Pasquotank-Camden Emergency Medical Services will spend the next year operating under a new management structure that has been implemented for a one-year trial.
The Pasquotank Board of Commissioners gave unanimous approval to the management change following a presentation Monday evening by Pasquotank-Camden EMS Director Jerry Newell.
Under the emergency response agency’s new structure, a position for operations manager that has been vacant for the last year will be frozen and nine participating Pasquotank-Camden EMS officers — four lieutenants and five captains — will receive probationary raises in paygrade only. All nine participants will remain at their current titles, or ranks.
As an incentive, the EMS lieutenants will receive a pay increase of two paygrades above their current paygrade. The captains will receive an increase in pay of one paygrade above their current paygrade. The lieutenants will report to the captains, who all report to Newell.
The change in management structure will only be in effect for the 2024-25 fiscal year, which ends June 30, 2025. The EMS participants voluntarily agreed to take part in the test run, understanding that their pay increases are probationary and at the end of the year could revert back to their paygrade prior to this year’s test, Newell said.
The captains “all have unanimous buy-in to try this project on a probationary period for up to one year,” Newell said.
Several of the captains were present at Monday night’s meeting.
In addition to their current roles and responsibilities, the participants will also share portions of the workload that would otherwise be performed by the operations manager. The probationary increase in pay that each is receiving will be paid using portions of the salary of a budgeted but vacant operations manager’s position.
According to Newell, his staff advertised and interviewed for an operations manager twice in the 2023-24 fiscal year but were unable to land a candidate for the job. Part of his presentation included asking county commissioners to freeze the vacant operations manager’s position.
Newell said that throughout the year, the participants “will learn the tools of the administrative EMS trade that they may not have been exposed to without this type of change in structure.”
Examples of the new skills include administrative functions such as payroll financing and budgeting, clear and concise communications, vehicle care and maintenance and proper disciplinary guidance, Newell said.
The restructuring will streamline communications along the chain of command, Newell said.
The EMS director said he and his captains will monitor and determine the effectiveness of the management change over the coming year.
“If it doesn’t work out then we’ll analyze this quarterly,” Newell said. “We’ll all get together and tell our honest opinions of how it’s going.”
At the end of the year the EMS participants will decide if the management trial is something they’d like to make permanent, he said.
Newell opened his presentation to questions from commissioners. He clarified that the trial participants’ increases in paygrade salary were all probationary.
“If they get to the end of the year and they don’t want to do it anymore because it utterly failed, which I don’t feel will occur, since all of them will remain probationary at that point in time, then everything will revert back to the way it was,” Newell said. “They’ll go back to their grade as they were today.”
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