It’s Been a Long Few Weeks…
and a Long Six Months

It’s Been a Long Few Weeks… and a Long Six Months

Great Barrington Moderator Michael Wise takes a quick break during the marathon, two-day town meeting.

First, I’d like to thank the citizens—and the leadership—of Alford, Egremont, Monterey, Mount Washington, and Sheffield for the support they showed the squad at their Town Meetings.

Last August and November we invited the Select Boards and Finance Committees of all six of our primary 911 towns to budget briefings. We explained the landscape: reduced insurance payments, new ambulances on order, increased staffing costs, and presented everyone who attended a budget book at the second meeting.

We didn’t hear from the Great Barrington Select Board until April. We attended two of the joint meetings of the Select Board and Finance Committee in April, more than six months after we presented them with our budget.

We had no indication our budget would not be supported until after those meetings had concluded, at which point the leadership voted to reduce our ask by about $90,000, condition it on a contract, and pay nothing for the replacement ambulances that we ordered over a year ago.

In fact, in one of the Town Manager’s first budget books, the original amount requested for operations, $414,000, was included. We ended up with $323,000. In the November meeting, we let the six towns know that they would need to pay their share of the loan payments for the replacement ambulances. No feedback, just a veto in late April. Five other towns are paying their share. Not Great Barrington.

Two points were made repeatedly before the vote: SBAS is “just a vendor” and “we didn’t approve your purchase of ambulances in advance.” I am paraphrasing.

On the first point, for 46 years this “vendor” provided ambulance service to Great Barrington at no charge. You can see the photos of some of the folks who provided it, and never got paid, below. If we are just a vendor, where do we send the bill for these folks’ 46 years of labor? It’s true that in 2014 we transitioned to a paramedic ambulance service with a paid staff. We did so because paramedic ambulances save lives, especially for critical care situations like strokes and heart attacks, where minutes make a life-or-death difference. Volunteer services don’t cost much, while a team of 32 EMTs and paramedics staffing three ambulances a day costs $2 million per year. Hence the support we request from towns.

On the second point, the ordering of ambulances, well they take 2 years to deliver. We’ve been encouraging all six towns to get together and participate in the decisions we need to make. We are confident in our own ability to manage this service and we thought the fact that towns didn’t take us up on that was a sign that they agreed, not a way to unilaterally veto a purchase 9 months after it was proposed, disclosed, and subsequently ordered.

Last week we scrambled to do a fundraising letter to cover some of this gap. We hope you will consider donating. This process, in my opinion, was reckless. I am a lifelong resident of Great Barrington and it is my strong opinion that both the process and the outcome were unfair to Great Barrington’s partner towns, and a disservice to the people who live here. Fundraising should be paying for the capital costs of future ambulance purchases, not current operations. Our leaders weakened emergency medical services here for what, to “save” the taxpayers an average of $33 each, which is the difference in cost per taxpayer of what we proposed vs. what was approved.

I say this as a citizen, as a volunteer on the squad for 50+ years, and as the president of this organization. Let’s figure this out together, because we all must do better.

Jim Santos
50 Year Volunteer & President, SBAS

Volunteers from Decades Ago

Sometime around the late 1980s/early 1990s, the squad produced a series of ads featuring several dozen of the unpaid, volunteer EMTs that staffed the ambulances back then. We dug them up and thought you might enjoy seeing some of these faces from long ago. Lou passed last year, Ruth, Ken, and Jim are still at it, volunteering for the squad in leadership roles. Anyway, here is a trip down memory lane.

Click any photo to view full size.

Donor Pages on Our New Website

Thanks so much to the 2,000+ donors over the last three years who recognize the importance of emergency medical services and how critical SBAS is to our community. That’s why we’ve created donor pages that list all of them.

You can review the 2024, 2025, and year-to-date 2026 donors by clicking the links.

Enjoy the end of the school year, prom, and graduation… responsibly.

Final Thoughts: Your Whole Life Ahead of You

Prom and graduation season is here. Please be careful out there.

There’s a particular kind of joy that belongs to prom night and graduation night — the way the air feels lighter, the way your friends look both exactly the same and somehow already different, the way the future stops being a far-off rumor and starts feeling like something you can actually touch. You’ve earned it. Every late night, every early morning, every test you thought you’d fail and didn’t — it all led here. And the best part isn’t the diploma in your hand. It’s the whole sky ahead of you, wide open, waiting.

So take the photos. Dance badly. Hug the people who got you through. But when the night winds down and it’s time to head home, be the friend who makes the careful call — who hands over the keys, who waits the extra twenty minutes for a safer ride, who texts “made it” when they get there.

The whole point of having your whole life ahead of you is actually getting to live it. Don’t let one night turn into the thing your family talks about in past tense. Graduation is a beginning. Make sure you’re around for everything that comes next.