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TEAS: AMBULANCE RESPONSE TIMES GETTING FASTER. CRITICS: WHY AREN’T THEY BETTER?
The director of the Tippecanoe Emergency Ambulance Service made a case Tuesday before the Tippecanoe County Council that adjustments in where ambulances are stationed, investments in equipment and other changes helped make gains with improved response times over the course of 2026.
Darrell Clase, who returned to TEAS in 2025 for his second stint as director, also said a website should go live Nov. 18 to track statistics on run times, staffing and other performance measures for a nonprofit ambulance service that gets some of its funding from the county.
“We have had feedback about not being transparent enough – not enough information about what we do,” Clase told council members Tuesday morning, in the second presentation on TEAS numbers to a county body win the past month. “We do some amazing things in this community.”
Some of the rumblings Clase alluded to surfaced again Tuesday, as calls for the county to release records that outline decisions being made by the TEAS board of directors about how the ambulance service operates and what it’s doing to improve response times across the county.
Lisa Dullum, a county council member, told Clase that County Council members were sorting through concerns from the public about TEAS’ performance while also getting requests from townships for tax revenues public safety needs, including their ambulance services. Dullum said the council didn’t have access to TEAS’ financial records, even as the county puts $100,000 a year into the service.
“That’s the quandary I find myself in as a councilor,” Dullum said. “We need to have the services for the community provided. But you’re a private entity and if you’re not doing it, then we need to use tax dollars to make that up. … I’d like to understand better what that money is being used for, and is it necessary to improve service? Maybe we need to use that in other places.”
Justin Kendall, a Lafayette bookstore owner who lost a four-candidate Democratic primary for county commissioner in May, has been butting heads with county commissioners over TEAS performance metrics, financial records and minutes of the nonprofit board’s meetings for months. He’s argued that those figures should be in the hands of the county, given a county commissioners’ seat on the TEAS board of directors. (County commissioners have disagreed with that analysis of the joint venture between Franciscan Health, IU Health and the county.)
On Tuesday, Kendall – wearing a hoodie that featured a bag of cash on top of an ambulance and a question: “ETA on TEAS?” – pressed the county council, the county’s fiscal body, to help make that case to reveal whether investments in TEAS’ operations match what could be spent to improve response times.
He’s argued that without those, it’s fair to assume money that could be invested back into the ambulance service is being going to hospital system margins. That county council members were still trying to get a grasp on the financial numbers was, he contended, evidence that he was on the right track.
“This is an emergency service,” Kendall said. “This should be outrageous to everybody that this is being hidden from all of you.”
