Opinion
Update, October 23: Cataldo is being sold to Coastal Medical Transportation Systems, with a proposed closing on November 30. Our story has the details.
When someone in Chelsea calls 911 for an ambulance, how long does it take to arrive? The honest answer is that residents have no way to know. The city does not publish ambulance response times. No ambulance response times appear in any City Council packet this year. And the company that answers those calls, Cataldo Ambulance Service, has held the job for so long that few people remember the city ever having another.
That should change, starting now.
One company, for decades
Cataldo is a private company based in Somerville. Chelsea is one of 16 communities its website lists for 911 ambulance service, along with Everett, Revere, Malden, Lynn, Winthrop and others. In the 1990s, Chelsea tried to give the contract to a different company. Cataldo took the city to court, kept the work while the case went on, and the dispute reached the Supreme Judicial Court in 1998. Cataldo has been here ever since. It also staffs city events and gave $500 to this year’s city gala.
None of that means Cataldo does a bad job. It means Chelsea has not had to ask the question in a generation. Emergency ambulance contracts in Massachusetts are exempt from the usual public bidding requirements, the Medford mayor’s chief of staff told that city’s council in January. So the contract can roll forward year after year without anyone outside City Hall seeing the numbers.
What the neighbors found when they looked
Revere, which also uses Cataldo, did look. In November 2023, Revere councillors called the fire chief and the company before the council over response times. Councillor-at-Large Marc Silvestri said he was at a call on Newhall Street where the fire department arrived quickly but an ambulance took 17 minutes. “The response time is just unacceptable right now in the city of Revere for the ambulances,” he said, according to the Revere Journal.
Dennis Cataldo, the company’s president, gave a frank answer. Staffing shortages since the pandemic have hit the whole industry, he said, and calls are now triaged by how sick the patient is. “What we are seeing in the industry, for good or for bad, is that some response times based on patient acuity will be longer,” he said. Revere sometimes needs six to eight ambulances at once, which means calling in mutual aid from nearby towns. Another Cataldo official said longer waits at hospital emergency rooms keep ambulances out of service longer.
Medford went further. This year it dropped Armstrong Ambulance after 25 years and signed with Cataldo. Medford’s police chief said Armstrong’s response times were “going into the 40-minute range.” Armstrong said its 2025 average was 4 minutes and 30 seconds. Both cannot be true, and that is the point: without published numbers, a city is left with dueling claims.
Chelsea’s own warning signs
Chelsea’s fire department has already told the council where the gaps are on its side. Notes from the Public Safety subcommittee in April say response times to the southern part of the city and to Admiral’s Hill are the longest from Central Fire Station, and that Engine 2 averages more than 4,400 runs a year against a norm of about 3,200. Chelsea firefighters are sent to many medical calls along with the ambulance. If the engines are stretched, the wait for the ambulance matters even more.
Chelsea is also dense, busy and wrapped around the Tobin Bridge and Route 1. The same pressures Revere described exist here. The difference is that Revere’s council asked.
What the council should do
The City Council should ask the city manager for three things:
- The current ambulance contract: its term, its response-time standards, what the city pays or receives, and what happens when the company misses its targets.
- Response times for Chelsea calls for the last three years, broken out by neighborhood and by how urgent the call was, including how often an ambulance had to come from another town.
- A public presentation by the fire chief and the company, as Revere held.
If the numbers are good, residents will be reassured. If they are not, Chelsea will know it has a decision to make. Either way, people who call 911 deserve to know what to expect.