In last Thursday's fiscal court meeting, magistrates voted to extend Mercy's temporary contract by another month to allow the county more time to weigh Mercy's proposal for running the service for a year.

"We need to sit down and look at this dollar for dollar, but do we (the county) want to get back into running this?" Magistrate Joe O'Bryan said. "I don't know what's going to happen."

Magistrate Roy Ringstaff is also concerned over the cost to run the emergency service.

"It costs a lot of money to run the ambulance," he said.

O'Bryan says payroll costs alone for ambulance service employees are almost $16,000 per month. He points out that in the last fiscal year running from July 1, 1999 to June 30 of this year, the county outlaid $155,000 in payroll to ambulance employees.

He says magistrates need the extra time to weigh all possibilities and consider what the county's citizens want and expect from the ambulance service.

"It's up to the people," he said. "I have to do what the voter wants to do."

O'Bryan says the basic question at hand pertains to the level of service the citizens would like to see out of their ambulance service. Of course, the more advanced the service, the higher the cost to maintain and operate, he added.

"We can either go back to the way it was as a basic life support service or we can go with the advanced life support we have through Mercy now."