Torrance awarded its ambulance provider a one-year contract extension this week after city officials decided concerns about slower-than-required response times might be due to the city’s own unrealistic expectations and security issues.

The unanimous vote Tuesday night extends through 2016 McCormick Ambulance’s contract to transport patients to local medical facilities.

A new report released Monday that includes May and June response times show McCormick Ambulance responded to 91 percent of emergency calls within eight minutes from Dec. 3, 2014, through June 30, Fire Department officials said.

That’s exactly the same response time percentage Gerber Ambulance posted from January through November in 2014, before its contract was not renewed, in part because it wasn’t meeting performance expectations.

City contracts for both companies held them to an eight-minute response time 92 percent of the time.

“Now that we’ve got the May and June numbers we’re pretty close,” Councilman Mike Griffiths said. “I would certainly like to see McCormick hitting that promise they made to the city of that 92 percent (response time); otherwise, I think they’ve done a very good job.”

Lights and sirens

But critics voiced lingering concerns that evaluating the two companies’ response times was not an apples-to-apples comparison, despite city officials’ assurances that it was.

Torrance residents have anecdotally reported far more occasions when a McCormick Ambulance has its lights and sirens turned on responding to a call than Gerber did. In Torrance, ambulance companies are expected to seek permission before responding to a call code 3 (with lights and sirens) instead of code 2 (no lights and sirens).

“I have personally seen McCormick turn on their lights and sirens to make a left-hand turn,” former Councilman Bill Sutherland said. “They are not allowed to do that on a call.

“I’ve personally seen them come on a call with their lights and sirens before they are given permission. So that must help your eight-minute maximum (response time). … So no, it’s not apples to apples.”

Fire Chief William Racowschi conceded that “there are occasions” when the department upgrades a call from code 2 to code 3.

City officials did not provide data on how often that occurs and how that aids response times.

Unrealistic expectations

Still, Councilman Geoff Rizzo, a retired Torrance police officer, said his research showed that Torrance’s expectations for the ambulance company may be an “unrealistic standard” and possibly never should have been applied in the first place.

He said the expected eight-minute response time on 92 percent of emergency calls was a performance standard for emergency responders.

“Our ambulance companies are not really being run by the Fire Department,” Rizzo said. “They’re a third-party vendor that we’re bringing forward to provide transportation services for our Fire Department.

“I can’t really find any performance standards for them,” he added. “Given call volumes in our city, given traffic in our city, given the time of day (the call occurs) I really don’t know if that’s realistic for that third-party provider. Possibly, moving forward, we may want to examine that.”

System never installed

The biggest obstacle McCormick faced in meeting the required response times, however, might have been a failure to install a computer-aided dispatch system that improves ambulance efficiency by tying the vehicle into the city’s emergency response system, Torrance officials conceded.

Gerber’s failure to install CAD after it was first made a contract requirement in 2011 was among the contract violations cited by city officials in not renewing its contract.

But Racowschi said “near nothing” was done to install the system “other than conceptually throw around” ideas.

An assistant to the city manager acknowledged no prior analysis in implementing a “massive interface requirement” was ever performed.

And Emergency Medical Systems Coordinator Brian Hudson acknowledged that the longest delay to bringing on the CAD system was actually caused by the city itself.

“It’s primarily designed to assist law enforcement agencies,” he said. “So there was concern about allowing access into their system for security reasons. That was the most significant delay.”

Officials are hopeful the CAD system — which shaves a “few seconds” off a response — will be in place by the end of August.

Council members expressed skepticism.

“We don’t have any real idea of when it will be up and running,” Councilwoman Heidi Ashcraft noted. “So far as holding people to a (response time) standard, that’s the problem.”