By Stephen Smoot
“Our organization has recently learned the EMS Salary Enhancement Fund created by the Legislature in 2023 has no funding source in the current FY 2025 and proposed FY 2026 budgets despite spending authorization of $10 million being granted each year. This will result in thousands of EMS workers having their salaries reduced, losing response stipends, or having retention payments cut from their wages.”
This call to action from the West Virginia EMS Coalition comes as a $400 million budget shortfall inherited by new Governor Patrick Morrisey threatens to derail the policy.
The coalition in an earlier release described the increase in costs for licenses, training, and more to agencies and individuals. Even more worrisome, the cost of ambulances and related equipment have gone up significantly in the past several years.
Earlier this month, emergency management officials in Pendleton County brought up the issue with the Pendleton County Commission. Rick Gillespie, emergency services coordinator, shared that the amount of money in that account is “zero.” He added that “there’s been nothing that changed that code.”
Pendleton County, and likely others, allocated the salary enhancement funds as had been established in the previous year, only to find that the funds available for 2025 no longer existed.
Mike Alt, training officer for Pendleton County Emergency Rescue, shared that the Salary Enhancement Fund brought response times down from 46 to 34 minutes.
Recently, an ambulance agency in Hardy County had to give up a long-scheduled spot for maintenance of a vehicle due to budget constraints. Though they had enough to cover changing its workload, it still reduces resources significantly.
On March 4, the coalition directed a letter to Morrisey, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Jason Barrett, and House Finance Committee Chairman Vernon Criss underscoring the need to continue the program.
The 2023 session of the West Virginia State Legislature produced Senate Bill 737 that established the Salary Enhancement Program.
Barrett was one of the original sponsors of the bill that established “a special revenue fund designated and known as the Emergency Medical Services Salary Enhancement Fund.”
This fund took the form of “an interest and earnings accumulated account” created “to support supplementing the salaries of, and providing crisis response for emergency medical service personnel.” The law also states that monies from this account cannot revery back to the general fund.
For many counties, this produced a vital support. Each could use it as it saw best. It could go to help make the career services more financially attractive, especially in relation to neighboring states. In Pendleton County, the fund was used to accentuate the stipend received by volunteers when they go on calls. This helped to slice response times almost immediately.
A similar program was proposed for fire departments, but it drew from other revenue sources. It specifically excluded EMS due to the existence – and assumed long-term establishment – of the Salary Enhancement Fund.
No answers have been provided as to how or why the funds were removed from the account established by statute and with a clear direction to not move money back into the general fund.
In West Virginia, emergency medical technicians, for example, make significantly lower salaries in career service. A mean annual wage for this profession in West Virginia comes to $31,130, slightly more than Kentucky. The same job in Virginia pays just under $40,000 and in Maryland just under $55,000.
Paramedics in the Mountain State make about $7,000 less than those in Virginia, $8,000 less than Pennsylvania, and just under $20,000 less than in Maryland.
