A former head of North Huntingdon’s emergency management operations has been tapped to lead Mutual Aid Ambulance Service Inc., Westmoreland County’s largest ambulance service.

Gene Komondor of North Huntingdon, who was the township’s emergency management coordinator from 2007 to October 2020 and had operated an ambulance service, started his new role as chief executive of the Greensburg-based Mutual Aid on Monday.

He succeeds Douglas DeForrest, who held the position for almost two years before leaving in June 2022 in what ambulance service spokesman Shawn Penzera said was a “mutual decision.” Former Westmoreland County Coroner Ken Bacha has been serving as interim CEO since June 2022 and will return to his previous position of Mutual Aid’s operations director.

As he starts his new job, Komondor will be reviewing Mutual Aid’s current operations and “helping us to identify new opportunities that are available in the ever-changing health care market,” said Tom Freeman, chairman of Mutual Aid’s board of directors.

Komondor will be leading an ambulance service covering 34 communities across almost 1,000 square miles in the county. The ambulance service generated $15.1 million in revenue from April 2020 to March 31, 2021, according to its Form 990, a document filed by nonprofits. It had $38 million in assets as of March 31, 2021, a drop of $3.2 million from April 2020, the beginning of the covid pandemic.

Komondor has a background in ambulance company operations, having owned Trans Care, a large ambulance company that provided patient transport services throughout Western Pennsylvania. The company was purchased by a larger firm with multi-state operations, Freeman said in a statement. Komondor remained with the new ownership group for several years, developing and managing contracts to provide ambulance services for health insurance companies in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia.

Komondor is a partner in OneStar in North Huntingdon, which conducts emergency management training exercises. He is a certified emergency medical technician and a teacher in the emergency medicine degree program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has taught courses on EMS and health care management since 2004.

The process for hiring Komondor began with a referral from an outside consultant and continued through meetings with the organization’s finance committee and its medical director, Freeman said.

Komondor’s hiring comes slightly more than two years after Mutual Aid fired its longtime chief executive, Joseph Yencha, and two other top officers: operations manager William Groft and business office manager Theresa Straka. Yencha, who was paid $184,700 according to Mutual Aid’s Form 990 for April 2020 through March 2021, had served as Mutual Aid’s chief executive from 1982 until his dismissal in February 2020.

Mutual Aid officials declined to comment about why the trio were dismissed.

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