TRAVERSE CITY — New hires are fueling Traverse City Fire Department’s drive to become the city’s primary ambulance transport agency, but not as quickly as department leaders had hoped.
Department Chief Jim Tuller and TCFD Emergency Medical Services Administrator Kathryn Dunklow told city commissioners the department likely won’t be ready to take over as primary transport agency by July 2026.
That’s unless eight licensed paramedics apply within the month, Dunklow said.
Paramedic licenses are transferrable from state to state, but new hires still have “quite a lot of hoops they have to jump through,” Tuller said Monday. They must go through firefighter probation, then an extensive orientation process to learn department protocols, medical control authority rules and so on.
“If I had eight individuals knocking on the door tomorrow, yeah, maybe we could do it this summer, but more likely it’s going to get pushed off for a quarter, two quarters, things like that,” Tuller said.
Dunklow told commissioners about progress at TCFD since July 2024, when the department began the transition to become primary transport agency.
Currently, both TCFD and Mobile Medical Response — MMR for short — respond to medical calls in the city, with the fire department transporting if MMR is unavailable or the situation is urgent.
Dunklow said the department transported patients to hospital 206 times in 2025, a 67% increase from 2024.
In February, the department hired Dunklow and added a new ambulance to its fleet, she said. Two firefighters began paramedic school in May and three more joined the staff in June. A second new ambulance arrived in October, and the department is waiting for the state to provide radio templates before using it.
City commissioners in November agreed to extend the city’s contract with MMR, Dunklow said. That ambulance service will still be there if TCFD isn’t ready to take over as primary transport agency by July, she added later.
“So there will be no lapse in service at any point,” she said. “We have MMR in place, we’re working with them, we have a very positive relationship with them and that will continue to go until such time as we’re staffed.”
While Dunklow said the department’s efforts to make the switch are being hobbled by staffing issues, City Manager Benjamin Marentette said the newest union contract with city firefighters has encouraged more candidates to apply.
The few who applied recently are excellent candidates, too, Tuller said.
Tuller said he, Dunklow and department captains should know in a month or two if TCFD is ready to take over as primary transport agency.
In the meantime, department personnel continue to train on providing better services, both by improving response times and by looking at how personnel respond to different incidents, Tuller said. One technique gives each first responder an assigned task when treating someone whose heart stopped beating — Tuller likened it to a racing pit crew.
“That saves so much time and makes it so much smoother, so much quicker, so much faster,” he said.
Firefighters practiced another technique for cardiac arrests Tuesday inside Station One on West Front Street: Dual sequential defibrillation. Dunklow explained it’s where responders use two portable heart monitor and defibrillator machines on someone with ventricular fibrillation that doesn’t respond to shocks from one defibrillator.
To unpack that, ventricular fibrillation is when the heart’s lower chambers contract quickly and without coordination, preventing the heart from pumping blood to the rest of the body, according to the Mayo Clinic. It’s the most frequent cause of sudden cardiac death and requires immediate medical attention.
Firefighters stuck two sets of pads, one for each defibrillator, on a mannequin as a LUCAS chest compression system pumped away.
Dunklow said if three shocks from one defibrillator don’t bring back a healthy heart rhythm, responders charge both to full power and shock the heart with each, one after the other. A recent trial in Canada found it more than doubled survival rates for v-fib that isn’t corrected by shocks from one device, from 13.3% to 30.4%.
“We’re pretty lucky we get to use the latest tools and techniques, and it’s all so we can give our patients better outcomes,” she said after the training.
Tuller said researching the latest science and techniques, then bringing them to TCFD when it makes sense, is part of Dunklow’s task.
On Monday, he also told city Commissioner Heather Shaw her job in leading emergency medical services will also ensure the department can keep moving forward to become the city’s primary transport agency when he retires on April 24.
So, too, will leadership from the department’s captains and lieutenants.
And the TCFD continues to save lives, Tuller said, responding to four cardiac arrests in 2025 where the person lived — city resident Larry Gerschbacher told commissioners one of those might have been him, as the department responded when his heart went from atrial to ventricular fibrillation.
“The boots-on-the-ground people are getting it done, and I’m confident that, with the leadership provided by Kathryn and the captains and lieutenants and everybody being responsible for themselves that, yeah, there’s going to be a new fire chief, there was a new fire chief before I came here, and we kept providing services,” Tuller said.