Last-ditch effort from county saves funding for Covelo ambulance service

UKIAH, CA., 5/9/25 — At Tuesday’s Mendocino County Board of Supervisors meeting, supervisors listened to written and oral testimony from concerned residents and community leaders from Covelo urging the county to continue funding emergency medical services to the Covelo Fire Protection District at $66,000 annually. In the end, the supervisors found the money to continue the program and to train emergency personnel, but only after a lot of hand-wringing and desperate pleas.

Residents and fire personnel — and the supervisors themselves —described the dire impact if funding was lost. All said that if the small station, which operates almost entirely with volunteers, were denied funding for its medical services, its ability to provide ambulance services to the residents of Covelo and Round Valley would be severely compromised or eliminated. 

And that would impact not just Covelo, but other parts of the county. In 2024, Covelo FPD responded to almost 300 medical calls. It would mean that every time a medical call was placed in Covelo, an ambulance would have to respond from Ukiah, Willits or Laytonville.

As explained by Anderson Valley Fire Chief Andres Avila in a comment to the board, having to pull an ambulance off the U.S. Highway 101 corridor to go to Covelo would cause a cascade of issues down the ambulance response chain. With the potential of an hour or more travel time from Highway 101 to Covelo, a patient could succumb to injuries or medical conditions while waiting for an ambulance to arrive. 

In a public comment submitted before the meeting, Covelo resident Pat Sobrero said ambulance response times already average about an hour — and could double if funding is denied and residents must rely solely on ambulances from the U.S. 101 corridor or farther.

According to Mendocino County CEO Darcie Antle, Covelo FPD has received approximately $700,000 from various funding streams since 2017, including $129,000 for a new ambulance in 2019. However, the particular funding before the board Tuesday began in June 2014 as a one-time only fund to deliver advanced life support, or ALS, services. ALS refers to a higher level of care than one would receive from a paramedic during ambulance transport, as opposed to basic life support, or BLS, the less intensive level of care provided by EMTs.

Three fire districts received the special ALS funds: Laytonville, Anderson Valley, and Covelo, each of which started out with approximately $33,000 in funding at that time. (Throughout the course of the board’s discussion, it became clear that although this funding was originally intended to specifically support ALS, perhaps the funding needed to be reframed as general support for rural EMT and ambulance services.)

Covelo FPD continued to receive the ALS enhancement funding until 2018, at which time the district did not submit its intent-to-participate renewal. At that point, Covelo FPD was withdrawn from the program, and Covelo’s funds were used to increase the ALS enhancement funding to the two remaining FPDs, Laytonville and Anderson Valley.

The board volleyed back and forth, wanting to fund the $66,000 requested by Covelo FPD, but unsure where the funds could be found in the county’s already strained budget. Then County Director of Planning and Building Services Julia Krog offered to donate the needed money from Planning and Buildings’ nuisance abatement funds budget, which finances investigations into various non-permitted activities.

With this welcome suggestion, the Board of Supervisors voted to fund the medical services at Covelo FPD at the requested rate, though it determined that the funds would come from Measure AI funds (cannabis business taxes) rather than the nuisance abatement budget. The board also recommended a financial analysis of Anderson Valley, Laytonville and Covelo FPDs to determine the financial needs of each district.

Covelo’s fire chief says part of the funding will be used for recruiting local EMTs

After the meeting, newly appointed Covelo Fire Chief Ruben Rojas explained that he did not know why the former Covelo fire chief had not registered with the county to continue the ALS funding past 2018. 

He described the overwhelming support of the Mendocino County fire chiefs as “humbling,” and said that he was grateful to have received the funding from the board of supervisors, especially given the budget concerns the county is facing. He said that part of that funding will be used to train emergency medical technicians, or EMTs, who live locally.

Currently Covelo FPD has just one local EMT. Other EMTs commute to Covelo from Laytonville, Albion and Ukiah. Rojas wants at least three EMTs to live within the district boundaries. To address this issue, an EMT training series will be held in Covelo this summer in partnership with Mendocino College. 

The series begins June 13 and runs for eight weeks. Residents who complete the Mendocino College EMT training are eligible to take the certification test to serve as EMTs in Covelo. Currently, 16 residents have expressed interest in completing the certification process. Rojas hopes to apply a portion of the $66,000 funding to waive tuition fees for Covelo residents.

For more information on the Mendocino College program, visit www.mendocino.edu or contact Chief Ruben Rojas at (707) 596-0913.