NATCHEZ — American Medical Response is officially the sole provider of emergency response in Adams County.

County supervisors voted unanimously to approve Monday a six-month contract with AMR to go into effect immediately, meaning the company will no longer split 911 emergency calls with Metro Miss-Lou Ambulance.

The new deal brings Adams County into accordance with the majority of Mississippi, as most counties use a single provider for emergency ambulance services.

Now, all callers that dial 911 or directly call Adams County dispatchers will be relayed to AMR, said Scott Slover, Adams County Board of Supervisors attorney.

“This is the first (contract) of its kind in the county, and it’s a strong document,” AMR Natchez Operations Manager Tim Houghton said. “It’s been through some serious review.”

Supervisors approved the contract unanimously, to the chagrin of Metro owner Jim Graves, who was allowed to speak at the end of Monday’s meeting after the contract had already been approved and pointed out that Metro was homegrown in the Miss-Lou, unlike AMR.

Graves also responded to a report Houghton gave on AMR’s response numbers in May. AMR responded to 95 percent of calls within the city in the desired response time of less than 10 minutes, while it achieved 96-percent compliance in the county, in which a response time of less than 20 minutes is required, Houghton said.

Out of 195 total calls, AMR responded to 10 outside of a desired response time. The latest response time came on May 23, when an ambulance took more than 35 minutes to reach its destination. That particular case was listed as a dispatcher error and was an outlier — of the other nine calls, none were more than 3 1/2 minutes beyond a desired response time.

The new contract requires AMR to achieve at least 85-percent compliance in each the city and county, and the company would face a $500 fee for percentage point they are below that number.

While Graves said AMR’s response times were where they need to be, he also said his own company had already been achieving those numbers.

“They finally got their response times up to where Metro has been all along,” Graves said.

Despite Graves’ statement, the contract with AMR had already entered effect upon the supervisors’ unanimous vote. After this initial six-month period, the contract will automatically renew unless the county notifies AMR of a desire to terminate the contract for any reason.