Cataldo Ambulance to start servicing Medford Monday

The city is set to transfer ambulance service from Armstrong to Cataldo Monday, January 19, despite a plea from the City Council to hit the pause button on the change in service.

City Council’s Committee of the Whole spent just over four hours grilling city officials and hearing from Armstrong CEO Richard Raymond as well as employees and concerned residents about Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn’s decision to switch ambulance services. The marathon session ended with councilors voting unanimously to ask Lungo-Koehn to halt the process at least until a full transition plan was made public.

“We’re not considering it,” she said Friday.

Lungo-Koehn said both fire and police departments have been working with Cataldo to ensure a smooth transition and both were ready to go. 

“Cataldo will give us exceptional service … a partnership,” she said. “I’m very happy with the decision made.”

What went wrong

All parties seem to agree that in March of 2025 the 25-year working relationship between Armstrong and the city began to fall apart. 

Lungo-Koehn said Friday that she emailed each of the city councilors around Dec. 5 to let them know she was in contract discussions with Cataldo.

“I said if they had any questions, to give me a call,” she said. “At that time only one councilor called me, George Scarpelli.”

Scarpelli has made it clear that this is a very personal issue for him. Armstrong Ambulance ferried his mother regularly back and forth to dialysis treatments with exceptional care, he said. Lungo-Koehn said she understands Scarpelli’s connection but that she can’t continue to work with a company just because he is friends with them.

Although Lungo-Koehn reached out in early December, City Council didn’t address the issue until Jan. 6, when after a lengthy discussion it agreed to review the issue at a Committee of the Whole meeting the following week on Jan. 13. The new contract was/is set to go live Monday Jan. 19.

The city faults Armstrong with inadequate response times in general and in particular took issue with a 45-minute delay. Chief Dispatcher Mike Salvi said he was in the room the day of the 45-minute delay. He said Armstrong’s GPS failed and they lost track of all their ambulances. Salvi’s dispatcher gave them a list of where all their ambulances were but he believes one got lost in the mix.

Scarpelli said when he asked Armstrong officials about the call, they took 50% of the responsibility and wanted to bring it forward “so we can make Medford understand someone else dropped the ball along the line.”

City Council President Zac Bears said he wanted to see data regarding response times from both the city and Armstrong.

“I will drown you in data, but it’s complex,” Raymond said.

The mayor's chief of staff, Nina Nazarian, said Friday she, too, has data, such as a Dec. 12 call in which a patient waited 25 minutes for an ambulance before driving herself to the hospital. And her data doesn’t always match up with Armstrong’s call logs because some of the lengthy delays are missing from those call logs, she said.

Raymond said he’d accept any challenge to his response times because their logs are all uploaded to a state matrix where response times are tracked. 

Lungo-Koehn was also concerned that Armstrong had stretched itself too thin. While Armstrong based in Medford, Nazarian said they were seeing what she called an alarming number of times vehicles labeled Medford were not in Medford but responding to calls in Arlington, Woburn, and other locations. 

“They haven't invested enough resources into staffing and into vehicles to provide the services that need to be provided in a timely manner,” Nazarian said.

Lungo-Koehn said Friday that Cataldo has already secured one location in the city and is in search of a second home, and they’ve purchased new vehicles, which is what Armstrong needed to do four or five months ago.

Raymond denied that they were stretched thin. He said they often responded to calls in other communities offering mutual aid but never left the city without coverage.

Where's the money?

The city also faults Armstrong for failing to keep up with making its $75,000 per year contractual payment to the city since 2020. Over six years, that would be $450,000. Raymond said prior to 2020 the city would send a detailed financial report outlining how much of the $75,000 was spent and on what, then Armstrong would cut the city a check. 

“In 2020 no one asked me for anything again. That was it,” he said. “What happened from 2020 forward? Someone didn’t read the contract, someone didn’t ask, I can’t answer that question.”

What also happened in 2020 was Lungo-Koehn began serving her first term as mayor. 

Raymond said he paid $150,000 toward the debt line mid 2025 and another $75,000 in November. He also reminded the councilors that during the government shutdown they went six weeks without getting paid from Medicare, “but we still showed up every day and did our job.” 

Cataldo has also offered training for Medford firefighters and EMTs, something Armstrong only offered after Cataldo said they’d do it, Lungo-Koehn said. Raymond said the answer was never "no" on training, but they prefer to outsource it.

Nazarian said all concerns together left them with no choice but to explore alternative services “and make the best deal for the city, and that’s what we did.”

Lungo-Koehn said it came down to a question of trust.

“They got very comfortable here … we really had no choice, and I do feel we made the right choice,” she said. 

Raymond also said that despite the new Cataldo contract, Armstrong would keep a house in the city and would always be there should Medford need the back up.