Special to Rural Messenger by Alan Montgomery
Like a candle flame in a breeze, there is a flicker of hope among the Haven EMS township board members that things might be getting better.
The Haven City Council recently announced that it has appointed three of its members to start attending the EMS board meetings, as actual board members — sitting at the horseshoe-shaped table with the three township representatives, as outlined in the medical service’s 1977 operating agreement.
The next meeting is at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 19, at the EMS building, 120 N. Kansas, in Haven. It is an open meeting and the public is invited.
If the three city members attend the meeting, the board will once again have a legal quorum and be able to take action on matters for the first time since the city pulled its representatives, 21 months ago.
It has been a somewhat miserable two years for everyone involved. The city filed suit against the three townships in the emergency medical service in November 2017, with the intent to take control of the service – and require the townships to contract with the city to get EMS coverage.
That lawsuit failed.
In March 2019, Reno County District Court Judge Trish Rose ruled against the city, declaring the Haven ambulance service’s original, 1977 operating agreement still in force. There had been no action taken by the parties to terminate that agreement, Rose said.
The city appeals
Soon after, the city announced it would appeal that ruling to the Kansas Court of Appeals. A second lawyer was brought in from Wichita to help with that appeal. That process is still underway.
The whole affair has been cloaked in a certain amount of haze and confusion, with city officials refusing to talk about the lawsuit and its appeal. No one in city hall or on the city council wants to answer the question: “Why do you want to take control of the Haven EMS?”
Local citizens say the ambulance service is a credit to their community and just about everybody has a family member or friend who has received emergency care and been whisked off to Hutchinson Regional Medical Center, or other facilities, by the Haven EMS crews.
Sandra Williams — who is a Haven city councilperson and also is one of the members chosen to start serving on the Haven EMS board — seemed subdued and a little sad, when asked weeks ago by a reporter, after a city council meeting, about the ongoing lawsuit. Is she concerned that “so many citizens have questions about the lawsuit that are not being answered?”
“I just wish the citizens would have more confidence in their elected city council,” Williams said.
Then she declined to answer any questions about the lawsuit, citing advice from the city attorney, Larry Bolton.
No “irregularities”
Bolton, in correspondence with a Rural Messenger reporter in September, said audits of city and EMS books had revealed no accounting discrepancies in the operation of the medical service.
“The annual audit report by the city’s auditor does not indicate that any irregularities have been detected,” Bolton wrote, on Sept. 9.
Asked about talk around town that the city felt the EMS was “loosely operated,” Bolton said that was not an issue.
“This litigation concerns the interpretation of certain contracts and the dates thereof,” he wrote.
The appeal was filed because the city did not agree with the Reno Count District Court’s interpretation of those contracts, and this is the main issue in the city’s appeal, the city attorney wrote.
Information gleaned from Reno County District Court files indicate that there were two agreements cited by the city of Haven to show that they could take control of the EMS.
One of the city-produced contracts, drafted and approved in Spring 2013, seems to be the key document.
It apparently was written by Bolton, but there is no indication in city council minutes that it was ever discussed by the council members until it had been drafted and taken to Haven EMS township board leaders for their signatures. The signed document was then presented to the city council, approved and signed on April 1, 2013.
The two-page contract was entitled “Preliminary Agreement,” and had the introduction paragraph saying it was an agreement to express interest in exploring ways to fund a new Haven EMS building in Haven. At the time, the service was operating out of an old building that was a former gas station.
Trusting souls
Representatives of the three townships – Yoder, Haven and Sumner – who were partners in the EMS service signed the agreement without having it examined by legal counsel. They never had found that necessary in the past in its dealings with the city of Haven, which is the other partner in the service, they said.
About four years later, the city filed its lawsuit, saying the April 2013 agreement, and a later agreement — that showed how bonds to finance the EMS building would be repaid – are proof that the 1977 EMS operating agreement had been “superseded” by the new contracts. The first agreement had a clause, about halfway through the first page, that said the townships would contract with the city for EMS services.
No one in the city has been willing to comment on how and why that clause was put into an agreement that was presented in 2013 merely as an agreement to seek funding for a new building – or why the blockbuster clause was not discussed with the township members.
Judge Rose, in Reno County District Court, did not agree with the city’s claims, saying the original agreement was still in force. The matter now awaits action by the Kansas Court of Appeals.
So it will be interesting to see how the three city council members – chosen to join the EMS board – interact with the township members and if they will support measures proposed by the rest of the board.
The stage is set. It could be a trip back to the good old days, when everyone got along, for the good of the community, or it might become a local version of the paralyzing “Us-against-them” turf battles now being waged in the U.S. Congress.
Hoping for the best
Dale Kauffman — a retired Haven area farmer and current president of the EMS board — said he is trying to think positive.
“I am going to the meeting planning on them to be sincere and honest partners on the EMS board,” Kauffman said.
“Our intention is to have a plan in place to take the steps Tuesday evening to make the board fully independent,” he said. “We hope to have quotes in place from several insurance companies as well as from an accounting agency on what they would propose to assume the financial oversight of the EMS operations.”
Their hope is to work out a plan for the good of the community, he said, in which the three townships and the city would share the costs of the ambulance service, as they always have, and the EMS would be governed by its own board.
The EMS bookkeeping is currently being done in Haven City Hall, as it has been for years, but a firm hired by the EMS is handling billing and collections. By hiring a firm to handle all accounting, that function can be removed from city hall and brought back to the EMS, in accordance with the 1977 operating agreement, Kauffman said.
Besides Williams, the other two city council members who have been assigned to the Haven EMS board are Ron Dale and Adam Wright.
