not technically county employees. They work for Nature Coast Emergency Medical Service, an entity created by the County Commission last year to run the ambulance service. When the county said Nature Coast would be non-profit, I don't think they intended that to extend to the workers, too.
What it means is that Teresa Gorentz is stuck between a rock and a hard place. She is Nature Coast's executive director (and finance director and human resources director and interagency liaison) because there isn't enough money in the budget to hire people for those jobs.
Nature Coast is mandated by the County Commission to keep costs down and, because this is the first year of its operation, Gorentz wants to keep the commissioners happy with the arrangement by being fiscally responsible.
But she also has to try to find enough money to keep her employees' pay from dipping below the poverty level.
Somehow, Gorentz has managed to trim costs 4.8 percent from this year, while still giving the workers a modest raise. She takes her budget to the county commissioners this month.
When she gets there, the commissioners should thank her for her efforts -- and reach for the checkbook.
No, the county government is not awash in money and the commissioners need to be good stewards of our tax dollars. But they also have to recognize the seriousness of the problem. How can the county hope to attract and keep quality emergency medical workers if their paychecks qualify them to receive blocks of surplus government cheese?
The commissioners recently wrangled -- again -- over the issue of where they should meet, Inverness or Lecanto. They were ready to spend at least $80,000 for a special election to ask the voters their view on this burning question (with no legal obligation to follow the voters' wishes).
If there is enough money floating around for this kind of silliness, let me suggest that some of that cash would be better spent in improving conditions for our emergency medical services.
I don't need a special referendum to tell me that the people of Citrus County care more about whether the paramedic who just pulled up at their door can afford to feed his or her family than whether Inverness or Lecanto is the county seat.
It's a question of priorities, about what we value more: our county's physical, or fiscal, health.
Recent coverage
County paying price for meager EMT pay (July 15, 2001)
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