In this photo from Monday, Oct. 27, 2014, members of a Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical crew load a cyclist into an ambulance.

Eudora Fire Chief Ken Keiter lets the numbers make the argument for the city of Eudora’s upcoming request that Douglas County expand ambulance service in the community.

In 2011, his department responded to 325 emergency medical service calls, which automatically generated a response from Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical, Keiter said. The calls have since increased at a rate of 30 to 40 a year, and the community had 450 medical calls in 2015.

“It’s a consistent and steady increase,” he said. “It’s a trend we’re seeing nationwide. I attribute it to baby boomers getting older. As that generation gets older, we’re running more calls.”

The other figure Keiter cites is 12 minutes. That’s the average time it takes a Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical ambulance crew to arrive at the scene of a Eudora incident after being dispatched.

“If you have a life-threatening issue, 12 minutes is a long time,” Keiter said. A local ambulance station could shave more than eight minutes off that average, he said.

The Eudora Fire Department attempts to have a trained paramedic on duty at its fire station at all times, Keiter said. They can perform CPR, use some breathing equipment and shock patients with a defibrillator. Unlike ambulance crews, they can’t administer medications, start an IV or initiate more advanced airway breathing procedures.

“We can do things to try to extend lives until more advanced care arrives,” he said. “That’s the reason we want an ambulance.”

After two unsuccessful requests in the past three years, the city of Eudora will again approach the Douglas County Commission about expanding ambulance service in that city.

Eudora City Manager Gary Ortiz said city staff was already in discussion with county officials about the expansion. On the table will be the same proposal first presented to the County Commission by then Eudora interim city manager Mike Press, who rose through the ranks of Johnson County’s ambulance service to become county manager of Johnson County.

The request will have one different element this year. Ortiz said the city has reached out to Eudora and Palmyra townships, which share the city’s concerns, for support of its requests.

Eudora’s last request, made during the County Commission’s July 2015 budget deliberations, won the support of Commissioner Nancy Thellman. She says she is still supportive of improving ambulance service in the county’s fastest-growing city. There is precedent, she said. The ambulance station in Baldwin City opened several years ago to improve response times to that city and the southern section of the county.

Thellman noted, however, that the County Commission faced a tight 2017 budget because of the expected consideration of funding for the expansion of the county jail, creation of a mental-health court and construction of a mental-health crisis center.

Ortiz and Keiter said they understand Eudora’s request represented a considerable financial commitment from the county. The city’s request will provide options to help with the upfront expense of opening a station and the expansion’s early operational costs.

To spare the expense of building a new ambulance station, the city is offering Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical an ambulance bay, bunks and access to the kitchen and other living quarters at the city’s public safety building, which opened in 2013, Keiter said. Should that solution not be acceptable, the city also is making available its old fire and police headquarters, he said. That option would require extensive remodeling of the building, but it would be cheaper than building a new ambulance station, he said.

As in past years, the city is offering options of service. The preferred option remains an ambulance station with two EMTs on duty around the clock. With the purchase of an ambulance and equipment and hiring of six EMTs, it would require a year-one investment of $828,000. The city is also offering a less-expensive alternative called a paramedic advanced response unit as a way to transition to full service, Keiter said.

The PAR unit option would make an EMT available for all shifts, Keiter said. The unit would be equipped with a rapid-response vehicle and be able to start more advanced procedures until the arrival of a Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical ambulance, which would transport patients to hospitals. The first-year cost would be $594,600 and it would have continuing operational costs of $355,000, or half those of a fully staffed ambulance, he said.

“In an ideal world, a full ambulance service would be our choice,” Keiter said. “A PAR unit is a baby step toward a full-ambulance service. Everybody I’ve talked to thinks we need something. It’s just a question of when we can make it happen.”