South Lincoln Ambulance agrees to transfer ambulance, assets to Yachats fire district

By GARRET JAROS/Lincoln Chronicle

YACHATS – A firebreak of a deadline, a single phone call and a done deal – the Yachats Rural Fire Protection District is in the ambulance business after South Lincoln Ambulance’s board agreed to give the district its ambulance and assets.

The fire district’s board held a special meeting Tuesday where interim chief Jeff Mathia made the announcement that South Lincoln’s three-person board had signed an agreement to turn over SLA’s assets to the district. He recommended the board do the same – and they did so unanimously.

The agreement comes after the board in June voted to end its staffing agreement with South Lincoln on July 31 if Mathia was unable to negotiate an agreement with the nonprofit to give the ambulance to the district and allow it to take over the service contract authorized by Lincoln County. Had an agreement not been reached, Mathia arranged for an alternate agreement with Pacific West Ambulance – which holds contracts to service the rest of the county – to loan the district an ambulance that would be staffed by district personnel and to also provide billing services.

Mathia has been adamant about the need to keep an ambulance stationed in the community.

The agreement with South Lincoln Ambulance will extend the district’s current staffing arrangement past the July 31 deadline with the provision that the assets transfer – which includes the ambulance and associated equipment along with office and other supplies – begins as soon as possible.

“We’re shooting for a target of Oct. 1 to have everything formally transferred over to us,” Mathia told the board.

South Lincoln will complete the transfer once the district receives a federal license allowing the ambulance to carry narcotics, which usually takes four to six weeks, Mathia said. He’s also begun the process with the Oregon Health Authority to allow the district to become a patient transport agency. The district can continue to transport during the transition because of its contract with SLA.

Once the federal license and state authorization occurs and the transfer of assets is completed, the district will receive 80 percent of the billing collected by SLA, which will keep 20 percent for administrative costs. Transferring billing to the district is an involved process that takes time, but Mathia said he hopes to have that completed by the end of the year.

The asset transfer also includes SLA’s equipment reserve fund which will go into the district’s equipment reserve fund and be earmarked for eventual ambulance replacement.

Mathia said he did not know the exact amount in SLA’s reserve fund, but estimated all the assets being transferred including the ambulance at $500,000. The ambulance, which was recently replaced by SLA’s insurance carrier after a fatal collision in 2025, is valued at $360,000.

Transferring the county-assigned ambulance service area from SLA to the fire district will not be necessary until further along in the transition, he said. The district plans to bid for the five-year service area contract in March.

Negotiating the agreement

The agreement was reached during a 1½-hour phone call July 20 when Mathia and SLA board member Shelby Knife were authorized by their attorneys to hash out an agreement.

“The goal was to hammer this out in one phone call,” Mathia told the fire board. “I was not going to proceed forward with sending an agreement back and forth, back and forth. I just felt that was getting us nowhere.”

Fire board president Doug Myers was also on that phone call along with the attorneys and SLA board members Frankie Petrick and Holly Gibbons. He congratulated Mathia and praised his negotiating efforts and the agreement. Petrick was also the fire district’s longtime administrator until January and Knife a former administrative assistant.

“At the meeting last Monday, to me, it was clear that Shelby was ready to get out of the ambulance business,” Myers told the board. “Frankie did not say much and Holly Gibbons just said a little bit. So it was mostly the chief and Shelby hammering things out with both attorneys chiming in on how we could facilitate all this stuff. So this is a pretty big date today. It’s where it finally is in writing that it’s going to happen.”

Mathia told the board that the SLA board was “very aggressive about getting this done once they found out that Pacific West was going to basically take this out from underneath them.”

Fire board member Stan Wagaman asked what had shifted after the board was told at its regular monthly meeting July 13 that negotiations were getting nowhere.

“They were given a deadline,” Mathia said. “And I was going to hold firm to that deadline. If they had not signed this by the meeting today, my recommendation would have been go to Pacific West Ambulance and that would have been that. However, they were very quick. That’s the quickest I’ve seen any attorneys move. And what really sped this up was me insisting on one phone call – we hammer this out and get this done.”

“Excellent,” Wagaman said. “I think it took us all by surprise …”

Staffing the ambulance has been an issue in the past due to the time firefighter/paramedics were out of the area transporting a patient to hospitals. But Mathia told the Lincoln Chronicle that has been mitigated by the recent agreement with the Seal Rock Fire District to provide cover when needed, by no longer providing primary ambulance service to the Tenmile area of Lane County, an increased number of volunteers, and his living close by in Waldport.

“I am glad that we were able to come up with an agreement with South Lincoln Ambulance,” Mathia said. “The community has relied on South Lincoln for decades. And I’m glad to see that even though that time is coming to an end, they’re participating in a transition, so really the community shouldn’t see a whole lot of difference.”

• Garret Jaros covers the communities of Yachats, Waldport, south Lincoln County and natural resources issues for Lincoln Chronicle and can be reached at [email protected]