No one forced STAR EMS to bid on this contract.
STAR voluntarily submitted a proposal describing its system as designed to “meet or exceed” Troy’s six-minute response requirement. The RFP and contract documents repeatedly state that emergency responses must occur within six minutes at least 90% of the time.
Now, after missing that requirement for six consecutive months, STAR management is freely telling the media:
“We will continue to do our absolute best to achieve that goal, but it’s highly unlikely that it’s going to happen.”
That is astonishing.
This was not an unexpected goal imposed on STAR after the contract was awarded. It was the requirement STAR bid on.
And this raises a serious fairness question about the entire procurement process.
Other ambulance companies may have reviewed Troy’s six-minute requirement, concluded that they could not responsibly guarantee it, and declined to bid. The city’s bid tab appears to show STAR as the responding bidder, with AmeriPro listed as “No Bid.” If companies were expected to price and staff for a strict six-minute requirement, but the winning contractor is now being allowed to treat that requirement as aspirational, then the competition was not conducted on honest terms.
The response-time requirement was not the only qualification the city overlooked.
The RFP stated that the contractor “shall also hold” CAAS accreditation. STAR expressly answered that it was “not at this time” accredited. The city awarded STAR the contract anyway.
Now we have:
- six straight months of missed performance requirements;
- no publicly announced corrective-action deadline;
- no publicly announced consequences;
- management saying the requirement will probably never be achieved;
- and city officials already talking about waiting until the one-year mark and potentially reconsidering whether six minutes was realistic.
Meanwhile, the bid documents expressly give Troy the right to cancel for poor performance or bring in additional companies or municipal personnel when the contractor cannot perform.
This does not prove self-dealing, and I am not claiming that it does.
But it absolutely creates enough red flags to justify an independent review of how this contract was written, evaluated, negotiated and awarded.
Residents deserve the complete procurement record, including:
- scoring sheets and evaluator notes;
- communications between the city and STAR;
- the reason the accreditation requirement was disregarded;
- communications with companies that attended the pre-bid process but did not submit proposals;
- and when city officials first learned that STAR considered six minutes “highly unlikely.”
Did STAR tell the city before the award that it probably could not meet the requirement?
Did the city know during negotiations?
Or is STAR only acknowledging it now, after receiving the contract?
Those questions deserve answers.
If six minutes at 90% was a real contractual requirement, enforce it.
If the city never intended to enforce it, then rebid the service honestly using the standard the city actually expects.
But Troy cannot advertise one standard to shape the bidding process, overlook another written qualification, award the contract, ignore six months of noncompliance and then explain the requirements away after the fact.