The executive director of Valley Emergency Medical Services left his job this month after a staffing dispute with the organization’s board of directors.
In a Nov. 5 letter to the board of directors president, executive director Robert Pettinella charged that the board was undermining his decisions to serve their own interests.
VEMS provides highly trained medics to assist with ambulance calls in the Valley.
The letter is embedded below:
Pettinella’s letter said he planned to leave the organization next March, but the board subsequently decided to bring in a new interim chief — state Rep. Jason Perillo, who ran VEMS before Pettinella.
Jared Heon, the president of the VEMS’ board, said the board decided to bring in Perillo immediately after Pettinella told him of his intention to leave the job.
“We met with him and had our labor counsel execute a separation agreement with him,” Heon said.
The Valley Indy sent a Freedom of Information request to Perillo Tuesday seeking a copy of the separation agreement. Perillo released the document Friday.
It calls on VEMS to pay Pettinella $20,000 severance.
Article continues after document.
Pettinella Separation Agreement
Pettinella had been earning $83,235 annually, according to the group’s most recent tax return. Perillo is being paid $1,440 weekly in the interim post.
Valley Emergency Medical Services, better known as VEMS, is a regional paramedic service covering 91.7 square miles of the lower Naugatuck Valley.
Each of the towns with which VEMS has a contract has its own ambulance service to respond to calls and take patients to hospitals.
If necessary, VEMS medics are also sent to those calls. The VEMS medics are trained to provide “advanced life support“ for people who need help.
At the October regular meeting of VEMS’ board of directors, Pettinella suggested reducing hours for VEMS’ overnight paramedics, citing a lower call volume since the Valley’s towns transitioned to a new company for fire and emergency medical dispatching last year.
According to a draft copy of the meeting minutes, Pettinella worried VEMS would make $160,000 less than it did the year before, and suggested cutting one of the overnight paramedics to mitigate the revenue loss.
But the board of directors voted 4 – 3 to maintain current staffing levels and revisit the staffing issue in three months.
In a letter to Heon dated Nov. 5, Pettinella wrote that he planned to step down even though his contract was to run through next June.
“I can no longer endure a board of directors that undermines the management staff of the organization, takes it upon themselves to change operational policy with little or no known facts, and then talks openly about those changes in the community to others, insinuating the management staff of the organization is incompetent,” Pettinella wrote.
In his letter, Pettinella also criticized the makeup of the board of directors itself, noting that several members run EMS agencies in their own towns.
“There is a conflict between what is right for VEMS and what is right for the local EMS agencies,” Pettinella wrote. “As such, the service chiefs that sit on the VEMS board skirt their fiduciary responsibility to do what’s in the best interests of VEMS, for what they feel is in the best interests of their service or agenda.”
Pettinella’s complaint echoes criticisms of the VEMS setup made in two separate reviews of the agency’s inner workings, the most recent by Thomas Welch, a lawyer hired by the Valley Council of Governments to review the paramedic service after a board member crashed a VEMS vehicle in Virginia while driving it for personal use.
Welch’s report, completed in 2013, noted that a 2004 review of the agency reached the same conclusion.
Heon said Tuesday that the board voted to make changes to its bylaws in response to the Valley Council of Governments report, and that the changes are currently being reviewed by a lawyer.
The Valley Indy requested a copy of the new bylaws.
Heon said Pettinella’s suggestion to cut overnight staffing came as “a shock” to the board members.
“Basically he was going to cut paramedic coverage in our region because he thought that we didn’t need it and that we were going to be short on money,” he said.
When board members received Pettinella’s resignation letter, he said they figured it best to start looking for a replacement sooner rather than later.
“Basically he didn’t want to report to a board,” Heon said. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do. Obviously that doesn’t work.”
Reached by phone Tuesday, Pettinella said he couldn’t say much about his separation from VEMS.
“Unfortunately I can’t speak in detail about it because I signed a separation agreement preventing me, but my letter strongly speaks for itself,” he said.
The second paragraph of the separation agreement says Pettinella “agrees not to engage in conduct or make statements relating to his employment or this separation agreement that can be construed as critical or derogatory of VEMS its employees, agents, partners, shareholders, officers, or directors.”
The document also calls on Pettinella “not (to) share, divulge, or disclose the provisions of this separation agreement except to his family, agents, representatives, or advisors, or to the extent required by law.”
Separation agreements with gag orders are generally frowned upon in the public sector. VEMS receives taxpayer money from the towns it serves.
In subsequent emails, he stood by his recommendation to cut an overnight paramedic.
“Since the towns have switched to North West public safety, where EMD (emergency medical dispatch) is now performed appropriately, VEMS lost 25 percent of its call volume,” Pettinella said. “As such and after careful analysis by the management team, we thought it best to remove paramedic hours from the road at times when available resources well outnumbered the requests for service. This is called System Status Management, and has been in use in EMS for over 20 years.”
Heon said the board is reviewing staffing and didn’t want to make a change at its October meeting without all the available data.
Perillo and Heon said Perillo’s main directive will be helping the nonprofit group find a new executive director.
“He’s not going to be the full-time replacement,” Heon said. “He’s just in to help us start a search and help formulate a plan.”
