After 80 years of serving San Luis Obispo County, San Luis Ambulance must now contend with other providers for the job after facing widespread dissatisfaction about long response times and working in an outdated system.
“Just yesterday, we had a call at Templeton High School and our engine responded to that incident, and we had a seriously injured football player,” Templeton Fire Chief Tom Peterson said at the Oct. 21 Board of Supervisors meeting. “Our crews arrived quickly, began care, and tried to contact the responding ambulance but there was no response. Dispatch then advised that the ambulance was coming from San Luis Obispo with a long and extended ETA.”
Peterson added that the delay prompted firefighters to request an air ambulance from Mercy Air 34, which is slated for closure in November. The helicopter transported the injured student to the trauma center at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera.
The fire chief said that the incident reflects what happens when the county system is stretched thin.
Peterson was among a throng of fire chiefs, mayors, city managers, and community members who urged the supervisors to approve seeking bids for ambulance services throughout most of SLO County. They believed San Luis Ambulance—which responded to 31,142 requests for service in 2024—must be vetted in a competitive way.
Supervisors greenlit the request for proposals process in a 3-2 vote with 1st District Supervisor John Peschong and 5th District Supervisor Heather Moreno dissenting.
Peschong said that he views all the players in the issue—San Luis Ambulance, cities, community services districts, fire departments, the Sheriff’s Office, and hospitals, among others—as a “public safety family.”
“It started out when I suffered a cardiac incident and the Templeton Fire Department saved my life, then San Luis Ambulance saved my life, and Twin Cities and French both saved my life,” he said. “I do believe that not through the RFP process but through the contract process, we can bring transparency, accountability, and if there are flaws, we can address those flaws through the contract.”
Issues with ambulance services have been so longstanding that an oversight body was formed called the Ambulance Performance Operations Committee. The committee—a mix of fire chiefs, city managers, the county health officer, and the county administrative officer—unanimously decided in 2022 that the county should run a competitive bidding process for the ambulance contract.
By January 2023, the committee decided to pause the process and enter a two-year contract with San Luis Ambulance because of concerns that the process wouldn’t be completed before the existing agreement with the ambulance service expired.
According to the committee vice chair, Grover Beach City Manager Matt Bronson, the current agreement with San Luis Ambulance lasts from July 1, 2024, through June 30, 2026, with an option to extend by one or two years.
“At this point, it’s not determining one provider or the other,” Bronson told New Times. “It’s about having a fair, open process to make sure that this is the most responsive, effective service delivery for our communities.”
But in San Luis Ambulance’s eyes, the county isn’t required to undergo a request for proposals process because a “proven, qualified, grandfathered-in” service already exists.
San Luis Ambulance Operations Manager Kris Strommen told New Times that response time compliance is monitored and reported according to zone-specific standards defined by the county Emergency Medical Services Agency (EMSA), which oversees the ambulance service.
“The EMSA also has oversight over the data for transparency,” he said via email. “Compliance is calculated based on total response time (from when the ambulance was notified to arrival on scene) and has a minimum requirement of 90 percent for each zone every month.”
San Luis Ambulance responds to four call zones in the county—urban (mostly cities), suburban (areas like Avila Beach, Cayucos, and San Miguel), rural (areas like Creston, Heritage Ranch, and Shandon), and remote (Cholame, Oak Shores, and Pozo).
Compliance requirements are 10 minutes and 59 seconds or less for 90 percent of total responses in urban zones; 20 minutes and 59 seconds or less in suburban zones; 30 minutes and 59 seconds in rural zones; and 60 minutes and 59 seconds in remote call zones.
For California Valley, which is a remote call zone, the compliance requirement is 80 minutes or less for 90 percent of total responses.
Strommen added that all the allegations against San Luis Ambulance are false.
“What we’re concerned about is that we would probably get the same results but having to go through an RFP process because the oversight, and the accountability, and the response times are all things that we are already doing,” Strommen said. “Another thing that we were concerned about is just that the misinformation out there about the lack of innovation or the lack of expansion and growth, when we’ve been adding ambulances and adding services year after year.” ∆
Correction, November 11, 2025 11:47 am: Editor's note: This story was updated to correct the photo credit.
This article appears in Pets 2025.
So….waaambulance indeed. I’m wondering why County Public Health leadership wasn’t honest with the Board of Supervisors. They allowed San Luis Ambulance staff and the Board to latch onto exclusivity/grandfathering to avoid the competitive process. Well, I ain’t the sharpest tool in the shed by any means, so I checked the EMS Plan update filed with the State and I’m pretty sure part of the response area they were waaambulancin about ain’t protected. So what gives? Who sat on this? Thank you Board Majority, thinking it would have been 5-0 if disclosed, but what do I know? https://emsa.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/71/2025/05/San-Luis-Obispo-2024-EMS-Post-Plan.pdf
The RFP process is very complicated and misleading. If you have a 90% compliance zone for a high population area you can wind up sending units far abroad to maintain percentages in lower population areas. The anecdotal stories in this article are misleading because whomever wins the bid you will have compliance issues. One actual helpful innovation that I’ve seen are fast response units that get on scene but don’t have transport capability. In this county many of the fire units are ALS aka paramedic units so this might not be as productive as the communities I worked for.