Florida Chief Uses Ambulance Transport As Special Favor

Latin ordered the favor -- worth $600 -- even though Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue is not licensed to transport patients between hospitals except in emergencies and is not licensed to pick up patients in Miami-Dade County.

City Manager George Gretsas said he talked to Latin but that no discipline report would be put in the chief's personnel file.

Lauderdale officials said the city is conducting no further investigation into the incident.

The Feb. 16 favor came just one month after the city, in an ethics crackdown, disciplined a police officer for accepting a free salad and soda worth $5.50 at Wendy's restaurant. The officer received a written reprimand in his personnel file.

Gretsas said the $600 charge would be collected from the employee, and if not, "people here in City Hall are prepared to contribute to the cost."

City officials, citing medical privacy laws, would not confirm the identity of the patient or the city employee. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel independently confirmed the employee was Safeea Ali, 25, Mayor Jim Naugle's $44,000-a-year assistant.

The ambulance was sent with the understanding the patient would not be charged, sources with knowledge of the situation said.

Though Ali and her father were never billed, Ali said Thursday that she paid for the February transport by check this week.

Latin said he wouldn't answer questions about the case.

Ali said she had called Latin directly for advice about getting better care for her dad. Her 50-year-old father was in North Shore Medical Center in Miami.

According to Gretsas, Latin called the Miami fire chief, who offered to transport Ali's father. But Latin decided to send the city's ambulance instead, Gretsas said.

Gretsas said Latin assured him it would never happen again, and a new policy was drafted to make clear the city is not licensed to transport stable patients from one hospital to another.

"Is it standard practice? No," Gretsas said. "Should it have happened? No. Will it happen again? No. Did it happen because someone was compassionate and did what they could to help someone's dying parent? It doesn't make it right, but it makes it understandable."

Dispatch logs show the ambulance went out of service from 5:02 p.m. that Wednesday and didn't run a call in the city after that until 11:13 p.m. The two-person paramedic crew had to pick up the patient in Miami, take him to Fort Lauderdale, then make the trip again to return equipment to the Miami hospital. During that time, there were 41 ambulance calls in Fort Lauderdale, according to dispatch logs.

The 80-mile "special detail" took four hours, fire division chief James Sheehan wrote in his daily report Feb. 16.

Naugle said this week that "it's a practice that should end." But, he added, referring to some recently disciplined firefighters: "I would rather see them carting around a dying man than going to a porno shop on company time."

Cheryl Rashkin, the supervisor of Broward County's EMS Certification and Regulation section, said Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue is not licensed to transport patients between Broward County hospitals except in emergency situations where a critically ill patient needs to be taken to another hospital that offers a higher level of services.

Rashkin's counterpart in Miami-Dade County, Raul Gonzalez, said Fort Lauderdale does not have a license to pick up patients in that county. Though not familiar with the case, Gonzalez said it sounded as if Fort Lauderdale had violated Miami-Dade's regulations.

If a patient needed to be transported, "they could have contacted a private agency," Gonzalez said. "Or, if it was an emergency, one of the fire-rescue departments" in Miami-Dade should have been called.

Fire union President Mike Salzano said union officials expressed concerns about hospital-to-hospital transfers to their bosses in a recent meeting.

"We're already at minimum staffing," Salzano said. "Engine 13 [on the beach] is still out of service, our rescues are overworked. Any time you take a rescue out of service, it affects my members and the citizens."