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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us March 13, 2006 Essentially Ashland City politics strangles an ambulance Lance Pugh Rules change as city chokes the life out of Ashland Life Support It was a dark night in 1990 as Nelson Davis, a prominent artist, lumberyard worker and wizened fisherman, followed his headlights down Dead Indian Memorial Road, driving a route that he knew clearly by memory. Each curve transitioned into another as Nelson thought of his work of the day and his drive down the mountain to meet a friend. As he casually reached to tune the radio, a leash of deer pounced before him. Nelson swerved and rolled his truck, which resulted in 24 broken bones, a collapsed lung, a broken hip and a bruised heart. Gordon “Gordy” Brown, owner and daily operator of our ambulance service, Ashland Life Support, sped to the scene, there to gather Nelson up and transport him to the emergency room in a race against the clock. All these years later, Gordy remembers the comments of an irascible Nelson: “Gordy, any chance of missing at least a few of the bumps in the road?” To his credit, I think Gordy hit every one, if only to keep Nelson conscious and alive during his descent into the Valley. Gordy Brown thought that he had seen it all. Twenty years of responding to emergencies (20,000 runs) in Ashland and outlying areas had left him with a mind full of carnage of what can go wrong behind the wheel or in the tub. Wherever injury and death stalked, Gordy was at hand to instantly respond, stabilize and transport the hapless, surprised or just unlucky, from death’s door to the emergency room, granting many another chance to tempt fate at a future time and in a disparate fashion. Gordy, who has lived his whole life in Ashland, graduated from the Ashland High School in 1974. He started working for Litwiller’s Ambulance Service in 1976 and started managing it in 1977. In 1983, the name had changed to Ashland Life Support, Ltd. and their location then moved from Ashland Street to 287 Maple St., just across from Ashland Community Hospital. As a small measure of background, “Grandpa” Clarence Litwiller bought the ambulance service from the city in 1935 and named it Litwiller Ambulance Service, laying the groundwork that made ALS a national leader in life-saving emergency medical procedures. Through time Gordy became a dive/rope rescue specialist and a commercial EMS helicopter pilot, working with the Crowman and Erickson corporations. Gordy would prove capable of handling everything that the world of emergency medical response could dish out, yet, as we might soon see, became speechless at the tactics used against him and his business after he signed a contract to sell to Mercy Flights. It would appear that Gordy had to navigate through a vagary of impediments thrust upon him by the City of Ashland, this during “emergency” meetings in a process, known to most of us, as “behind closed doors.” While trained as a level 4 emergency medical technician and owner of the ambulance service that had plucked many denizens of Ashland from death’s door, Gordy’s most focused foes seemed to have come in the form of a city administrator, mayor and council all humming the hymn that rescue and life safety should be a profit center for the city, not in the hands of a man whose family created the system, freed the trapped from flaming wreckage and delivered them to advance life-saving procedures at hospitals throughout the Valley. OK, so I have my obvious biases, but I am the one with a column. I’ve noticed that it is nearly impossible to get anyone in the city to utter a harsh word, no matter how true, against the “official” version of an event. Perhaps this is due to a hard collision between the truth and one’s desire to be able to glide into a funded retirement? Maybe? In this limited space we can only rekindle some conversations. In my view, the council failed to heed nor acknowledge private enterprise and the entrepreneurial spirit, preferring, instead, to glom onto a successful business through questionable tactics. Gordy had been offered a “one-time” low-ball sum to sell to the city. He likened it to a surreal meeting with a Tony Soprano, where it was made clear that he had better take the offer as no one else was going to be allowed to purchase it. But, Gordy gave Mercy Flights a call and entered into a sales agreement with Mercy Flights on Oct. 20, 1995. It was rumored that the 747 tasked to transport Ashland’s “godfather” — who was then in Europe — back to Portland had nearly melted its engines in the urgency to get the passenger to Ashland and into an “emergency” council meeting, there to, apparently, decide on a way of putting the Mercy Flights deal on ice. In a bold stroke, the council came up with a new ordinance that would make it nearly impossible for Mercy Flights to meet a newly mandated response time, giving a clear advantage to the city’s local emergency services, the city team, as it were. Gordy sued the city though finally gave up when he realized that “justice” is afforded those who can comfortably expend a large sum for a lengthy legal confrontation. Gordy finally gave in and allowed the assignment of the contract from Mercy Flights to the city, though “under duress.” So, in the end, the city got the business, but, despite profuse assurances to the contrary, did not hire the women who worked for ALS, as a separate bathroom and other facilities were deemed too expensive. In the end, Gordy summarized the experience best: “I worked my whole life to do the right thing, then ended up bullied and threatened right in my own home town.” Note of update and clarification: The robber who seemed to have gotten away as described in last week’s article of a 1980 Ashland bank heist, was served justice a year later. He was apprehended in British Columbia for robbing a convenience store and pled guilty. Detective Lynn Parlette of the Ashland Police Department (recently retired) said that the suspect was wanted for a weapons violation out of Florida at the time of the local robbery. 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