By Staff Reporter
ALDEN — For about a decade, the Lancaster Volunteer Ambulance Corps answered 911 calls in the Town of Alden without charging the town for it. Next year, ambulance service gets its own line in the town budget.
The Town of Alden’s preliminary 2027 budget, posted on the town’s website Oct. 6, includes an ambulance account with $40,000 for “ambulance service” and $1,000 for “professional ambulance billing.” The budget document puts the $41,000 in the general fund for the part of town outside the Village of Alden. That fund raises nothing from property taxes; it runs on $236,021 in county sales tax money, permit fees, interest and $41,864 from reserves.
The money shows up as the town hands its emergency medical service to Mercy Flight EMS, the ground ambulance division of Cheektowaga-based Mercy Flight, on Dec. 1. The Town Board’s agenda for Monday night’s meeting listed a “Resolution to Approve an Agreement with Mercy Flight Inc.” and a “Resolution to Approve a Financial Hardship Policy and Application with Mercy Flight,” plus a resolution calling a public hearing on the 2027 budget. On Oct. 5, the board’s agenda carried a resolution approving an ambulance billing service agreement with MultiMed Billing Service, Inc.
Neither document was posted with the agendas, and results of Monday’s votes were not on the town’s website early Tuesday. The Buffalo Chronicle is seeking copies.
A September breakup
The Lancaster Volunteer Ambulance Corps, known as LVAC, had been Alden’s contracted ambulance provider since 2016. It answers 780 to 800 emergency calls in the town each year, LVAC chief of operations Bernard Jerozal IV told The Buffalo News’ Jon Harris in a September report. After nine months of negotiations, the town told LVAC in mid-September it was going with another provider.
“They just said that they decided to go in a different direction,” Mr. Jerozal said, according to The News.
LVAC’s contract expired at 11:59 p.m. Sept. 16, more than three months before Mercy Flight’s planned Jan. 1 start. Supervisor Colleen Pautler said the town believed LVAC was obligated to keep serving Alden through at least Oct. 31, and that the town was prepared to “seek judicial intervention if LVAC refuses to honor that contractual obligation,” The News reported.
LVAC answered with a warning. In a statement published by the Cheektowaga Bee, the corps said it would “caution residents that this may not be the same level of reliability as they have experienced with LVAC,” and that the town “should not expect that LVAC is able to fill the gaps in coverage, as the town has not contracted with LVAC to do so.”
The Alden Fire Department, which runs its own ambulances, pledged to answer as many calls as it could. “We simply cannot guarantee that we will have an ambulance available for every call,” the department said, according to 716 Spotlight.
Mercy Flight executive vice president Scott Wooton told The News the nonprofit did not have a unit staffed and ready to plug in. “As a resident of the Town of Alden, I’m hopeful that there can be either a safety-net or a short-term contract between the town and LVAC, just to try to make that a smooth handoff of the baton,” Mr. Wooton said.
On Sept. 22, the town announced that LVAC would keep covering Alden through Nov. 30 and that Mercy Flight would take over Dec. 1, a month earlier than first planned. WIVB-TV reported the extension after what it described as 10 years of free ambulance service from LVAC.
What the town says it is getting
In a letter to residents signed by Ms. Pautler, Deputy Supervisor Gwendolyn Bork and council members Randy Crist, Mark Drogi and Mark Kerl, the board said the decision came “after carefully looking at our options.”
“For the first time, Alden will have a dedicated ambulance stationed in our community 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” the board said. Having an advanced life support ambulance “right here in Alden, rather than relying solely on an ambulance coming from outside our community, will provide an important improvement in accessibility and response capability for our residents,” the letter said.
The money question
For LVAC, the dispute came down to dollars. “We can’t just continuously provide this for free with the way insurance reimbursements are going down,” Mr. Jerozal told The News. “Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements are already at such a low level that it costs us more money to go take a 911 call in the Town of Alden than we receive.”
The corps took in $4.4 million and spent $4.35 million last year, he said, and Alden made up roughly a tenth of its approximately 7,800 calls.
Alden’s own numbers leave questions open. The preliminary budget does not say what Mercy Flight will be paid or for how long, or whether $40,000 covers a full year of a dedicated, around-the-clock paramedic ambulance. It does not explain why the town needs its own billing contract, or how Village of Alden residents, whose town costs are not in the outside-village fund, fit into the arrangement. Nor has the town said what the “financial hardship policy and application” on Monday’s agenda will cover.
Across all funds, the preliminary budget would raise $3,116,922 in property taxes, up $183,903 from 2026. The town-wide general fund levy alone rises $122,579, to $1,218,650.
What comes next
State law gives towns until Nov. 20 to adopt their budgets, after a public hearing. The board has a work session Oct. 26 and a regular meeting Nov. 2, both at 6 p.m. at Town Hall, 3311 Wende Road. LVAC’s coverage runs through Nov. 30; Mercy Flight starts the next day. The Chronicle is seeking comment from the town and Mercy Flight on the contract’s cost, term and response-time standards.
Featured photo: The Alden town line. Photo by Mitchazenia via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped.
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