Gilchrist County's EMS staffing strain offers a preview for Nature Coast counties weighing fire rescue funding
A new audit finds Gilchrist County's third ambulance isn't consistently staffed, as voters next door prepare to decide a sales surtax that could reshape how rural Florida pays for emergency response.
What the audit found
Gilchrist County Fire Rescue added a third ambulance to widen its emergency coverage, but a performance audit covering October 2024 through March 2026 found the department cannot reliably keep that unit staffed. Auditors concluded current staffing levels keep operations running, but only by leaning heavily on overtime, not by providing what they called optimal coverage. When overtime shortfalls hit, the third ambulance can go out of service.
The numbers back that up. Overtime accounted for $689,120 of roughly $1.94 million in gross EMS and fire rescue wages in fiscal year 2024-25, nearly 35.5% of total payroll. Gilchrist Finance Director Richard Romans called fully staffing response units the county’s single biggest financial challenge.
The county also has no written response-time goal, the audit found, which limits its ability to pinpoint why some calls take longer than others. Average response time in fiscal 2024-25 was 13 minutes, 8 seconds, a figure shaped by Gilchrist’s rural geography and station placement, the kind of distance-driven delay familiar to much of the Nature Coast.
A ballot measure next door
Gilchrist County voters decide Nov. 3 whether to approve a 1-cent sales surtax dedicated to fire rescue services and facilities. Under Florida law, counties may levy up to a 1% discretionary surtax for this purpose with voter approval, and the money must go toward eligible uses such as firefighting and prehospital emergency medical treatment.
Romans is explicit that this is not new money but a shift in who pays. Gilchrist currently funds EMS through a 0.9026-mill municipal services taxing unit plus a separate fire assessment; if voters approve the surtax, the county must reduce property taxes and assessments by roughly what the surtax brings in, an estimated $1.8 million, per a Florida Department of Revenue projection Romans shared with WUFT. The effect: residents and visitors making taxable purchases in Gilchrist County would help carry a cost currently borne mostly by property owners.
Gilchrist Fire Chief James Campbell declined to discuss the audit’s staffing findings, telling WUFT in an email that the county is still assessing the gaps identified and will share more “once the county has completed its assessment.” Auditors noted Campbell had already told them the department would need six more firefighters to meet a National Fire Protection Association benchmark, six personnel on scene within 14 minutes for 80% of structure fires.
Why it matters on this coast
Levy County and its neighbors share the same structural pressures that produced Gilchrist’s numbers: wide service areas, volunteer and career crews stretched thin, and budgets that strain under overtime. Amy Stafford, vice president of rural providers for the Florida Association of Rural EMS Providers and fire chief in Hendry County, said the dynamic is statewide, rural departments losing staff to higher-paying agencies, then covering the gap with overtime until budgets force cuts. “Overworking our people and not allowing them to have a good work-life balance will cause them to get burnt out,” she said.
Stafford said rural counties sometimes rely on mutual aid from neighboring departments when a unit has to come out of service, and on volunteer departments to handle first response before career crews arrive, both realities relevant to Levy County’s own coverage arrangements along U.S. 19/98 and the county’s rural interior.
Gilchrist’s audit rated its fire rescue program as “partially meeting expectations” across all six broad areas reviewed, with 17 of 24 individual measures only partially met and none failing outright. No Levy County audit or ballot measure is pending as a direct comparison, but the Gilchrist vote offers a concrete test of how Florida law lets counties trade property-tax and assessment revenue for a sales surtax to fund emergency response, a mechanism available to any county in the state, including those on this coast, should staffing and funding pressures reach a similar point.