Back in 2018, 83 percent of voters in the Paonia, Hotchkiss and Crawford areas approved the creation of a special district for the North Fork Ambulance Service. Spanning Delta, Montrose and Gunnison counties, the service area is about 1,500 square miles. A mill levy was established to fund it, and in the past five years, the NFEMS has become a community health service. The primary mandate is to provide emergency medical services, but the organization also offers house visits by paramedics, exercise classes for seniors, and other outreach into the community.
On May 6, 2025 three of the five seats on the Board are up for election.Three incumbents and four challengers are in the race. In this first installment of a two-part series, Marty Durlin profiles incumbents Dan Miller, Marcus Roeder and Peter Pruett.
Dan Miller is currently the Board President of the North Fork EMS. A 20-year resident of
Delta County, Miller served as the Hotchkiss Marshal for 17 years, and is now retired.
DAN MILLER
As a board, we're doing really good, maintaining money and bringing in money to build
our infrastructure. And we've added crew quarters, a new building in Crawford, and we
just purchased another house and shed that's going to be put in place in a couple months in Paonia, where the crews will have places to go and spend 24 hours if they want to, or spend the night, and they're close to the ambulances, to respond. And it gives a lot more people the advantage to come in and work for us. That's where a lot of our money goes is in the people, the crews. But it's been a long road in the last five years, just trying to build all that up and to make us solvent and still be able to respond and help those in the community. That’s the most important part, because they're the people we're serving and they're taxpayers. We do need criticism that can make us better. And I think having an opportunity to vote for people is a wonderful thing.
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The 2025 budget for the NFEMS is around $2 million. More than $1.3 million comes
directly from the mill levy on local property tax payers. More than half a million is from
revenues from health services, and the rest comes from grants.
The district also has what treasurer Marcus Roeder calls “pretty significant reserves” of
more than a million dollars. Roeder has a veterinary background as well as an MBA.
MARCUS ROEDER
We do get people who use our services a lot, and we have discovered if we are proactive
and mitigate some of these areas — you know, a lot of people fall and there's nobody
there — if we can mitigate some of that, we can keep them out of the ambulance. It's a
crazy thing that as a health service district, our big goal is to keep people out of the
ambulance.
Anybody who's lived up here in the valley knows that medical care is limited. And so
we, you know, we try to take a “whole community” approach. Now, I know a lot of
people who want to run for the Board have an EMS background and probably some
organizational management skill sets, that’s fantastic. But we work more at a strategic,
30,000-foot kind of level, in order to bring the whole community together.
As an EMS, they look at the reactive side, which is really, really important. But I hope
that everybody also looks at the bigger picture: that we are community health care. We
want to have enough reserves in hand so that we can always fill our core mission, which
is meeting the medical emergency needs. The bottom line is getting to our patients as fast as we can.
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Peter Pruett worked as an Emergency Medicine physician in Colorado for more than
three decades, recently retiring from Delta Health. He also served as Medical Director for
the North Fork Ambulance Association and joined the Board of NFEMS in 2022.
MARTY DURLIN: Do you think it would be helpful to have some EMTs on the Board, you know, people who are, you know, on the ground doing that kind of work?
PETER PRUETT
I've learned in the last three or four years I've been on the board that it has very little to
do with operational activities. We do review the chief's reports every month with a
meeting. We've had one paramedic come in with a complaint about a particular run,
which was valid and concerning. And Chief Steckel, you know, has a process for
receiving those complaints and processing those.
The board doesn't really need medical expertise, I mean, much. I think I do provide a
perspective of someone who was in emergency medicine for years, and occasionally my
input's helpful. But boards of directors, particularly this one and most of them, are mostly concerned about the budget, the finances. Can we afford this new equipment?
DURLIN: What about this new program? How are you gonna run it? What are the regulatory requirements for this organization? And in the case of the North Fork Ambulance District, we are regulated by state regulations and county regulations, and this is what the board deals with.
PRUETT: I would just like to say to the community as a whole that they've got an excellent ambulance service and they can thank themselves for supporting it, by providing a special district with tax support. In fact, our chief has been honored by a statewide award for being, of that year, the most amazing and most productive chief anywhere in the rural districts of the state.
So you've got a good service, and you deserve it.
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Tune in May 2 for part two of our series on candidates for the North Fork Emergency
Medical Service Board of Directors, featuring challengers Ty Clock, Blake Kinser and
Mychaela Belden.
