With Pittsburgh EMS contract settled, union targets residency requirement

Two weeks after securing a new contract, the union representing Pittsburgh Emergency Medical Services personnel said Wednesday it intends to sue the city to eliminate a residency requirement for its members as a way to address chronic staffing problems.

If a lawsuit is successful, the bureau’s members will be able to live outside Pittsburgh limits, just like city police and firefighters.

Public Safety Director Lee Schmidt said the residency requirement can be changed only through a lawsuit or a referendum because it is written into the Home Rule Charter, meaning city leaders can’t modify it on their own.

The city’s police and fire unions went through similar fights and were successful in repealing residency requirements.

Officials including Jon Atkinson, who heads the EMS union, said they hope allowing people to live outside the city will help boost recruitment efforts.

“If we sue the city and are successful, then we’ll be able to hire anybody in Allegheny County, not just the city of Pittsburgh,” Atkinson told TribLive.

Atkinson said being able to recruit paramedics from anywhere in the county should help address staffing shortages, reduce forced overtime and keep all the bureau’s units in service.

EMS is budgeted to have 217 uniformed employees. Currently, the bureau is short about 30 paramedics but has six extra EMTs.

Under the new contract, the city has agreed to allow employees to live anywhere in the county once the residency requirement is removed.

The contract — which the union approved by a 68-63 vote two weeks ago — is also expected to improve recruiting and retention through pay increases, retroactive to the start of this year.

It includes a 6% pay raise for 2024. That will bump up hourly pay for first-year EMTs to $21.63, first-year paramedics to $26.13 and crew chiefs to $41.48.

Schmidt said money for back pay was included in the 2024 budget.

Next year, EMS workers will see a 2% pay raise, followed by increases of 3% in 2026 and 4% in 2027.

People being hired from other emergency services agencies will be paid according to the experience they’ve earned elsewhere, EMS Chief Amera Gilchrist said, rather than reverting to a first-year salary when they come to Pittsburgh’s bureau.

Also included for the first time in the new contract is an advanced EMT position, which sits between a regular EMT and a paramedic.

They’ll be able to administer more medications than EMTs, Schmidt said, and they’ll be able to start IVs, which regular EMTs cannot do. But they won’t have quite as much training as paramedics, he said, and won’t be able to perform more complex care, like intubation.

The new contract also proposes to implement a new system to sometimes team up an EMT with a paramedic instead of pairing two paramedics or two EMTs.

The goal, officials said, is to stretch existing staffing as city officials work to hire more paramedics.

Officials said they are hopeful such changes in the contract will allow existing workers to feel less of a burden from staffing shortages that have often required them to work mandatory overtime.

“The last few years have been really challenging for us from a staffing perspective,” Atkinson said. “It leads to morale issues.”

That exacerbates existing staffing problems, Atkinson said, because some people end up quitting.

Efforts are already underway to improve recruitment. Gilchrist touted the in-house EMT training academy that launched this year as an example of new ways to boost staffing.

Having fewer employees affects the bureau’s average response time, which is now around nine or 10 minutes, Gilchrist said. That’s slower than the national average of eight minutes, which Gilchrist said is the goal.