If Keeler Township had surveyed constituents as Silver Creek Township did before contracting for five years with Coloma Emergency Ambulance Inc. (CEMS Medical Transport) April 1 for ambulance service, its board might not be facing recall Tuesday.

“Silver Creek put it to a vote of the people in a survey, and they’re standing with us,” Sister Lakes Fire Department EMS director Frank Kuiken said Friday. “We’re a community-based service. The board formed a committee, talked to different professionals and listened to their constituents. That’s all we asked Keeler to do.”

“We suggested to table this or put it to a vote before the annual meeting and see if people are willing to pay for our service,”  added Jim Scholz, a Whirlpool project manager who has been a Sister Lakes firefighter for about 10 of his 35 years in the service.

“The fact that the board flat-out refuses to answer questions at public meetings has driven the recall. You had the annual meeting with 100 people sitting there saying they didn’t like what you’re proposing to do, let’s put it to a vote. What did they do? They waited until the annual meeting was over and people left because it had drug on so long. Then they turned around and went into the public meeting and slammed it through. This was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Scholz.

“They started a first responder group without a vote of the people and spent $10,000 on a vehicle without asking a soul. And they pay those people $15 an hour, two hours minimum, to run calls without asking anybody. People are saying 20 years of this is enough – and it’s not just about ambulance. You don’t want to give us any money or help us boost up a transporting ambulance service to ALS (advanced life support). That’s when I started asking questions.They’re not saving money. (Supervisor) Bill Kays said it all comes back to the money, with a lot of noise from other services concerned about the threat to their subsidies posed by service whose business model calls for no tax subsidies. Did Coloma turn down that countywide millage (which Keeler Township voters rejected)? They took another $100,000 and added it to the $400,000 they already got out of Van Buren County. Ambulance was a pivotal issue that the people decided to conduct a recall. We had nothing to do with that,” asserts Kuiken.  “We had nothing to do with organization of the recall. None of our people were involved in the recall. In fact, we specifically stated we would not do that. It’s not our place. It’s a political decision for township residents … the ambulance issue was the straw that broke the camel’s back because the people were not being listened to by their board of representatives as constituents. When over 150 township residents fill the township hall to request the same thing and you don’t listen to them, that’s what happens. We go from the political of talking to township officials about recall, which turns into a tirade of complaints about our fire department which haven’t been validated. Nothing was found to be wrong” when the Van Buren County Sheriff’s Office investigated suspected embezzlement of funds in 2009.

“It did bring some things to light and we did what any business would do, we changed personnel,” President Tom Gear said. “We found things we weren’t happy with, so we got somebody else to do the treasurer’s job. This is the most frustrating thing I’ve ever gone through.”

“There was an investigation initiated by the fire department,” current Treasurer Mary Spaulding said. “They notified the Keeler Township board first out of respect and not hearing rumors that weren’t true. The fire department contacted the appropriate authorities, they did the investigation and our department paid for a forensic audit that found nothing to be wrong or out of place. What they found – and we’re all volunteers and none of us board members get paid – wasn’t anything to do with mismanagement or embezzlement, it had to do with some poor structure and poor office skills, so to speak, in a volunteer position. We did what any organization does when it finds something is not working, you restructure, you reorganize and come back together. That’s exactly what we did. There is absolutely nothing to validate that anything was missing or that we had done anything illegal. There were no funds missing, yet it’s come back to bite us.

“We’re fighting because we know we can provide a better service to our community,” the treasurer said. “Had there been complaints against our organization that we have not provided the best care to our patients that we can and had the township said to us we were not meeting its requirements or doing what we were asked to do, then, by all means, replace us. But we’ve been above and beyond. You keep reading the few testimonials here and there in support of the new service. That’s nothing compared to what we get here. It’s not in the paper every day, but they come to us,” like at the Fourth of July parade, when spectators stood and applauded, the woman who dropped off grape jelly or the farmer who left watermelons.

