Palmdale Rejects 2nd Ambulance Company

The Palmdale City Council has voted to preserve a monopoly on ambulance service held by a local company, rejecting a request by a rival Santa Clarita-based firm to be allowed to pick up patients in Palmdale.

Santa Clarita Ambulance plans to appeal the council’s decision to deny it a permit to compete for non-emergency business in Palmdale. The council voted 3 to 0 against the Santa Clarita company Thursday, a victory for Wilson Ambulance Service of Palmdale, the only firm now permitted to make emergency or routine ambulance runs in the city.

Council members said they feared that letting another company compete for routine trips in Palmdale would hurt Wilson financially, perhaps impairing the local firm’s ability to carry out emergency services. Wilson has the exclusive county contract for emergency service in the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys.

But executives of Santa Clarita Ambulance, which opened a station in Lancaster in February, said local hospitals had asked the company to come in, complaining that Wilson has been neglecting routine ambulance business in the Antelope Valley because of its emergency service obligations.

The two companies have had a long-running rivalry that culminated last fall when Wilson dropped Santa Clarita Ambulance as its subcontractor to provide emergency services in the Santa Clarita Valley. Wilson expanded to provide its own ambulances in the region at that time.

Since then, Santa Clarita Ambulance has accused Wilson of failing to respond to emergency calls in the Santa Clarita Valley as quickly as required under the county contract. County officials said Wilson did have problems initially, but more recently has been meeting required response times.

At issue in the Palmdale dispute are routine ambulance trips that include taking patients from one medical facility to another and between a hospital and patient’s home. Santa Clarita Ambulance already had gained permission to compete against Wilson for that type of business in Lancaster.

In other actions, the Palmdale council:

* Proposed substantially higher landscape maintenance assessments for property owners starting in July. One fee charged to owners citywide would increase from $8.80 to $9.82 annually. Another fee also charged owners of many newer houses would increase from $80 to $97.97 next year.

* Designated Martin Luther King Jr. Day each January as a formal city holiday, meaning all city offices will be closed. In past years, city offices have remained open, though city employees received a floating holiday to honor King.

* Named the city’s planned $2.8-million community theater the Antelope Valley Community Arts Center, as suggested by the private group that helped raise money for the theater’s construction. The council last month awarded a contract to built the 347-seat facility.

* Announced the resignation effective April 26 of Tom Combiths, head of the city’s economic development section. Combiths, who earned $80,702 a year and had been with Palmdale government since 1985, said he has been hired as the city manager of his hometown of Pulaski, Va.

* Paid $80,000 to purchase from Norton Marsh a small portion of the closed and fire-damaged Palmdale Plaza, the city’s first shopping center. City officials hope to redevelop the center, but have been unable to reach any purchase agreement with the company that owns most of the site.