Wachs Urges Support for Paramedic Plan

Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs on Monday urged his colleagues to support an ambitious plan to hire 500 new paramedics over five years at a cost of $50 million in an effort to combat severe staffing shortages.

The plan--proposed last month by the city’s fire chief--is scheduled to be reviewed by the Fire Commission today. Wachs said he will introduce a motion asking the council to adopt the plan.

“If ever there was a life-and-death issue in this city, it’s the festering paramedic crisis which aptly has been described by some as a time bomb with a very short fuse,” said Wachs, who is running for mayor.

Wachs said Chief William R. Bamattre’s plan, if implemented, would increase the number of paramedics in the department by 45%, a move that could cut response times by one to three minutes.

“To be sure the new paramedic plan is expensive,” Wachs said at a news conference. “It will cost the people money. But to not do it will cost even more in terms of the loss of human lives.

“We want to keep this city together. We’ve got to provide the people of this city with the services they have a right to expect.”

Bamattre said the paramedics are needed because the department’s primary role has become emergency medical care, not fighting fires. About 80% of the agency’s calls are for medical emergencies.

“This is a very complex problem. It’s not something that we can turn around overnight,” Bamattre said.

He called his plan the answer to department staffing woes. The goal is to have at least one ambulance and one paramedic at each of the city’s 103 fire stations around the clock. Now, 17 firehouses have no paramedics and 29 have no ambulances.

“It allows us to improve the response times, and that’s the bottom line,” Bamattre said.

Some city officials have taken issue with Bamattre’s proposal.

While Mayor Richard Riordan supports increasing the number of paramedics, he questioned whether it is necessary to hire 500 additional medics to meet the department’s goals, a spokesman for the mayor said Monday.

Other critics accused Wachs of grandstanding to get publicity for his mayoral race.

“I think it takes a lot of chutzpah to sit around for years neglecting this thing and then let a crisis occur and then try to create some political hay out of the crisis,” said Ace Smith, a spokesman for mayoral candidate Steve Soboroff.

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Times staff writer James Rainey contributed to this story.