County to sign for Oct. 1 start.

New deals with Warren County were signed Monday by Vicksburg officials, including one that will sharply increase county payments for city-operated ambulances.

Meeting separately, county supervisors tabled the ambulance deal and three others pacts until Wednesday, when all four are expected to be approved.

The agreements will go into effect Oct. 1, the start of the 2007 fiscal year for both city and county governments.

The so-called interlocal agreements allow the two governments to provide shared services, but are often the focus of contentious debates over how costs should be allocated. A factor that confuses the math is that city residents pay both city and county taxes.

In addition to ambulance service, interlocal agreements cover the assessment and collection of taxes, management of E-911 emergency dispatch and relating to the sale or redemption of property sold for nonpayment of taxes. The latter three were accepted with little or no discussion and will remain unchanged from previous years.

The ambulance agreement, though, led city officials to threaten to cut runs of the ambulances, maintained, staffed and operated by the Vicksburg Fire Department, to calls in the county if the supervisors didn’t pick up a greater share of the costs per run.

&#8220We’re losing so much money,” said Leyens at last month’s meeting. &#8220We could save so much by stopping runs outside the city, but we know that’s not the right thing to do and that’s not what we want to do.”

The ambulance service is the oldest shared service, dating back nearly 40 years. Initially, the city provided staff and fuel and the county provided vehicles for the Vicksburg Fire Department-based service. But the budget has risen from about $200,000 per year then to $3.2 million for the coming year.

For this year, the county was to pay a flat $350,000 to provide life support and rescue responses to county residents. The county does not pay for trips made by ambulances for mostly non-emergency calls such as basic transfers of patients from their homes or nursing homes to medical appointments. Those are categorized as &#8220basic life support” and the vast majority are inside the city limits.

The new agreement does not distinguish between types of service, but rather will take all responses into account, divide them into city or county runs and charge the county $300 per run of any type outside of the city limits.

The most recent tallies show about 400 non-city responses per quarter. At $300 each, that tallies to $480,000 per year.

The source of the $300 figure is the average loss per run, city Strategic Planner Paul Rogers said. The city keeps five front-line ambulances and five crews on duty around the clock at an average total cost per-run of between $1,200 and $1,300.

About 55 percent of total ambulance expenses were recovered through public and private insurance sources from May to June. The budget under the current contract calls for about 62 percent of costs to be recouped. No bills are sent to individuals for rescue responses.

Citing &#8220poor” performance, the city fired one of its local debt collectors, Kay, Marley and Associates, 3108 Halls Ferry Road, at a meeting last month. Monday, it received but did not open bids from three companies vying for the role: Delinquent Debt Services of Birmingham, Ala., Recovery Agency of Harrisburg, Penn., and Urbanek of Edison, NJ.

The city employs two agencies, one to bill Medicare, Medicaid and other public and private insurers and one to collect from those who do not respond to the initial bills.

Nonpayments added up to about $1.3 million since last October, the start of the current fiscal year, Rogers said last month, but the decision to terminate the firm was not a result of failing to reach an established standard, he said.

The agency assigned to send initial bills to insurers, Healthcare Consultants, was retained.

The next agreement signed with a private agency will also include collecting fines on gas and utility bills, police fines and possibly cemetery fines, for those who do not fulfill the perpetual care license in the city’s Cedar Hill Cemetery, Rogers said.

In other business, city officials: