Northern Edgar County Ambulance Service discussed selling to Horizon Health -

CHRISMAN, IL. (ECWd) -

During its July 17, 2018, Special Meeting, the Northern Edgar County Ambulance Service ("NECAS") discussed several items in Executive Session.

Among those discussions were:

• An "ultimatum" presented to the NECAS by Carle Regional EMS (this will be the subject of a future article)
• Discussed selling the Ambulance Service to Horizon Health and Horizon could run it
• Jeremy asked for his pay to be doubled (and we thought they were having some financial difficulties)
• Jeremy asked for Vickey's pay to be increased
• The Dodge Durango purchased from the Edgar County Sheriff needs to be worked on
• Put together a buy-out of the ambulance service to see who would step up and purchase it, or who would come up with a plan to keep ambulance service in northern Edgar County

Most of these discussions are not supposed to occur in closed executive sessions. The Open Meetings Act ("OMA") permits exceptions to open meetings, and only 2 of the above 6 items are permitted in closed sessions.

We find it odd that an ambulance service who is allegedly having financial difficulties has decided to give out massive pay increases at the same times they are discussing disposing of the service either thru a sale or simply shutting it down.

On June 11, 2018, I talked about this issue during the Edgar County Board Study Session and Horizon Health's representative clearly stated they were "in no way, shape or form" interested in taking over [Chrisman's Ambulance Service] NECAS. . . and just six days later, the NECAS is discussing selling to Horizon.

Did something change in the six days that would make the NECAS board discuss selling to Horizon?

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