After reports surfaced over the response times from American Medical Response (AMR), the city opened up a bidding process for a new company to work with the city.
The Colorado Springs Fire Department initially agreed on a partnership with Priority Ambulance- a company out of Knoxville, TN.
Earlier this month the fire department announced it ended negotiations with Priority Ambulance.
‘We just realized that as we were in those negotiations we started to deviate from the RFP (request for proposal, which outlines expectations for the agreement) that we had published,’ said Chief Ted Collas with the Colorado Springs Fire Department.
‘We published a scope of work and that scope of work tells those what they can expect to do and that’s what we started to get away from,’ said Collas.
In the current contract with AMR, there’s an option to extend the contract for 1 year at a time- for up to 5 years.
Collas says they will go with this option while they work on a new RFP with different expectations of the provider.
The Fire Chief didn’t go into details of what the new RFP might contain, but that they want to make sure they have everything covered for Colorado Springs.
‘I think its our responsibility to always look at ways to improve the system,’ said Collas.
AMR’s contract ends at the end of this year, the new contract will go into effect on January 1st.
