The Town of Westlock has been out of the ambulance business for more than two years, but Alberta Health Services still hasn’t paid the bill.
The ongoing dispute between the two parties will now head to arbitration to determine how much, if any, of the outstanding $342,000 will be paid. Council passed a motion to invoke the arbitration clause following an in-camera discussion at the May 13 meeting.
Mayor Ralph Leriger said he’s “disappointed” that the matter will now have to go through legal channels.
“Through discussions we’ve not been able to have reached a reasonable conclusion to the event,” he said. “We’ve looked through the contract and chosen to invoke the arbitration clause in it.”
The issue came before council about six months ago at the Dec. 10, 2013 meeting, when councillors opted not to pursue legal recourse, but rather make one last attempt to lobby Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock MLA Maureen Kubinec on the issue.
Town administration has provided information to AHS about how the service ran a deficit of $342,000, which represents the deficit the town incurred in running the ambulance service and transferring assets to Associated Ambulance in 2012.
Some of this information was presented to AHS in a change order to the contract while the town still ran the service.
AHS has rejected that amount, and has been in negotiations with the town since the town’s ambulance service contract ended on March 31, 2012.
“We met with the MLA in September and she indicated to us to try one more time. We have tried one more time,” said Carol Revega, Westlock’s Legislative and Corporate Services Director, at the Dec. 10 meeting.
That try was met with a flat-out “no.”
Leriger said last week the amount of money owing is very significant to a community like Westlock.
“We think about it in terms of where we get our income,” he said. “One per cent of our tax revenue is $59,000, so $350,000 is a lot of money to me.”
In 2008, the province announced municipalities would no longer be required to provide ambulance services effective April 1, 2009.
Service in the Westlock area had previously been provided jointly by the town, the county, the Village of Clyde and the M.D. of Lesser Slave River.
None of the other partners wanted to take on a contract with AHS, so the town did so on its own — an initial two-year agreement that would end March 31, 2011.
Revega said that at the time, AHS didn’t realize large municipalities would want out, and ended up spending a lot of time in negotiations with those cities.
“They didn’t then have the time for the rest of us to negotiate a contract beyond March 31, 2011, so they automatically renewed all the contracts,” she said.
The town provided notice in January 2011 that it would no longer provide the service after March 31, 2012, and AHS indicated that Westlock would become a direct-service point, meaning AHS would provide the ambulance service.
That changed suddenly in the summer of 2011, when AHS said a private service provider, Associated Ambulance, would take over ambulance services in town.
Regardless, the town was told it could give its staff notice for March 31, 2012.
“We got to March 2012 and they wanted to extend our contract further because they weren’t prepared with their private service contractor,” Revega said. “The town said no at that time, because again our union agreement ended and we gave our staff notice for March 31, 2012.”
In the meantime, the town had incurred about $342,000 of expenses between providing the ambulance service and transferring that service to Associated Ambulance.
