January 16, 2008 by Gloria Penner

I awoke this morning to an unusually balmy January day.  Usually I welcome the 10 degree temperature boost in the middle of winter.  But the winds were active, even in my coastal neighborhood, and my mood shifted.  The recollection of the October wildfires and the havoc and the heartache they caused made me anxious.  The anxiety increased as I drove east to my office at KPBS through a grey pall hanging over the freeway until I realized that it was a light fog and not smoke in the air.

My apprehension about more devastating fires visiting San Diego was not relieved by the interviews I conducted earlier this week with San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, San Diego Council President Scott Peters, and County Supervisor Dianne Jacob.  She represents those unincorporated areas that are so susceptible to Santa Ana blazes.  In another interview, I questioned Supervisor Ron Roberts about the plan he and the Mayor had unrolled at Sanders’ State of the City address last week.

The idea of a countywide fire department that would roll all the small understaffed and underequipped fire districts into one efficient firefighting machine appeared to be off the table.  Instead, there was a plan to come up with a plan to be unveiled on June 30th.  Political leaders and fire chiefs from around the county would meet in some regional effort to form a county firefighting authority.  It would lead to a Joint Powers Authority which theoretically would lead to some more cohesive way of preparing for the fire season, warning people if they were in danger, and, hopefully, actually fighting the fire.  It seems that the idea of a county fire department is not popular among those small districts that would lose a sense of importance and whose fire district board members would lose status.  And it certainly wasn’t popular with the group I interviewed.

It also seems that there’s no real money on the table to fund any of this.  Yes, there was talk of the state’s responsibility and the federal government’s role.  But our political leaders stepped away from any talk of financing a fire fighting organization through taxes or fees.  Even Governor Schwarzenegger’s current plan to add 1.25% to property insurance to fund more equipment got a lukewarm response from the four politicians.  I asked both Roberts and Jacob about using some of the $700 million reserve funds that the County has stashed away.  But (in separate interviews) they argued against tapping the reserves for ongoing expenses (such as hiring more firefighters).   And they both pointed to that reserve as helping the County retain its good credit rating on Wall Street .  

I can’t dispute that advantage.  But I do worry that Santa Ana winds will arrive before that consolidation plan does, and certainly before the plan becomes an organization which hopefully somewhere down the line will change the way fires are fought in San Diego … for the better.

The Fire Next Time: An Envision San Diego Special airs Thursday, January 17 at 8 p.m. on KPBS channel 11, simulcast in HD.