San Diego officials are set this year once again to ask private companies to bid for the right to run the city’s emergency medical services system.
One of the companies expected to vie for that opportunity has hired the city’s former fire chief, whose department ran EMS services, to help it secure the job.
In spring 2024, then-fire chief Colin Stowell initiated the city’s effort to open up its EMS contract and remake the system. He retired a few months later, in August. Late last year, he started a job with AMR — the city’s long-time EMS operator until it was replaced by Falck in 2021 — in which he helps AMR win contracts from local governments.
The city now says sometime this year it will issue a request for proposals from companies to take over a contract that could be worth over $60 million annually.
Stowell and AMR said they have no concerns about any conflict of interest in the former chief working for the firm while it pursues the contract in a process he initiated as a city employee. Stowell said he has carefully complied with all relevant regulations and was hired because he has a valuable, relevant expertise.
His transition from influential city official to private businessman highlights the common revolving door between government jobs and government contractors, where officials retire from the public sector and then use their expertise to build a second career in the corporate world.
Such scenarios are common and typically legal. But that reality is balanced by various rules designed to protect public funds and limit inappropriate influence, including one sweeping state law that prohibits workers from having a financial interest in a contract they influenced in the public sector.
The law known as government code 1090 has roiled numerous city business deals over the past decade — and has the potential to come into play when a former government employee works for a company that has contracts with the same government entity.
If a former city employee were to help craft a contract, then later work for a company that benefits from the details of the way that contract was made, “that doesn’t look good,” said Scott Cummings, a legal ethics professor at UCLA. “It raises a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
There’s no evidence Stowell made plans for a future job at AMR while he was working for the city. He says he didn’t discuss working for the company until at least four months after he left the city, at the beginning of 2025. He first started working for the company as a consultant in March, but steered clear of discussing anything with the city until a year after he retired.
The EMS system
AMR handled the city’s emergency medical system from 1997 until it was replaced by Falck in 2021.
Right away, Falck had problems living up to the contract, which it pinned largely on upheaval from the COVID-19 pandemic, and the city started making changes. It brought in AMR to supplement Falck’s services. Then it restructured the EMS ambulance transportation system, putting the city in charge of staffing, billing and other major pieces of the operation.
After all those changes, the city and Stowell began discussing issuing a request for bids for a new contract. In April 2024, city officials sought a consultant to help them shape a request for proposals to help pick who would take over.
A week later, Stowell reminded council members that he had previously promised to bring them a proposal for a new ambulance system, considering whether the city should take over the operation entirely, build on the restructured system or create some sort of hybrid model.
“I will bring you, along with a consultant, bring you back options of what the future EMS system should look like,” he said. “And that’s what we hope to do here by the wintertime of this calendar year.”
Stowell by then had already announced his retirement, and he left office in August. A month later, the city formalized the deal Stowell had described to the council, signing a contract with the consultant AP Triton to put together the ambulance services RFP that he said was forthcoming.
A new contract
That RFP did not arrive in late 2024 or early 2025, as originally planned. The city now says the RFP is expected to be released sometime this year.
At the start of 2025, Stowell started talking to AMR about consulting with them, he told Times of San Diego.
Early that year, he started working with them first on an upcoming contract in Ventura, and then one in Santa Barbara. He said the company brought him in to meet with fire departments on EMS contracts, to help the company understand what the departments needed.
By November, he had joined AMR as its director of fire partnerships in California, and in a San Diego Business Journal profile, said he was excited to help the company compete for the city’s upcoming contract, which he predicted would include something called “Nurse Navigation,” a service offered by AMR that diverts non-emergency 911 calls to a team of nurses.
In an interview with Times of San Diego, Stowell said those comments did not reflect knowledge he had from his time at the city or anything he advised the consultant to include. He said the mayor’s office, after he left his city job, told AMR when to expect the RFP, and said he expected the city to want a Nurse Navigation-style system because of longstanding discussions about the issue.
“To my knowledge, no one knows what the RFP will look like,” he said. “Nurse Navigation is a specific term for a general type of service. It’s getting some 911 calls out of the system, which is something we always battled in San Diego. That was always in our discussion.”
“The city shares information with potential contract bidders about estimated timelines of RFPs, but it does not communicate information about the content,” mayoral spokesperson Dave Rolland told Times of San Diego in a statement. Rolland said this case was no different.
The rules on conflicts
San Diego’s ethics ordinance restricts former employees from being paid to lobby the city for one year after they leave the city.
Stowell said he carefully abided by that cooling off period. He told Times of San Diego that in March, he told AMR he couldn’t talk to anyone in the city until after August, and that he never did.
The local ordinance is not the only rule on the subject. California’s government code section 1090 prohibits city officials from participating in the making of any contract in which that official has a financial interest. Violations of the section can lead to voided contracts or civil and criminal penalties.
In a statement, an AMR spokesperson said the company isn’t aware of anything that would prohibit its relationship with Stowell.
”We want to be clear, at the time of Colin’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,” the statement reads.
City spokesperson Candace Hadley said the city’s RFP system is structured and standardized to be fair, competitive and transparent.
“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 Cummings, the UCLA professor, said there is still a potential for a problem, even when an employee leaves the government early in the contracting process.
If a public employee exits before a contract is executed, but can shape the contract to benefit a planned future employer, “say by including a service that is a strength of the company he is going to, that could seem like it’s designed to produce a good result for the company,” he said.
In this case, Stowell said he did not discuss a job with AMR until months after retiring from his city job.
For decades, courts have held the state law applies not just to final contracts but to nearly any step in the process before issuing a contract.
In the 1960s, courts considered a case in which the city council in Taft considered plans for a new civic center. One council member resigned before the city issued a contract that included the council member’s plumbing company. The state supreme court ruled that even though the member was no longer on the council at the time of the contract, the law applied to essentially all aspects of the contracting process including “the planning, preliminary discussions, compromises, drawing of plans and specifications and solicitation of bids.”
Today, the state’s official guidance on the law cites that same language, cautioning, “resigning from a governmental position may not be sufficient to avoid a violation.”
Cummings said it would come down to details — timing, Stowell’s role crafting the process, how independent the consultant who ended up shaping the RFP had been — all of which could make it less concerning.
Bob Fellmeth, a public interest and law professor at University of San Diego, said there is not a bright line defining whether the RFP presents a problem, and it depends on the behavior of city officials making the eventual decision.
Fellmeth said city officials would need to be sure the RFP doesn’t unduly favor any particular contestant
“It comes down to the facts,” he said. “We need more facts … that is, what’s the composition of the RFP when it’s released?” If it unduly favors one bidder, he said, that could be a problem.
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