Hi everyone. I wrote back last spring about a problem we have keeping and getting qualified people to keep our ambulance service operating.

The fire chief, president and myself met with county officials and CIMVAC to get some things in place until the Conquest Fire Company could get an action plan in place. Things seemed to be going very well. The fire chief set it up with emergency 911 so CIMVAC was also blown out the same as Conquest.

I would like to thank all the people at CIMVAC for helping us out in our time of need. I would also like to thank Barry Rubenau, James Burke and the Conquest Fire Company for knowing we had a problem and putting a very good action plan together to get the people of Conquest covered.

With that said, we are now almost one year later and we are still in the same condition as we were last year. We currently only have two people trained to run our ambulance. This brings us to a crossroads. Is it cost effective to keep an ambulance in Conquest? How much longer can we wait without doing anything?

It is not fair to keep asking CIMVAC to cover all of our calls while they are being paid and are contracted with other towns to do their ambulance calls. CIMVAC is going to give us time to get something in place, meaning cover it ourselves, contract with them or another company. I want everyone to know that this has no refection on the job that the Conquest Fire Company does for us. They continue to answer our calls for help.

This isn't a Conquest problem alone. It's a county wide problem - even in the larger towns they have little or no coverage many hours of the day. Many of those towns have been pushed into paid medics. We have not decided anything and we realize how much of a difficult decision lies ahead. I thought I would plant the seed for public discussion. We will do everything possible to resolve this issue with the Conquest Fire Company, but it must be resolved because it's the town board's responsibility to provide the taxpayers with the best service at the cheapest possible cost.

Charlie Knapp is supervisor for the town of Conquest.