“That’s what makes it worthwhile to us – not money,” Fire Chief Anthony Lozada said. “Money is the least of our concerns here because we’re here to serve this community. We make enough to get by. We’re not going to take our primary unit and leave these people uncovered to take guaranteed money. That’s not how we operate.”

Sister Lakes Fire Department, 66, branched off from Keeler at the beginning of 1953 and built its own firetruck after starting with a converted Army truck and 14 volunteers.

“We’re a key piece of real estate that they want,” Spaulding said. “VBEMS (Paw Paw-Mattawan-Lawrence-Decatur), South Haven, Coloma are paid directly from Van Buren County. We’re the only ones who have to provide quarterly reports and go through Keeler Township to get their funds. Our organization is held to a different standard. (Coloma) is not required by contract to provide quarterly reports or a yearly audit, like we were. When I first started here 10 years ago, I was in jeans and a T-shirt and progressed to full on-duty 24/7/365 ALS” and blue uniform shirts.

“We have the same training and the additional licensing. There are a whole lot of letters hanging out there that we have, but don’t boast about it. If you want to provide the best service, you get all the training you can. I guess we don’t toot our own horn enough. In all of this crap we have gone through all these years, we have always taken the high road, hoping the good guys always win.”

“A key point of this,” Kuiken said, “is that members of our board identified some unusual things, some questionable things. Rather than sweep it under the rug or trying to handle it and then being accused of covering it up or hiding anything, we went to the Sheriff’s Office and to Silver Creek and Keeler and said we’d like an independent investigation. Check it for us and let us know. The thing that gets me is the pot calling the kettle black. This contract Keeler drew up with Coloma, we sat there and asked a couple of questions and were told by Mr. (Trustee Don) Blackmond that he had reviewed it and he’s a lawyer, the township attorney had reviewed it and it was appropriate, yet there were three discrepancies that ultimately were changed that day before they signed it. A section did not require an ambulance to be kept in Keeler Township, but in the ‘geographic area.’ We were losing the contract, which was bad for us and bad for the township, but we wanted to do our part to make sure Keeler Township gets the best service it can out of Coloma. People accuse me of scare tactics. I’m not trying to scare anybody. I’m scared. As EMS director, I’m scared for myself, my family, my wife and my friends and loved ones and the care they’re going to get. We can do a better job. Our business model is to be a fire department and to cover the 100 square miles we do, the best we can. We do it all here – water rescue, vehicle extrication, fire, dive, ambulance. I’m not out to conquer the world.”

Sister Lakes officials point to a section of the contract which states, “During the term of this agreement contractor agrees not to attempt collection against an individual who is a real property owner or resident of township and who has no insurance or benefits that cover emergency ambulance transportation.”

“They’ve billed some people and not billed others,” Kuiken interprets. “My billing agency said we can choose to do no collections or aggressive collections or choose to bill people or not to bill people, but you have to do it all the same to everyone. That’s the bottom line.”

“We’ve gone to them numerous times and complained about their first responder service not meeting the letter of the law when they do not answer their calls. That’s when they started getting aggravated with us,” said Kuiken, who lives between Sister Lakes and Eau Claire.  “Seventy-five percent of our calls aren’t general transports. When it hits the fan out here, it’s deadly serious. We have serious car accidents on M-152 at speeds you don’t have in Benton Harbor. They don’t have the type of storm damage we have going on in a rural area.”

“Where I have an issue with their business model,” Scholz said, “is when Coloma takes an emergency ambulance out of service to do a non-emergency transfer, like taking Mrs. Smith from home or a nursing home to Lakeland to get her dialysis service and not bring in a second rig. Their business model says don’t hand off calls to outside services, pull one of our rigs from further away.  Their business model makes it difficult to hold them accountable with tracking.”

“So much of their traffic goes off the frequency and there’s no public record,” Gear agreed.

