Kent County Levy Court votes unanimously to double its sign-on bonus for paramedics.
The county already offers signing bonuses to paramedics, ranging up to $5,000 for the most qualified and experienced ones who join the EMS department.
Earlier this month, Kent County Public Safety Director John Tinger asked commissioners to double those bonuses, to make the county more competitive with other jurisdictions, saying higher bonuses can attract qualified, experienced paramedics to fill the county’s large number of vacancies.
“With 11 open vacancies right now, the most attractive employee candidate would be a certified paramedic coming from out of state," Tinger said. "Those are the ones that we could probably get out into the field within about a three month period.”
Kent County’s proposal would distribute the signing bonus over three years, rather than a single lump sum. Still some commissioners raised concerns about paramedics job-hopping - signing on in Kent County, working for a year, and then moving to another jurisdiction with a signing bonus, like New Castle County.
Tinger agrees that can be a problem.
“But if we can get a year out of someone? I'll take that year," he said.
Levy Court voted 6-0 to move that proposal forward.
They also unanimously approved a measure to increase the number of hours of paramedic trainees from 35 to 40 per week to better reflect the hours those trainees are putting in in DelTech’s EMS training program.
In other EMS-related news, Levy Court approved moving money from the construction contingency fund at the Harrington EMS station to cover about $36,000 of cost overruns at the Frederica EMS station. Those cost overruns were caused by the need to use recycled concrete to stabilize the soil beneath the new building.
