TEAS Update July 17

My previous posts have had a lot of detail, but all of the issues with accessing records from TEAS, Inc comes down to the following:

• Non-profits always have a board of directors (purple boxes) and can optionally have members

• Tippecanoe County, Lafayette, and West Lafayette are members of the TEAS, Inc corporation (red boxes)

• Day-to-day operations of the non-profit are determined by the board of directors (specifically the hospital directors), in board meetings held quarterly.

• Non-profits that have members must hold at least an annual member meeting, where it performs specific actions, per state law

• TEAS, Inc's bylaws outline that the members of the non-profit are required to receive and vote to accept specific items during its member meetings (lower red box):

  • Board of Directors meeting minutes and associated documents

  • Annual operational audit of Franciscan's "TEAS" business unit

  • Operational reports

  • Financial reports

• TEAS, Inc's bylaws outline that it is to notify the members of the corporation of the date, time, and location of member meetings that occur, so it can attend them

The county and seemingly the cities, have no record of any member meeting notices being received from TEAS, Inc in the last 3 years.

Neither the county nor the cities have in their possession any of the items listed above that are to be given to them in member meetings.

This would indicate that the member meetings are not occurring, which is a violation of not just TEAS, Inc bylaws, but state law.

Because these member meetings are not occurring and records are not being received, nobody in any of the government units knows why TEAS is doing what it's doing.

Ultimately, because none of the government units have any idea what TEAS is doing or why they're doing what they're doing, TEAS is free to make their response times as bad as possible, to make as much money for themselves as possible, because the city fire departments will pick up the slack for response time most of the time.

Because of the legal agreement locking the political subdivisions out of making any competing emergency ambulance service, no competing services can come in and operate in the county.

This makes it so that rural areas of the county get horrible response times and the cities have to devote more resources to their fire departments to make up for the poor response times, costing taxpayers more money overall.