Park Ridge considers charging assisted living sites, nursing homes for high number of 911 calls

Park Ridge aldermen took a tentative step toward authorizing the city Fire Department to charge residential health care institutions, including assisted living facilities and nursing homes, for service at an April 5 Committee of the Whole Meeting.

Fire Chief Jeff Sorensen said he was asking aldermen to consider the plan because the department has reached a “tipping point” in its ability to provide timely services to residents of both the facilities and the community at large.

“People in this community, they want 911 services to be available for them,” he said. “We’re consistently tied up on calls from health care facilities and so they’re getting the second, third, fourth closest ambulances to them.”

Park Ridge may be one of the first municipalities in the state to consider or pass this type of arrangement, Sorensen and city attorney Julie Tappendorf said.

The City Council has been discussing the possibility of charging health care facilities like nursing homes and assisted living communities for emergency services since last year as the call rate from these types of facilities has increased.

Park Ridge is currently home to six residential health care facilities, per a memo from Sorensen to aldermen: assisted living facilities The Summit of Uptown, The Sheridan and Sunrise Senior Living and nursing homes Avantara, Ascension Living Resurrection Place and Park Ridge Care Center.

Sorensen told council members last week that the Fire Department receives triple the regular number of calls from nursing homes and six times as many calls from the assisted living homes as it does from multifamily residences of the same size.

The department is proposing that each facility be allotted a number of calls for emergency services every year, and that each facility would pay the difference between that amount and what the city receives from Medicare reimbursements.

Fire Department Executive Officer Paul Lisowski said no decision had yet been made on how those funds would be used.

Mayor Marty Maloney pointed out that the city had recently tried to get private schools and local public school districts to split the costs of its crossing guard program and encountered pushback. The same, he said, might be the case when the city approaches residential health care facilities about this proposal.

“No one wants to pay more,” Maloney said. “We’re justified here. But I thought we were justified … in our crossing guard approach. The argument there is, ‘this is public safety, it’s our responsibility,’ and that might be a pivot that these facilities make and I think we need to be prepared for that.”