New Ipswich, Greenville and Greenfield are facing the potential for increased costs when the Peterborough ambulance responds to calls in their communities.
During a Tuesday meeting, the New Ipswich Select Board met with Souhegan Valley Ambulance Chief Wendy Leger and Fire Chief Ben Hatcher to discuss a letter from Peterborough Fire Chief Ed Walker proposing changes to how Peterborough provides mutual aid ambulance services. Under the proposal, Peterborough would charge $1,500 per call when responding to those communities under certain circumstances.
The charge would not apply to every call, Walker clarified in an interview with the Ledger-Transcript. He said that if all available ambulances at Souhegan Valley Ambulance — which serves New Ipswich and Greenville — or Wilton Ambulance, which serves Greenfield, are staffed and already out on emergency calls, Peterborough would respond without charging a fee. The town would also continue to respond to mass-casualty events, such as serious car crashes requiring multiple ambulances, at no cost.
The $1,500 charge would apply when a community’s home ambulance service has an ambulance available but does not have it staffed, Walker said.
Peterborough has used a similar model with Jaffrey and Rindge since 2024, although the fee has been $1,000 per call. Walker said that at the time, Peterborough was responding to a high number of calls in Jaffrey while the Jaffrey-Rindge Memorial Ambulance was short-staffed.
The per-call charge for Jaffrey and Rindge would also increase to $1,500 under the new proposal.
“It isn’t fair for our taxpayers to be subsidizing that. It’s a resource our taxpayers are paying for that isn’t available when we’re in these other communities.”
Walker emphasized that regardless of whether communities sign the agreement, Peterborough will continue to respond to high-level emergencies requiring immediate intervention and to large-scale incidents.
Next steps for communities
At the New Ipswich Select Board meeting, Leger and Hatcher said they were caught off guard by Walker’s letter, which included a draft contract requiring a response by March 27.
Leger said Souhegan Valley Ambulance had never previously been approached by Peterborough Fire and Rescue about the volume of calls Peterborough was handling in its service area.
“How can I solve something if I don’t know it exists?” Leger said.
Hatcher said he and Leger had already begun discussing ways to mitigate the issue, including improving daytime staffing levels.
Souhegan Valley Ambulance owns two ambulances, Leger said, but staffing them — particularly during daytime hours — has been a challenge. Most Souhegan responders work ambulance shifts as a second job, meaning overnight and weekend shifts are often fully staffed, while only one ambulance is reliably staffed during the day.
Some members of the New Ipswich Fire Department are certified EMTs, Hatcher said, but are not interested in working full-time with the ambulance service. He suggested a potential model in which firefighters could serve as EMTs during emergencies. However, he noted that such an approach would require significant planning, including determining compensation and insurance coverage.
“I think the solution is us working together,” Hatcher said.
Hatcher asked the board to authorize him and Leger to explore potential staffing solutions and return with a proposal.
Greenville Selectman Charles Buttrick and Greenville Town Administrator Tara Sousa also attended the meeting.
Buttrick, noting that he was speaking as one member of the Select Board, said he believes it is Souhegan Valley Ambulance’s responsibility to provide ambulance services to the towns it serves, and that the service would be responsible for any charges imposed by Peterborough in the coming year. He said Greenville and Souhegan Valley plan to discuss the issue further at an upcoming Select Board meeting. Greenville has also had preliminary discussions with Wilton Ambulance about possible mutual aid support, he said.
Sousa said the only official action Greenville has taken so far has been to respond to Walker’s letter, explaining that the timing of the request is challenging because the town has already finalized its proposed budget for the coming year without accounting for the additional expense. The only opportunity to amend the budget would be from the floor at Town Meeting on March 14.
“At this point, the town’s budget is set,” Sousa said. She said the town’s budget has a single line item for their contract with Souhegan Valley Ambulance, and the town doesn’t have a mechanism in place to pay another ambulance service.
Leger said the same issue applies to Souhegan Valley’s own budgeting process and what it would need to request from New Ipswich and Greenville.
“If I knew this was coming, I could have budgeted — but this was submitted after budgets. I don’t have the funds to do it, either,” Leger said.
Walker acknowledged the timing was difficult.
“We’re aware it’s a tough time of year because they’re in the eleventh hour of their budget process. We understand that,” Walker said. He said he is in communication with the towns and doesn’t intend the March 27 deadline to be a hard stop to services if conversations are ongoing, but said it’s reached a point where “it isn’t reasonable” for Peterborough to continue subsidizing ambulance services for other communities.
The need for personnel
Walker said that Peterborough has been increasingly responding to day-to-day calls from its surrounding communities, in part because it has one of the largest services in the area.
Peterborough has four ambulances, two of which are staffed at all times, with an option to deploy the additional ambulances when needed using off-duty crew who live locally.
Walker said that in the past year, approximately 13% of Peterborough’s calls were outside its six member communities.
According to Walker, Peterborough responded to 25 calls in Greenfield, 28 in Rindge, 35 in New Ipswich, 39 in Greenville and 92 in Jaffrey.
Leger said her records show Peterborough responded to 15 calls in Greenville and 11 in New Ipswich, but she noted that her figures include only calls where Peterborough arrived on scene and provided service. They do not include calls where Peterborough was dispatched but canceled en route.
Walker said that while surrounding communities sometimes provide mutual aid during mass-casualty incidents requiring multiple ambulances, Peterborough has not needed to call for routine mutual aid because of staffing shortages.
He said the department has grown significantly over the past decade. When he first joined, the department operated on-call overnight, then moved to a single overnight employee, then two, and eventually became fully staffed around the clock.
“We’ve been fortunate to be able to respond to all of our own calls,” Walker said. “Luckily, years ago, we understood where trends were ticking up, and we were able to grow and position ourselves to meet the demand for our people.”
Hatcher said that was the crux of the issue for many communities: Staffing.
“The issue in the area is that no one has personnel, so getting an ambulance out, getting a fire truck out, is difficult,” said Hatcher. “We know what the problem is; we need a solution for it. I want to concentrate on the solution.”
The Select Board unanimously approved Hatcher and Leger’s request to explore options for staffing the ambulance using firefighters or another potential model. Hatcher agreed to provide regular updates, with a formal update to be delivered to the board on or before March 20.
Ashley Saari can be reached at 603-924-7172 ext. 244 or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on X @AshleySaariMLT.