Lozada said, “Problem is, mutual aid is defined by providing service to another agency basically when they’ve exhausted all of their resources based on an emergency call volume. Emergency is the key word. For example, they take the Dowagiac car and do a non-emergency transfer from Lee to Kalamazoo because that’s guaranteed money doctors sign for. They’re contracted to have two ALS units there. Now you have one to cover Indian Lake to the other side of Vandalia. That ambulance gets a call. When the next call comes in, who’s there to take it? Us or Lifecare (based in Cassopolis), which happens quite frequently. Now we have to go in and take that call in an area that is contracted for free – but we can’t be for free. We call in a second crew to come here to cover our area. So now we’re paying two crews because we have to take a call in their area because they took an emergency ambulance out of service to take a transfer to Kalamazoo.”

“I pay taxes into a countywide millage for ambulance,” Kuiken said. “A good portion of Berrien and Van Buren do. Mr. (CEMS CEO Brian) Balow’s business model takes that money from Berrien and Van Buren so he can scoot over here to Cass and offer them service for free. That’s a helluva business model.”

“They move their cars so much, if you listen to the radio, they don’t know where their numbers are,” Spaulding said.

Lozada said, “It says in their stuff there were two vehicle accidents in the last five months. That is accurate.The first of those occurred in February and involved our ambulance going out to a non-emergency lift assist. The roads were extremely icy from freezing rain. They made the turn by Driftwood. It’s like a semi. The wind coming off the lake catches it like a sail and blows the ambulance sideways and off the road. Yes, that happened. At the same time, I personally witnessed two Keeler Township board members drive by, pointing and laughing, having a good time that our ambulance wrecked. One of our people was injured. The second, on July 19, the truck was turning around and turned too tight at the pole at Maple Island and M-152. It has a 52-degree turning radius, which means the wheels are almost pointing at each other. The truck went into service to the wrong Lakeshore Drive and was turning around after realizing their mistake.”

Sister Lakes officials say they did not attend the January township meeting because their ambulance was backing up Coloma at FIve-Mile Corner after a child drowned at Twin Lakes, where their dive team went.

“At the February meeting I apologized that we had not been there last month,” Lozada, of Keeler Township, added. “Somebody’s life is way more important than listening to politicians.”

Sister Lakes officials believe the Coloma move has been in the wind longer than Keeler Township officials admit. “They absolutely had their minds made up,” Spaulding said. “Their QR took their EMT class through Coloma.”

“Keeler Quick Response formed about the time they wanted us to go ALS because they were pretty sure we would not go ALS,” Gear recalled. “They knew if Coloma was going to be their service, they probably better have something to back them up.”

“There was an article in the Kalamazoo Gazette, which we didn’t know anything about,” Lozada said, “and I attend almost all of the Keeler Township meetings and don’t remember ever hearing anything about this. The Gazette quoted (Supervisor) Bill Kays as saying they’d been studying Coloma for two years.”

“Way back when, before the QR team was established, we were advancing from BLS (basic life support) to Bennett ALS,” said 42-year veteran Buzz Whelan of Hartford Township. Bennett ALS, which Sister Lakes achieved in two years, the state allows the service to run ALS part-time, if personnel are available.

“We’re well-supported in the community,” said Gear. “EIghty-five percent of the township’s taxable value is right smack in the middle of where we’re at,” with farmland dominating northern Keeler. “They make accusations they can’t back up, which drives us crazy. We’re not trying to bash anyone, we’re trying to provide the best service we feel we can for our community.”

“We’ve got cross-trained firefighter/EMTs. Cardiac arrests average six people from this department,” Kuiken said. “Now, we’ve gone back to this rag-tag, sometimes-we-come, sometimes-we-don’t responder group. That’s what we used to be, the guys who came to the station in our cars and go home at night. Four to six minutes without oxygen and blood to your brain, doesn’t work well, so we stepped up. Now you don’t know where the ambulance is coming from. Bangor? Dowagiac?”