BY TRACY LEE TATE
Special to the Times
LAKE BUTLER—There are almost always two sides to every story, and this is true of the public comments made by several people, including two former employees of the Union County Emergency Medical Service, Sergio Fernandez and Lance Thornton, at the recent Union County Board of Commissioners on Oct. 16, 2023, and the people they were complaining about.
In the interest of fairness, the Times decided to look into the comments and allegations made in that meeting and tell the other side of the story, with interviews with UCEMS Director Toby Witt and the county’s human resource department. The comments from the meeting have been covered in a previous article.
Witt said the comments made at the meeting were simply a continuation of a past situation at the EMS station. When Witt came in has said he found the operation in a state inappropriate for a medical service.
“I started work at a time the department was in danger of shutting down,” Witt said. “The department did not have the staff to function and called in a private company to run some calls. We only had one unit on the road many times. I had to get medics in here fast. People who could hit the ground running. Many of them were not comfortable at the start and no one was or is perfect. This was true of both the existing staff and the new hires. I chose to put experience in the work as a priority rather than time spent on the staff here and that led to several disgruntled employees. I was just trying to get the best possible people in here to serve the county residents.”
Witt added that when he walked in the door the medical director had passed away and his replacement was not responding to calls.
“I had to put people in some difficult positions to keep things going,” he said. “One of the people I brought in was Lt. Mike Broshar, a paramedic. This is who the two former employees were talking about at the meeting. He came to us with 30 years of experience, and we were lucky to get him, but the two men in question did not like him from the start. He was out running calls as soon as he started here, despite the fact he was new here, and a lot of people resented him. He has been working in emergency medicine longer than any of the other employees, and he may very well do things differently from the way they were taught, but that does not make his methods wrong. He has worked for multiple services over the years and has had no complaints on his record and no derogatory action on his state license.”
Witt said the dislike showed itself in the personal interactions in the station and on calls and continued when his desk became flooded with incident reports concerning Broshar. An incident report is written by a staff member to report any misbehavior or impropriety he or she sees in other staff members while on a call. It is told in the opinion of the writer and is reviewed by both Witt and the medical director.
Witt said the reports were petty and trivial.
“The silliest one was that he failed to clean a stretcher after a call – and that is not even his job.”
The reports kept coming and were reviewed as required by law and none proved to be factual. The number of reports grew so high that Witt finally told everyone to just come to him and make their reports in person and he would call the medical director into the discussion if necessary.
“Upon looking into the reports neither the medical director nor myself found anything even mildly negative,” Witt said. “It was simply a witch hunt by disgruntled employees. Since these two have been gone (the past 7-8 months) we have had zero complaints or problems. If Mike were that bad and that much of a problem, I would still be getting complaints about him, and I am not.
“Sergio did not need to discuss incident reports in a way that could identify the patient (a violation of HIPPA laws),” Witt continued. “All of his reports were checked, and if he does not agree with the decisions made by myself and the medical director, he can come and talk to us about the problems he says he has seen, not broadcast them in a public meeting.”
Witt said the department has gone from being about to shut down due to staff and equipment shortages—and would have been shut down by the state had it been widely known—to a smoothly functioning operation with experienced employees and dependable equipment. He added that the department does not deserve the negativity it is getting from the public and a few disgruntled employees who have an ax to grind.
“It’s all just sour grapes from both of them,” Witt said. “It was obvious they did not like me, the way I was running the department or Mike.”
According to the Union County Human Resources records (those available to the press as some contain legally protected information) Fernandez, while still employed by EMS, had requested to be moved from full-time employment to call time, listing his reasons for requesting the change.
He was instructed to list the dates and times he was available to work so as to be fitted in on the on-call schedule, but never did so, nor has he filled any shifts.
His name was purged from the call time list in October, as is done every year along with several others in several departments.
Thornton was placed on suspension for insubordination and improper conduct and, when called in to discuss a corrective action plan, refused to read or sign the document.
He refused because he said he would not work with Broshar. He was told that he must sign the document or continue on suspension and legal advice on the matter was to terminate him.
After this he appeared before the Board of County Commissioners to request that they allow his termination to be changed to a resignation, which they allowed.
