County approves double pay for mandatory ambulance overtime

WASHINGTON — County supervisors voted 4-1 Tuesday on a change in the ambulance service’s mandatory overtime policy, setting the pay for emergency shift-filling department employees at double their normal hourly rate.

Interim Ambulance Director Katrina Altenhofen suggested the measure to the board. She said it was critical to prevent staff burnout from especially busy days as the service’s call volume continues to rise.

“The employees, they’re tired,” she said. “We had that one weekend where we had a call every 2.4 hours, and that’s slamming it for a full 24-hour time frame, plus three emergency call-offs that happened.”

Supervisor Richard Young, the former owner of the then-private Washington County Ambulance Service, was the lone negative vote.

He said he sympathized with Altenhofen’s concerns, but worried the policy would open the flood gates for similar requests from other departments with their own conditions requiring employees to show up for unscheduled work.

“Secondary roads, they’ve already been in here, and I’ve heard rumblings at the sheriff’s office through the union,” he said. “When we make a policy like this, we need to look and see how it’s going to affect everybody.”

Young proposed looking into a third shift for the ambulance service, to help raise the threshold for overwhelming calls. While Altenhofen said unsustainably high-volume days were not the norm, she made a similar suggestion in her quarterly report presented at the same meeting.

Still, the interim ambulance director since December said that solution would take months to implement, at a minimum. She posed the added pay for mandatory hours as an immediate patch to the service’s current problems.

“My hope would be, we don’t have to have this. This becomes a safety net when we have further discussions,” she said. “But at the end of the day, that citizen at the end of the 24th hour, they deserve the same thing as that citizen in the first hour.”

The meeting marked 10 months since Altenhofen’s appointment as the interim director of the Washington County Ambulance Service. The department saw turnover surge after the suspension of Director Jeremy Peck, for reasons that remain unknown to the public.

While staff numbers have recovered since then, Altenhofen said the county still needed to prioritize retention efforts if it wanted to keep up.

“We have retained staff,” she said. “That’s big, especially when we don’t pay the same scale that Johnson County pays, Henry County pays, and now Jefferson County’s coming up.”

Supervisor Stan Stoops made the motion for the policy change. He said even a third crew may not fix the issue of burnout from underpaid, mandatory overtime.

“There’s still going to be situations where she’s going to have to call for backup,” Stoops said. “It’s rare, but it has happened.”

Supervisor Jack Seward Jr. initially pitched the extra pay as a temporary measure, but later voted in favor of Stoops’ motion.

He said he understood the need for the handbook change.

“If it comes to the point where you’re asked to go above and beyond what’s usual and normal, then you expect some kind of added benefit,” he said. “We’re getting to the point in this particular situation where, they could all at some point decide, ‘This ain’t worth it, I’m not going to do this.’”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com