WATERVILLE — Maine’s community paramedicine programs have been revived by a court decision that forced the federal government to restore grant funding it had frozen in March.

The grant, administered by Maine EMS, was frozen March 24 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It halted funding to 10 community paramedicine programs in Maine. Without that funding, programs in Topsham and Portland were expected to lose momentum, while Waterville’s was at risk of shuttering entirely.

Chief Jason Frost of Waterville Fire Rescue hopes their $103,000 grant is here to stay.

“I hope that, you know, that was the end of it,” he said. “Because there’s other communities — Portland, Topsham — they kind of rely on that money also. We were really worried that we were going to have to suspend community paramedicine, we just don’t have it in the budget, but it looks like it’s going to be back.”

The goal of community paramedicine is to prevent 911 calls from happening in the first place by building relationships with patients and assessing risk at their homes. Paramedics provide free, in-home visits to patients in need of vital checks, blood draws, medication drop-offs, and rides to and from appointments. Sometimes it’s as simple as reorganizing a patient’s pills, other times it’s setting people up with housing or social services.

Because community paramedicine is an emerging field, most of Maine’s programs are funded through grants.

In March, the federal government cut nearly $91 million in federal public health and behavioral health grants to Maine. This largely impacted Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention programs focused on vaccine distribution, epidemiology grants, community health worker programs and health disparities grants, which included the community paramedicine funding.

In response, Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey joined attorneys general from 23 states and the District of Columbia in a multistate lawsuit against the Trump administration for terminating nearly $11 billion in public health grants to the states. A Rhode Island judge granted a preliminary injunction May 16 to halt the cuts.

It required the federal health department to reinstate funding while the lawsuit is pending.

The Maine CDC notified Maine EMS on May 27 that they could access the original funding, Soliana Goldrich, Maine EMS community paramedicine coordinator, said in an email.

“Following the injunction, our office received the green light to start spending those grant dollars,” she wrote.

Maine EMS is planning to complete grant contracts with each of the 10 programs in the state by July, Goldrich said.

Even with the funding reinstated, Topsham’s program is in limbo. Before the original grant funding was canceled in late March, Fire Chief Chris McLaughlin had already signed the contract and purchased a $53,000 cardiac monitor for Elizabeth Reeves, the town’s full-time community paramedic.

Three months later, he said the town is still waiting on a refund from the state and won’t purchase a much-needed vehicle for Reeves until then.

“We’re still waiting,” he said. “End of July, is what I’ve been told. I didn’t order the car yet, because I had gotten the email that the grant went away, but we had already ordered the monitor at that point. So once the money comes in, then I’ll order the car.”

Topsham’s program has been entirely grant funded the last two years. But because of the program’s sweeping success, McLaughlin decided this year to ask taxpayers to fund Reeves’ salary out of the municipal budget.

“We felt it in Topsham’s best interest to have this full time under our own finances, so we can decide if we don’t need it anymore or if we want to build it further,” he said. “But with the grant money going away and then coming back, that’s certainly one of the biggest reasons we decided to fund it ourselves, so we don’t have to worry about it, you know, disappearing.”

Goldrich said in an email that it is highly unlikely that the funding would be retracted again.

“While we can’t predict what future changes we might see at the federal level, the assessment for now is that it is safe to distribute and utilize these funds,” she said in an email.

Frost said his department was excited to hear that the community paramedicine grant was back.

“I guess we got lucky enough that this is one of them that we are going to be able to hang on to,” he said. “For this year, anyway.”