MONTICELLO – After a car accident occurs, there is a critical space of time while emergency medical providers wait for an ambulance to arrive and provide patient transport. A move last week by the Sullivan County Legislature seeks to minimize that window and get patients to the hospital sooner.

With a unanimous vote on July 21, the legislature extended its contract with SeniorCare Emergency Medical Services (EMS) for another four years. They also modified the contract to upgrade one of the county’s four “fly cars” to a staffed ambulance. Legislators Luis Alvarez, Amanda Ward, and Terry Bernardo were absent from the vote.

SeniorCare EMS, a Bronx-based ambulance service, was first hired in June 2024 after the county obtained a Certificate of Need (CON) to provide supplemental EMS to support local systems of response already in place.

District 3 Legislator Brian McPhillips said the county had four fly cars, two ALS (Advanced Life Support) and two BLS (Basic Life Support), and will now be eliminating one of the BLS fly cars and putting an ambulance in its place.

“We’re upgrading,” McPhillips said. “We realize that the need was more for the ambulance because we were having a lag.”

McPhillips said the county’s fly cars, which are emergency vehicles able to assist but not transport patients, were getting to accident scenes quickly but then waiting for ambulances to bus patients to the hospital.

According to the resolution, the contract renewal stipulated a “total cost not to exceed $3,560,000 for years 1 and 2 of the agreement, and not to exceed $3,738,000 for years 3 and 4.”

The resolution also justified the renewal with praise for the agreement: “The program has proven successful in saving lives by reducing response times, provided for crew assists to our local EMS agencies and increased availability of advanced life support services.”

When asked if a grant would offset the projected $7 million price tag over the next four years, Sullivan County Communications Director Dan Hust said the cost would be “completely borne by the county.”