A Shrinking Roll Call, Ambulance Corps Is Losing a War of Attrition

Toward the end of every monthly Sag Harbor Village Board meeting, Ed Gregory, a board member and longtime volunteer with the Sag Harbor Volunteer Ambulance Corps, reads the corps' monthly report into the record.

The report includes the man-hours for the month, the number of emergency calls, training sessions, trips to the hospital, and nights worked - all routine information that village officials need to know, and that taxpayers often take for granted.

Then, in Mr. Gregory's most disappointed voice, a monotone, he relays the bad news: The ambulance corps has lost another member.

"Please be advised that the following member is to be removed from the insurance rolls," Mr. Gregory has said at every meeting for close to a year.

Elderly, lifelong volunteers are not retiring. They aren't dying at regular monthly intervals. The corps in Sag Harbor is simply losing members because of the circumstances of the times. Eleven of them have resigned in the past year.

"They're dropping out and moving away," Mr. Gregory has told the board. He checks off the names month after month: Phillip Logue in November, Lisa Maffucci and William J. Young II in October. The list goes on.

The math is simple. If 11 members have left in recent months, and the corps has gained only one new member, the volunteer organization is at a loss. Averaging 600 calls a year, the Sag Harbor Volunteer Ambulance Corps cannot afford to lose more members. They are down to 22.

Eddie Downes, the corps' president, and Missie Mahoney, the vice president, are worried. Yet they remain optimistic about the low enrollment, which Mr. Downes called "uncommon."

"Membership hasn't been this low since I joined, and that's 18 years ago," he said. The organization's rolls once topped out at 32, he said. With 2,300 residents and 27 square miles to cover in the Sag Harbor Fire District, 22 members seems awfully low.

Mr. Downes said he believes the loss of membership is "symptomatic of what's happening all over Long Island. . . . People are having to work two or three jobs just to get by." There aren't enough hours in a day to allow people who are struggling to support a family to volunteer, he said.

Many of the recently resigned volunteers have moved away to the north shore of the Island and to the South. "Anywhere that's cheaper to live," Ms. Mahoney said, people are flocking to. Those who can afford the East End's pricey real estate are either second-home owners and part-time residents or too busy to volunteer, she added.

Although Mr. Downes and Ms. Mahoney's take on the situation may hold true in Sag Harbor, the East Hampton Ambulance Association has not been hurt in the same way.

"We've lost as many members as we've gained," said Susie Dayton, the ambulance association's chief. Her organization boasts 40 members, "but we could always use more." They average 1,000 calls a year in the East Hampton Fire District.

The Sag Harbor corps' leaders recognize that, as with most volunteer organizations, there are lulls and peaks. "We're at the down side of the turnover," Ms. Mahoney said.

She said she hopes for a "great rush" of volunteers soon. "We can only get better with more volunteers and more experience."

Of the 22 Sag Harbor volunteers, 16 are certified emergency medical technicians, and three are certified in advanced life support. Unlike in East Hampton, Sag Harbor volunteers do not have to be certified E.M.T.s to join the corps, but they do have to become certified in cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The Sag Harbor corps offers E.M.T. and C.P.R. training at its headquarters.

The Sag Harbor corps is "one of the ambulance companies you look up to," said Tom Field, an instructor and volunteer with the Amagansett Ambulance Company. "It has to do with the training they do. The volunteers spend a lot of time."

There was a time when Sag Harbor Village got by with just two volunteers, although there were far fewer residents then. John A. Schoen founded the Sag Harbor Ambulance Corps 73 years ago as a company of one. He was later joined by Edmund M. Downes, the current president's grandfather. Together, the "two helped anyone that would help," according to the corps' own two-page history.

With no classes to train volunteers how to care for patients, the corps was a "load-and-go operation." If someone needed to go to the hospital, Mr. Schoen was the man to call.

"When a call came into John's house . . . he would make phone calls to other people that might be willing to go with him for a ride, to assist the patients to the hospital," the corps' history says. "Many of times, back then, John would ask whomever he met on the street to go with him!"

In 1982, the Sag Harbor Volunteer Ambulance Corps was incorporated, with 27 members. There were just 200 calls a year then.

In its infancy, meetings were held "wherever," Mr. Downes said.

"Supplies were kept in a closet on the third floor of the Municipal Building" on Main Street, "and at one point they were kept in a closet on the second floor of the Division Street police building," the history states.

The corps got its first building, behind the Brick Kiln Road firehouse, in 1992. It is dedicated to the corps' founder.

At village board meetings, Mr. Gregory uses his position to put out the word that the ambulance corps is in desperate need. Ms. Mahoney and Mr. Downes have sat at tables set up on Main Street to try to get residents to join - usually unsuccessfully.

The incentives to do so, however, include a retirement program after five years are vested, and a rewards program for taking part in a certain number of calls.

Also, it "goes without saying" that it feels great to volunteer, Mr. Downes said. "We're like a little family. Most of the people we take to the hospital we know."

There are other, smaller perks, such as good meals at the monthly meetings and at training sessions, and free sweatshirts. "It doesn't seem like a lot, until you don't have to worry about a $50 sweatshirt during the winter," Ms. Mahoney said.

Ms. Mahoney and Mr. Downes have found another way to reward their fellow volunteers: a tank of gas for every 50 calls responded to. And with an average tank of gas on the East End at around $2.70 a gallon, that incentive might not be so small.