The city of San Diego still plans to seek bids from private companies to run the city’s Emergency Medical Services system.
The city is doing so despite potential conflicts of interest from one of the largest ambulance providers, American Medical Response, which now employs the city’s former fire chief, Colin Stowell.
Two years ago, Stowell kicked off the city’s effort to remake its EMS system. He told a City Council committee he and a consultant would issue a request for proposals to companies capable of reorganizing and improving San Diego’s troubled ambulance service.
“I will bring you, along with a consultant, bring you back options of what the future EMS system should look like,” Stowell said at the committee meeting. “And that’s what we hope to do here by the wintertime of this calendar year.”
Stowell retired in August 2024 and in March 2025 started working for AMR — the city’s former EMS provider and now a supplemental provider — as a consultant. In late 2025, Stowell took a role as AMR’s Director of Fire Partnerships.
The consultant Stowell referred to in the committee hearing was AP Triton, which worked with the city on EMS-related issues for years.
In September of 2024, AP Triton officially agreed to finalize the city’s bid for ambulance services.
There’s no evidence that Stowell discussed working with AMR while he was with the city.
In a January 2026 interview with Times of San Diego, Stowell said he complied with all regulations and was hired for his years of relevant experience and that he never discussed any city-related work or interacted with city officials until a year after his retirement.
“To my knowledge, no one knows what the (request for proposals) will look like,” Stowell said.
AMR backed also said that the company was not aware of any information that would prevent it from competing for the city contract, whenever the city releases it.
“We want to be clear, at the time of [Stowell’s] departure from the city, no draft of the RFP had been created — the third party to develop and run the RFP for the city had not been hired, nor had any written material or preparatory content been produced,” a statement from a spokesman reads.
But the city and AP Triton actually had released some written material ahead of the potential RFP.
In June 2024, while Stowell was still the fire chief, AP Triton completed a 135-page EMS optimization and feasibility study. The report described its scope as analyzing “possible EMS models for ambulance transport services.”
That report outlined recommendations for the city to include in its new system and a timeline for issuing the RFP.
The report recommended implementing “nurse navigation,” a service that uses registered nurses to triage some 911 calls to reduce ambulance trips.
“Nurse navigation,” however, is the specific name of an AMR product, rather than a generic industry term.
In public hearings, Stowell often outlined the importance of increasing the city’s use of nurse triage to manage the 911 system. He said that just reflects the collective understanding that the city’s next contract needed to take advantage of it.
“Nurse Navigation is a specific term for a general type of service,” he said. “It’s getting some 911 calls out of the system, which is something we’ve always battled in San Diego. That was always in our discussion.”
Candace Hadley, a spokesperson for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, said in August that the city has not changed its plan to issue an RFP this year.
“The city’s request for proposals process is a structure, standardized system designed to be fair, competitive and transparent,” she wrote in an email. “All proposals are considered and evaluated against predefined criteria to ensure impartial, merit-based selections that best serve the needs of the city, the Fire-Rescue Department and the public.”
But it is not always obvious when a public official’s involvement in a contract or project could violate a broad state law called Government Code Section 1090, a conflict-of-interest law that prohibits public officials from having a financial interest in any contract made in their official capacity.
A relevant, recent local example came in 2020, when the newly formed utility San Diego Community Power could not hire its top choice for its new CEO.
San Diego Community Power issued a letter to the state’s Fair Political Practices Commission asking if its top choice was eligible for the job. The commission said she could not be hired, because of Section 1090. Since she had helped draw up the organization’s bylaws, which included the creation of a CEO position, the commission concluded that she had in essence “made” the position she was seeking.
An FPPC spokesperson confirmed that the city of San Diego has not requested an advice letter on whether Stowell’s employment with AMR would constitute a conflict of interest, or a Section 1090 violation.
But the court case that the commission relied on in its advice to San Diego Community Power reinforces how broad Section 1090 is.
“We have held that the ‘making’ of a contract for the purposes of section 1090 includes ‘planning, preliminary discussions, compromises, drawing of plans and specifications and solicitation of bids,’ and not just the moment of signing,” reads the 2017 California Supreme Court ruling in People v. Superior Court.
For the city and Stowell, then, the question would be whether his role bringing in a consultant to craft a request for proposals for the city’s new EMS contract qualifies as “making” a new contract that his new employer would compete for.
Scott Cummings, a legal ethics professor at UCLA, said earlier this year that it could present a conflict of interest, or the appearance of one, but that it would all come down to factual details on the timing of specific decisions, Stowell’s personal role in crafting the process and how independent AP Triton was while shaping the RFP, all of which could make the issue less concerning.
