One of the two local ambulance services is unhappy with the county’s proposed ordinance.

Metro Rural Services submitted changes to the county’s proposal at Tuesday’s board of supervisors meeting.

In the originally proposed ordinance, drafted by County Attorney Bob Latham, the county would designate one ambulance service as the main provider. That company would then oversee the operations of all other providers in the county.

The topic of a county ambulance ordinance came up after Emergystat Ambulance Service closed its Natchez office in October after being on and off the county’s response rotation list.

Metro Manager Bob Purvis said there were a number of things his company wanted to see changed.

“The ordinance had insurance requirements way above what a local business carries now and above what the state requires,” Purvis said.

Metro carries four times what the state requires for an ambulance service, he said, but the ordinance required an unrealistic amount of insurance coverage.

Purvis also said he thought the response times spelled out in the ordinance were too lengthy and that they should be shortened for the public’s safety.

And then, there were the dispatch issues. Receiving information from the lead ambulance service instead of E-911 would slow things down, he said.

“We feel emergency calls should still come through the 911 center,” he said.

Manager Jim Graves said he thought the ordinance’s restrictions just wouldn’t work.

“It will take too much time,” Graves said. “It’s going to add two to three minutes to it, and that’s a lot for folks in (a medical emergency.)”

A statement released Tuesday from American Medical Response, a competing agency, said the company was happy with Latham’s originally proposed ordinance.

The ordinance would make ambulance services in the county “highly accountable and more reliable,” AMR spokeswoman Bennie Boone said in the statement.

“For example, all ambulance services would have to submit periodic reports on their response times to a county-appointed oversight official,” the statement reads. “We’ve supported (efforts to strengthen services) from the beginning, and we’ll continue to do so.”

Latham said the topic would be addressed at a later meeting.