Dateline: November 27, 2003

Ambulance service receives state grant

By Roger Estlack, Clarendon Enterprise

The Associated Ambulance Authority was awarded a $35,000 grant from the Texas Department of Health (TDH) last week to help purchase a new ambulance.

Authority Director Anita Aaron said her office received a congratulatory phone call from TDH last Tuesday after sending in the grant application in April.

“We were very blessed,” she said. “We were thrilled just not to be rejected and then to find out that we got just what we asked for.”

Aaron said the ambulance service received the maximum possible award under a TDH Local Project Grant program. The funds will be used to replace the authority’s oldest ambulance, which is a 1995 model that will be traded in.

 “Because of where we are located, we rack up a lot of miles,” Aaron said.

The ambulance service, which operates a total of three ambulances under the authority of the Donley County Hospital District, had only 30 to 45 days to fill out an application that Aaron said was much more complex than previous applications.

“This was a team effort,” she said of the application. “There is no one person responsible for the success of this grant.”

Ambulance service personnel Debra Hill, Anna Summers, Brent Aaron, Connie Wheatley, and District Administrator Alan Graham assisted Anita Aaron with the application.

Work is already underway on several grant applications to come up with an additional $45,000 needed to purchase a new ambulance, and Aaron says the state grant will make finding the extra money much easier.

“It puts us in a better position since we’ve already been awarded a grant,” she said. “It opens doors and makes us look more attractive to other grantors.”

The ambulance service has one year to use the state funds and seeks to find the matching funds within that timeframe.

Earlier this week Aaron was in San Antonio for the Texas State EMS Conference on behalf of the ambulance authority and was attending the Rural EMS Task Force meeting of the Governor’s Emergency Trauma Advisory Council.

“We’re developing an elected officials’ guide to EMS as to who we are and what we do,” she said.

Aaron said currently the state considers EMS to be a “non-essential” service while law enforcement and fire departments are considered “essential” services.