No Overtime for Tri-Town Resolution

The magnificent victory of the Bruins in the Stanley Cup finals this week had us talking about hockey and ice skating, and the conversation turned as these things will to the question of whether it is easier to skate forwards or backwards. This, it seems, is a matter of opinion, some of which can get quite vehement. Is it a function of the kind of skating you do or how you were trained? Or is there a right-brain, left-brain predisposition at work?

Debates like these are the stuff of barrooms and watercoolers, and we enjoy them. Talk may get heated at times but we also delight in our different points of view because they make life interesting. Other topics on which we bring our opinions forward with a similar mix of facts, experience and gut instinct seem far more serious. And — not always — sometimes they really are.

Here on the Island, the on-and-off tension over how to provide needed public services sometimes gets framed as a tug-of-war between those who favor local control or home rule and those who want to push regionalization. We tend to talk about this as an ideological split between people who think governing is done best closest to home and those who see efficiency in cooperative action. When it comes down to it, however, what’s driving our points of view is always more and less complex.

There is no single or easy resolution to these different viewpoints, and we are not advocating regionalization as a cure-all. But there are some issues, such as the need for quality and reliable emergency response up-Island, where it’s time to stop the talk and focus on providing a critical service. It is heartening, therefore, to see the three towns that make up the Tri-Town Ambulance Service finally taking steps to fix what could and should be a model of intermunicipal collaboration.

The Tri-Town Ambulance Service was formed more than three decades ago by and for the towns of Aquinnah, Chilmark and West Tisbury in an effort to provide better emergency service to people who live in the most rural reaches of the Vineyard. Over the past several years, however, the regional ambulance service has been beset by a series of cost-sharing, governance and leadership issues. Its troubles came to a head earlier this month when the Chilmark selectmen, who have been given administrative control by the other two towns, appointed a chief of the service over the strong objections of the hospital’s emergency medical director.

Discussion of the qualifications of the new chief came on the heels of another black eye for tri-town. In May, Aquinnah voters at their annual town meeting voted not to pay the town’s full share of tri-town’s $480,000 budget for the coming fiscal year, which begins on July 1. Aquinnah voters were evidently miffed about being asked to bear a full third of the cost of the service despite having the lowest ambulance call volume.

Tri-town’s problems seem to stem in part from an ungainly supervisory board, the ambulance committee, which is made up of seven members, including the three up-Island town police chiefs, a selectman or designee from each town and a member of the ambulance squad. Among other things, this is simply too large a management group. Meeting this week, this committee — together with the selectmen of the three towns — agreed to take a fresh look at their organizing agreement, restructure the committee and consider a different assessment formula. Aquinnah selectmen said they would ask voters at a special town meeting July 7 to restore the full budget allocation so the service can operate uninterrupted.

Faced with an aging population and headed into the hectic summer season, tri-town and the municipalities in which it operates can ill afford to let differences about governance — or just plain internal squabbling — interfere with what is quite literally a life-and-death matter, and we applaud them for addressing their organizational issues.

Making sure that our residents and visitors have access to top-notch emergency care can’t wait for a governing study, however. We urge tri-town to keep that goal paramount this summer.