Santa Barbara Ambulance Controversy Exposé

Did the county of Santa Barbara prematurely and covertly purchase $3.6 million of ambulances while the county fire department was still locked in a bid competition against American Medical Response for an exclusive countywide ambulance service contract?

The answer is yes!

Background

I have served as a government watchdog for Santa Barbara County for over 32 years. In that time, I have never witnessed a matter as scandalous as the process by which the county of Santa Barbara has initiated a bid process for the ambulance services contract for the county.

As a way of background, AMR (American Medical Response) has been the county’s main ambulance service provider going back some 50 years. Despite the fact that there has been scant evidence that they were not doing an excellent job providing these services, for several reasons, the county board of supervisors were more than interested in allowing the county fire department to challenge AMR for the contract.

The county appeared determined to ensure the competition between AMR and county fire was fair and impartial by creating a wall between the bid competition and county decision makers so that county fire and other local fire departments or AMR could not leverage political pressure on the process. The county hired independent experts to create the criteria by which the bids would be competitively scored and they hired additional independent experts to evaluate the bids once they were submitted.

Once it was determined that the county was outscored significantly by AMR as determined by the independent evaluators, the wheels fell off the county fire department’s ambulance ambitions. Henceforth, the fire department and their allies started complaining very loudly about the process beginning a series of appeals and protests against the outcome in Nov. 2022 and Jan. of 2023, losing both times.

After the ink was dry on the final denial of the fire department’s appeals and protests, in February of 2023, the County Fire Chief Association of Santa Barbara County which partnered with the county in the effort to win the contract from AMR, sent a letter to the supervisors requesting the board of sups invalidate the bid process and thereby reject a contract award for AMR for all the same reasons they raised during the appeal and protest efforts.

The fire departments ended up getting everything they asked for from the supervisors by way of an official decision on April 4, 2023 to eliminate the aforementioned process which had been designed to be apolitical. After that decision, the wall of separation between the fire department and county decision makers was blown to kingdom come. In fact, county fire was able to significantly influence the criteria and a process by which the county would subsequently begin to create a new permit application process in June 2023, whereby the supervisors themselves, and not independent experts, would pick the winners and the losers for new non-exclusive ambulance services throughout the county.

This new process is still ongoing; no permit has been awarded.

Now to the most scandalous part of this process. While the county fire department was still in their “protest and appeal” mode, we surmise sometime in late 2022 or early 2023, that is, while AMR was the apparent winner of the contract bid, the county of Santa Barbara secretly ordered $3.6 million worth of new ambulances (35 total). These ambulances began to be delivered in March 2023 before the county had created the new permit application process for ambulance services and several months before any permit holders will be chosen.

How could the county be so sure of the outcome of a public contract bid process while county fire was yet still losing the same? Who authorized these purchases (or leases)?

COLAB has requested the District Attorney of Santa Barbara County to fully investigate this matter as we don’t trust the county to come forth with the pertinent details. Our suspicions are well founded because we filed a California Public Records Act Request over one month ago and in that time, the county failed to discover and disclose the detailed purchase orders for all these ambulances.

The records we discovered are below: They include 2 purchase orders, General Transaction Ledgers (payments), and photos (above) of over a dozen ambulances being staged at Vandenberg beginning in the month of May 2023.