Current Employees

Anonymous #1

I’m a current employee at Athens County EMS, and while I planned on being here today, like so many others, the very real risk of retaliation by the current commissioners has made me reluctant to publicly call out Adkins. While I could go serve coffee or drive for Amazon or UPS and work shorter hours, see less trauma and death, and still make more money, I genuinely love serving my community as a paramedic. I don’t want to lose that. However, the way the commissioners are running our ems program puts that goal in jeopardy. Everything Jon Rose has stated about the commissioners and about Adkins in particular is true. Our pay our equipment our staffing, all of it. We take roughly 1000 calls a month, and yet the current commissioners don’t treat us like a service they need. Athens is the poorest county in Ohio. This means that for many people here preventative and regular medical care is out of reach, leaving them to rely on the EMS system and the ER. The cost of housing is uncontrolled. At my current pay, finding a place to live in the same city I work in is almost impossible. It seems Adkins wants me to give my labor, my time, and my service to Athens, but does not want to pay me a wage that would allow me to live here. We have had the wheels literally fall off two of our ambulances. The other trucks are constantly having mechanical problems and going back to the shop again and again when they should just be replaced. We need new trucks and new equipment before someone gets hurt. We get up in the middle of the night for you, we’ve missed birthdays and holidays, we’ve held the hands of your hurt and dying loved ones, we’ve injured ourselves and broken our bodies to pull you out of danger, we’ve soothed your pain, saved your lives, bandaged your wounds, and every single time you’ve called we have showed up. Now, we need someone to show up for us.

Anonymous #2

I'm single, with no children. I live in a family owned home, so I don't have the burden of monthly rent. Just property tax, your usual utilities (power, water, trash pick up, etc.), a car payment under $300 a month. I like to think I live within my means, yet I still find myself living paycheck to paycheck. This job is not a "summer time" job to me, this is my CAREER, yet I have friends working what would be considered "high school jobs" or "summer jobs", that make more than I do! My response when people are shocked by how little I make, I tell them "this isn't a get rich career, you really have to love the work". But should we really accept that?

Anonymous #3

My anonymous comments are that smaller, poorer county ems agencies are paying as much or more than we are. We take extraordinarily more calls than other counties. This is the reason many have left. Also, the commissioners refuse to enact seniority pay. New hires with no experience make nearly as much as those with 10, 20, 30+ years of experience.

Those who have sacrificed and stayed (even after taking a pay cut when we went from seoems to county). Working more than 12 hours is dangerous, and there are studies that show it. Let alone 24 or 36 hour shifts. That nice award and recognition we got earlier today, 2 of the folks on that run left for higher wages.

Anonymous #4

Hello I am a current employee of Athens County EMS. I have been working full time here for over 20 years and I am just now making 20 dollars an hour. When we switched over from SEOEMS to Athens County everyone there took a $1 pay cut to transition over. It wasn't until we formed our union that we started to get a pay raise yearly. We have lost a lot of great employees due to the pay at Athens County EMS. They have all went to other companies who pay more and they don't have to work the hours they have to work at Athens County EMS in order to make ends meet. They don't have to work 2-3 other jobs just to make sure they can pay their bills and take care of their families. Athens County EMS is so short staffed they have to mandate employees to work over their scheduled hours just to make sure trucks are kept on the road to take care of the community they serve. It is not safe at times for employees to work 36 hours before getting to go home, especially when they have run 8 or more calls in the 24 hours they were already scheduled. As many calls as Athens County runs in a years time or even on scheduled shift daily we should be trying to add trucks to our county, but instead we are shutting trucks down or running Basic Life Support Trucks instead of Advanced Life Support Trucks, because people don't want to work for Athens County EMS due to the Pay, because they can go elsewhere and make more money and not have to work as many hours. Athens County EMS has a lot of great people and is a great place to work, but the pay has to be fixed and brought up to a livable wage so that people want to work there. I hope you all will see this as a problem and try to help do what needs done to fix this problem. Thank you for your time in listening to our concerns about this problem.

Anonymous #5

Due to low pay we are having trouble retaining employees at ACEMS . We have adjacent counties paying more than we due and private pays way more . Most of us work 2-3 jobs just to be able to afford to live. ACEMS is short staffed due to people leaving or just not wanting to work with us  due to our wages. Staff gets mandated all the time to work over which turns a 24 hour shift into a 36 hour shift for to make sure trucks are staffed so that we can serve our community which makes it unsafe sometimes for our employees due to our run volume. There are also times when we are now shutting a truck down or running one with an advanced EMT or just a BLS truck . With our call volume we should be adding trucks not shutting them down . Athens County has a lot of great people and is a great place to work but pay has to be fixed and brought up to a livable wage. This has nothing to do with our Chief or Assistant Chief , they are both great people to work for and due what they can for us but many times their hands are tied . Thank you for your time listening to our concerns and hope you will all see this as a problem and help try to fix this .

Former Employees

Marissa Marshall

Hello, my name is Marissa Marshall, I am a former paramedic of Athens county EMS. I started my EMS journey back in 2008. I became a paramedic in 2014. In the last 16 years I’ve worked for multiple private EMS agencies, Ohio health as a paramedic in the ER, critical care as a flight paramedic with medflight, and multiple 911 county agencies. I started with ACEMS back in 2020 or 2021, and I worked full time until I quit this past June. I loved Athens county. I made some amazing friends, like Jon rose. And I learned so much in my few years there. I believe acems has one of the most progressive and admirable protocols of anywhere I’ve worked. I left mainly because of the pay. As a full time paramedic with 15years of EMS experience I was making just over $18/hr. After taxes and insurance my take home pay was between 1100-1700 depending on if it was a short pay or long pay. I left because I couldn’t justify driving to Athens to work on average 56hrs/wk and still barely be able to feed my kids. I left for a private EMS company working the same amount of hours paying me $28.50/hr starting out. My bring home pay is now almost double what it was at ACEMS. The pay was the driving force in me leaving Athens, but not the only reason. Mandations are never fun, but I do understand they are necessary as to not leave the county without paramedic EMS coverage. But when the mandations get bad and you’re getting mandated multiple times a month it gets very exhausting mentally. We already work 48 or 72 hrs every week, adding 12 on top of that is hard. Missing extra time with family and at your home is hard. If ACEMS would have paid more I would have stayed. If they would increase their pay significantly I would consider returning. They need to figure out a way to hire more people and retain those people. Athens has so much to offer, and I don’t think a single person in this profession is doing the job to get rich, but I don’t think wanting to be able to support a family, while giving up 48-72hrs a week minimum is asking too much.

Anonymous Former Employee

I quit because of low pay and mandations. I loved my job. My family got foodstamps while I worked there and we needed them because we were so broke. I was getting mandated like once a week. It got to the point where I was breaking promises to my kids all the time. Missing parties, events, holidays on my supposed days off, working 12 extra hours which was a whole extra day to them because they would be in bed by the time I got home. I just couldn’t do it anymore. My kids were going to grow up  thinking I was gone all the time because I didn’t care but it was because I didn’t have a choice. I would rather flip burgers at McDonalds than miss them growing up.