Malverne village, ambulance corps work on contract

Despite the perception of a chilly relationship between Malverne’s Board of Trustees and leaders of the village’s Volunteer Ambulance Corps, the two entities have been working together to reach a shared goal of finalizing a contract and a lease agreement that will allow the corps to make a long-awaited move into a headquarters.

Trustees John O’Brien and Patricia Canzoneri-Callahan have met several times with corps President Joe Karam and executive board Chairman John Hassett in the months that followed the board’s Aug. 18 work session — in which trustees discussed the corps’ failure to meet contractual obligations and its inimical behavior toward the village government — to work out details of the contract.

“It’s slow,” Hassett said of the process. “The building’s been empty for four months already. It’s not doing anybody any good.”

But the two parties cannot begin to discuss a lease until the contract is finalized, and, according to O’Brien, some of the delay is attributable to one item in particular: the village’s refusal to pay the corps’ entire operating budget, as it has done for the past 43 years. As it stands, a percentage of the corps’ services are utilized by residents who live outside the village — particularly in Malverne Park Oaks, North Lynbrook and North Valley Stream, which are unincorporated areas of the Town of Hempstead. And because the corps is not a village agency, the village is not authorized to use tax money to fund those services.

“[Those residents] get the same services our residents do but they pay nothing,” O’Brien said. “So we’ve kind of said, ‘If the number of calls outside our village is 10 percent and in the village it’s 90, we’ll pay 90 percent of the operating budget,’ which we think is fair. A resident of Malverne shouldn’t pay for someone from the unincorporated part of Lynbrook to get a service.”