Time for SCWEMS to toughen up

The Saratoga Sun has been following the recent, sometimes heated, discussions at South Central Wyoming Emergency Medical Services (SCWEMS) Joint Powers Board (JPB) meetings with interest. Everyone who lives in this area is affected by the availability of timely and effective ambulance and first responder services.

It appears to the Saratoga Sun that SCWEMS is experiencing growing pains, and needs to learn some lessons about the accountability of their actions.

An article in the Aug. 6, 2014 edition of the Saratoga Sun shows SCWEMS is now dealing with yearly revenues more than 10 times what the service had in their coffers when they started. There are also 60 to 80 volunteers throughout the county.

The supporters and detractors of Bill Dahlke credit him with the growth and strength of SCWEMS. He is also credited as a first-class Emergency Medical Technician who nobody wants to see the service do without.

The Saratoga Sun believes it is time for SCWEMS to “toughen up” and deal with the very serious charges of fiscal mismanagement and time sheet falsification.

It has been acknowledged by SCWEMS that the board never approved an increase in pay for on-call hours at the Saratoga SCWEMS station. The fact the pay increase happened at all, and continued for more than a year, should be considered a major mistake in the operation of the service.

Mistakes happen, in business as in life, but there are usually consequences.

There have been no consequences other than disgruntled, and sometimes outraged, members of the service and the municipalities they serve.

Discussions recently overheard at Riverside’s town council meeting suggest there are municipalities so upset with the state of SCWEMS, they are considering pulling their support from the JPB.

It has been openly denied that time sheets have been falsified in order to receive extra on-call pay, specifically at the emergency meeting on July 31, 2014. The Saratoga Sun reported on a verbal description from the SCWEMS bookeeper in which a time sheet was submitted that had additional hours, not actually worked, tallied in a separate column from actual hours worked in order to adjust for the extra pay promised. Since the person responsible for administering paychecks only reviewed a total of hours submitted, provided on separate sheet, seems to constitute a fraudulent time sheets.

We, at the Saratoga Sun, do not fault the volunteers who submitted these time sheets for the fraud, but the management that put the system in place and promoted it. Someone must have told the volunteers to fill out their time sheets this way, and supervisors had to approve what would have been a very obvious increase in pay. The system seems to have been designed to subvert the payroll procedures in place.

The money does not seem to be the important point, but it is the blatantly fraudulent process to effect an unapproved pay increase.

The structure of the SCWEMS board appears to be in disharmony with what is necessary for a large organization. Having the Director of the organization as a sitting board member, and even Chair of the Board, is like having the fox watching the hen house. Many entities governed by a board make sure that their directors and other day-to-day administrative personnel are not on the board, but instead serve under the board’s supervision. This means those personnel must clearly and explicitly follow the direction of the board. Instituting an unapproved payroll action would generally be a fireable offense.

The fact the board has carried motions to take no further action on the payroll matter only makes it appear as if they are trying to hide something.

It seems the SCWEMS board considers their funding as theirs alone even though a significant portion of SCWEMS funds comes from the municipalities that are members of the JPB which includes five towns and the county. This means SCWEMS is ultimately accountable to the town councils and board of county commissioners. This was evidenced in the town council meeting discussed above.

SCWEMS should take the time to acknowledge their growing pains, provide a full financial accounting that goes as far back as the beginning of the extra pay for Saratoga volunteers, remove any board members and station supervisors who actively participated in the payroll issue from administrative positions, and restructure the board and administrative personnel to reflect an organization of SCWEM’s size and complexity.