BEACON – The fire services are not the only ones that find it difficult to recruit volunteers. Volunteer ambulance corps are suffering staffing issues and have to rely on requesting neighboring communities to come to their aid because of a shortage of personnel.
The City of Beacon finds itself in the same predicament with its volunteer ambulance corps, said Mayor Lee Kyriacou.
“This happened because the adjacent community ambulance services wrote the city letters saying that there has just been too many calls for mutual from your catchment area and we just can keep doing it. That precipitated it. We had to do something here,” he said.
So, for the first time, the city is budgeting $200,000 for paid ambulance services. Of that, $150,000 will be used to hire a paid service, most likely Ambulnz, based locally in Newburgh, to perform its advanced life support services. The remaining $50,000 will be used to assist the Beacon Volunteer Ambulance Corps with its basic life support service.
The money is included in the proposed 2022 city budget.
