Lewiston approves new interagency ambulance agreement with Nez Perce County, adopts standardized fee formula

The Lewiston City Council on July 14 approved Resolution 2025-32 authorizing the mayor to sign a new interagency ambulance agreement with Nez Perce County that establishes an updated, audited formula for county payments and standardizes per-response charges.

The agreement replaces an older, hard-to-reconstruct payment approach that the city and fire chief said relied on undocumented historical calculations. “We sat down with the county commissioners … and we worked on putting together a new formula that wasn't based on things in the past,” Fire Chief Greg Reitmeier told the council, describing the new approach as “an objective standard that's verified and it's audited by a third party.”

Why it matters: city staff said the new formula is meant to better align county payments with the city’s actual costs for ambulance response and transport. Under the revised structure the city will retain ambulance transport revenue it bills (previously, portions had been returned to the county), and will charge a standardized per-trip fee to the county for…