Now that the smoke’s clearing, how are fire dollars allocated?

As Grand Jury reports go, the findings are anything but scathing. As anyone who watched the firefighting efforts unfold could tell you, County Fire and the other regional districts are doing just fine at their primary task of quenching flames. County Supervisor Neal Coonerty, whose district includes the Martin Fire area near Bonny Doon, says, “The coordination was incredible with both CalFire and the Bonny Doon volunteers. I was very impressed with how quickly they were able to contain that.”

What’s in focus is the more esoteric angle of fire budgeting. The rural areas of the county—the ones without specific independent fire districts—are covered by a general county administrative unit called CSA 48. Well, sort of. There is one splinter area near the Monterey border covering a fifth of a square mile, called CSA 4, which takes care of Pajaro Dunes. CSA 48, which covers 286 square miles of the most inaccessible areas in Santa Cruz, operates under a $2 million agreement with CalFire, while tiny CSA 4 operates under a separate agreement to the tune of $840,000.

“That came about in 1966,” says Pat McCormick, of the executive office of the Santa Cruz Local Area Formation Commission (LAFCO). “At the time, that was a new subdivision on the coast, and the level of fire protection was higher because it was more dense than other rural communities.” CSA 4 has year-round professional staffing, while the rural areas of the county rely of volunteer brigades and state assistance in case of an incident. Other county areas with high density—such as Live Oak and the San Lorenzo Valley—already had independent fire districts in place. Pajaro Dunes was too small for that, but too dense to get away with a volunteer fire force.

What makes this wrinkle from the ‘60s interesting now is the case of the Bonny Doon fire, whose volunteers were the front line in the Martin Fire. Since 2006, citizens in Bonny Doon have been fighting to get an independent fire district, believing the area is too dense to be lumped in with the rest of CSA 48. Exacerbating the issue is the fact that county voters as a whole declined to double the fire protection fee in the 2007 election, while Bonny Doon residents strongly supported the measure.

There is no definite public hearing scheduled yet, but McCormick anticipates the creation of the district will appear on a LAFCO agenda in late September or early October. “The proposers didn’t want the hearings to occur in summer, when most people’s minds are elsewhere,” McCormick explains. “They specifically asked for it to be after Labor Day.”

Another area the Grand Jury identified as being underserved was Paradise Park, the small community off Highway 9 just outside city limits, but before Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. While nominally in CSA 48, the nearest fire station is in Santa Cruz, so the county contracts with the city to cover any calls there. The Grand Jury is recommending that Paradise Park be detached, like Pajaro Dunes, so it has its own budget, or annexed by the city of Santa Cruz. According to McCormick, “It depends on if a separate service area is cost effective. The system isn’t broken. It’s just a little opaque.”

Fire contracts and budgets are notoriously complex, thanks to the myriad ‘you scratch our back here we’ll scratch yours agreements that cover different contingencies during different seasons. “Even by government standards, the CalFire contracts are obtuse,” McCormick says. “They’re available. You can find them easily on the county supervisor agendas, but to read through one and understand how many dollars are being paid for which service, it’s definitely confusing.”

The Grand Jury recommends a new County Fire website to better explain and coordinate efforts. Coonerty says that one of the difficult aspects—how County Fire reports its incidents to the board—has already been getting better in the time between the Grand Jury’s work and now. “We’re getting a broader look at what the incidents were,” he says, “whether they were medical or fire, and the last time I asked for a report on mutual aid available, so we know who helps who during an incident. Those things are coming back to us in much more detail.”

One funding issue that the Grand Jury saw as an anomaly was the distribution of funds from Proposition 172, a 1993 state ballot measure that doles out public safety money to the counties. Currently, Santa Cruz allocates 99.6 percent of that money to law enforcement. Of the $16 million received in 2007-2008, County Fire got $64,000.

The Grand Jury recommends that the Board of Supervisors take another look at that proportion. “I think there is leeway to have it changed,” Coonerty says, “but it’s not free money. The sheriff’s department isn’t strongly funded either. You know, the sheriff was in charge of evacuations, and I saw them at the Martin Fire— they were immediately on the scene and out of the way of the firefighters, so they could concentrate on their task.”

He adds, “What the reason was for making the vast majority go to the sheriff, I’m not certain. If we’re going to shift more to fire, we have to make sure the purpose is solving problems we want to solve. We may just have to find other ways to fund additional fire protection.”

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