JOHN DUFFY | FOR LNP | LANCASTERONLINE
MESA is not receiving reimbursements from nonmember municipalities when it responds to ambulance calls. These include Mount Joy and Columbia boroughs, as well as Rapho and West Hempfield townships — areas that chose not to participate in the authority and have benefited from an excess of MESA service calls. In past discussions, elected officials in MESA member municipalities has called the imbalance a theft of services. At a Jan. 29 meeting of northwest county elected officials, it was agreed that letters from member municipalities was a logical next step. Invoices from MESA and face-to-face meetings have yielded no results.
“Both of these are soft. We need to go harder,” said Elizabethtown Mayor Chuck Mummert about the two versions of the draft letter. Council member Andrew Schoenberger said the members should offer steps for the nonmember municipalities to either pay MESA back or join the authority, otherwise they’re going to continue taking advantage of those who have paid into the service. “Are our residents then going to have to pay more?”
Several Elizabethtown Borough Council members, as well as Mummert, said the letter was not strong enough. Instead, they asked borough staff to rewrite the letter to include information about the costs the regional ambulance authority, commonly called MESA, has had to absorb as a result of the mutual aid imbalance. Mutual aid is when emergency response companies lend assistance across jurisdictional boundaries.
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