LAFCO initiates fire district

San Diego County’s Local Agency Formation Commission has voted to initiate the process to consolidate fire protection and emergency medical service in the unincorporated areas under county jurisdiction.

A 7-0 vote February 7, with county supervisor and LAFCO commissioner Bill Horn expressing support before he left for a San Marcos meeting but not counted in the official vote, begins the official preliminary studies. The consolidation will be contingent on obtaining the necessary funding to provide service to the entire area without decreasing the existing level of service for any existing agency area.

“The process would begin by looking at all agencies,” said LAFCO executive director Mike Ott.

The February 7 proceedings also included acceptance of a municipal service review, which is a prerequisite to any LAFCO reorganization. The municipal service review studies infrastructure needs or deficiencies, growth and population projections, financing constraints and opportunities, cost avoidance opportunities, opportunities for rate restructuring, opportunities for shared facilities, governmental structure options including the advantage or disadvantage of consolidation or other reorganization, evaluation of management efficiencies, and local accountability and governance.

“These are not arbitrary areas that LAFCO has chosen to examine. These are required by state law,” said Shirley Anderson, LAFCO’s chief of policy and research.

“It reviews the efficiency and delivery of services,” Anderson said of the municipal service review. “It requires the examination of services, not agencies.”

The municipal service review examined the 28 special districts which provide fire protection. Sixteen of those are fire protection districts, five are municipal water districts whose services include fire protection as well as water, and seven are county service areas. The San Diego County Board of Supervisors is the governing body of a county service area, although six of those county service areas have elected advisory boards (the exception is County Service Area 115, which had been in the Santee Fire Protection District before Santee incorporated as a city and the fire protection district was replaced by a city fire department while the county service area was created for the fire protection district area not in the City of Santee).

The areas not within the boundaries of a fire protection agency (some of those are served by volunteer fire departments) include 10,741 parcels. Of those parcels, 2,554 have structures. The DeLuz area, which is served by a volunteer fire department but is not in any fire protection agency’s boundaries, includes 873 total parcels and 372 parcels with structures.

Volunteer fire departments cannot assess tax levies, nor do they have ordinance power. The total cost to provide the needed improvements, including emergency medical service staffing and equipment, to the currently unserved and underserved areas is estimated at $110 million.

Since many fire board members serve as volunteers or for per diem pay, consolidation would not reduce the cost of elected officials, nor would the reduction in the number of fire chiefs reduce costs since unity of command would result in title changes rather than a reduction in personnel. “What we need probably is more personnel in the unincorporated area, not less,” Anderson said.

A unified department, however, would provide for universal response criteria and training standards as well as a unified command. “No single authority among the 28 is accountable for safety services in the unincorporated area, and the public is confused,” Anderson said.

When San Diego LAFCO was formed in 1963, fire protection service was provided by 19 fire protection districts and six municipal water districts. Two county service areas were formed between that time and June 1974, when the Board of Supervisors voted to phase out the California Department of Forestry contract and encouraged communities to form their own fire protection districts. Some consolidations have taken place since then, and incorporations and annexations have eliminated additional fire departments, but LAFCO commissioners and staff attribute the disunity to the county’s 1974 decision.

“There’s absolutely no question in my mind that the county certainly helped to create the mess,” said county supervisor and LAFCO commissioner Dianne Jacob. “Therefore I do think that the county has some responsibility to fix it.”

Consolidation could include a county fire department, a merger of the county’s fire protection districts (which would not provide a remedy for the lack of fire protection to unserved areas), a regional fire protection district with expanded boundaries, a fire protection district as a regional overlay, a structural joint powers authority, or a functional joint powers authority. The joint powers authority concepts could include functions such as dispatch and training but are outside of LAFCO’s scope.

“It will only help the entire region,” Jacob said of a consolidated fire service. “We’re only in the region as strong as our weakest link.”

Possible funding sources to ensure the proper level of service for the consolidated fire agency include a state property tax shift (which would require state legislation), Proposition 172 funds (the November 1993 initiative approved by the state’s voters calls for a half-cent sales tax dedicated to public safety; currently law enforcement receives the entirety of the County of San Diego’s Prop. 172 revenue), transient occupancy tax funding (which must be spent on activities to enhance tourism but could theoretically include funding emergency medical response to recreation areas), and county general funds.

The municipal service review, which capitalizes on other studies undertaken by the county’s Task Force on Fire Protection and Emergency Medical Services, is the first step in a reorganization. “It would entail doing additional studies of extreme detail,” Ott said of the process.

The initiation allows LAFCO staff to proceed with those additional studies. A macroanalysis will include the validation or refutation of the $110 million cost estimate, and if a funding commitment is not obtained following the macroanalysis LAFCO will likely opt out of the process. “We don’t feel it would be a wise use of public funds to proceed further,” Ott said.

Should funding be identified, a microanalysis would follow the macroanalysis. The microanalysis could be done either in-house or by a consultant and would include recommendations which would be brought before the LAFCO board to approve or reject.

If the LAFCO board rejects the recommendation, the process is terminated. If it is approved a protest opportunity would allow for a public vote if sufficient signatures are obtained. Under the option of dissolving the existing 23 districts (and deactivating fire and emergency medical functions for the five municipal water districts) and creating a new successor fire protection district, the signatures of 10 percent of the voters or landowners within any one district can force an election,

although the voting area would be the entire reorganization area and voters in any single district cannot terminate the entire reorganization. (If processed as a consolidation rather than a dissolution and formation, voters in any one district could