Replacement of Fire Chief in Rancho Santa Fe Ends a Dynasty of Efficiency, Turmoil

“I’m the boss,” he said. “I think that says it all. We all get this (employee unrest and no-confidence motions) in this business. Look at Encinitas, Fallbrook, Ventura. I think it’s cyclical in the fire service, every few years.”

Peter Fox, Former Rancho Santa Fe fire chief

Under the eucalyptus trees, amid the manses and the landed gentry, a family dynasty is coming to an end. For the first time since 1957, the fire chief of Rancho Santa Fe is not named Fox.

From 1957 to 1981, the fire chief was James Arthur Fox, an iron-willed and indomitable Britisher whose outsized personality and innovations in fire protection made him a figure of veneration in this woodsy isle.

He retired in 1981 and turned the job over to his son and hand-picked successor, Arthur Peter Fox--a chemist by profession and a budget and computer whiz by temperament, but a fire chief by inheritance.

Two weeks ago, beset by angry firefighters and a blistering report from the county Grand Jury alleging mismanagement, Peter Fox was replaced as fire chief at his own request and given an administrative job whose duties are as yet undefined.

Now, the three-man fire board is prepared to sever Fox’s control over the firefighters by having the new chief report directly to the board. After that comes the harder task of deciding what Peter Fox’s new job will be and how long he will remain in the department his father built.

At 45, Fox has worked for the department since he was 14. In the early years, the entire Fox family lived at the firehouse as the father went about shaping the department in his own image and creating a local legend.

“The only decision we’ve made so far is that Peter will definitely stay a few months so the new chief can get his feet on the ground,” said fire board chairman Ray Griset, a 77-year-old lima bean farmer who joined the board shortly before James Fox was hired as chief.

“After a few months, we’re just not sure what will happen to Peter,” Griset said. “We may make the decision at Tuesday’s meeting or maybe in a month or two. I see three choices: He could stay, he could quit, or he could play an intermediate role.”

Decision Voluntary

The idea to hire a new chief, Griset said, came entirely from Fox.

“He made the choice for reasons that probably will never be public,” Griset said. “But I can tell you it has nothing to do with the firemen screaming to get rid of him.”

Fox declines comment on his future, except to say that it makes sense to separate the firefighting responsibility from the budget and other “number-crunching” duties.

For the Rancho Santa Fe firefighters, the change was long overdue.

The day after the arrival of the new chief--Arden “Pete” Pedersen, 48, a 24-year veteran of the City of Orange Fire Department--firefighters revealed that a vote of no confidence had recently been taken in Peter Fox.

Nineteen firefighters had voted no confidence, four abstained. All six dispatchers also voted no confidence.

“As long as Chief Fox is in any position of authority in decision making, with either direct or indirect effect on the firefighters bargaining unit, you will have a serious morale problem,” said the San Diego County Employees Assn. in a letter to the fire board and the press.

Friction between Fox and the firefighters is nothing new.

Before the City of Solana Beach dissolved its joint operating agreement with Rancho Santa Fe, firefighters in Solana Beach had passed their own no-confidence motion concerning Fox.

“Peter began giving orders to officers when he was still a part-timer and, like his father, could be cold and foul-tempered,” said a March, 1981, article in the Reader about James and Peter Fox, titled “The Empire & The Dynasty.”

“(Peter) got a reputation as a hothead, likely to fly off the handle or unleash a cruel harangue,” the paper said. “Men who accepted the same from the chief couldn’t bear it from his young son, and Peter admits feeling an ‘undercurrent,’ . . . that perhaps his colleagues resented him and his favored status.”

‘Name is Magic’

Six years later, Lee Taylor, a Rancho Santa Fe resident for 33 years and a former county supervisor and former president of the Rancho Santa Fe Assn., gives a similar explanation for the apparent decline of Peter Fox.

“The name Fox is magic in Rancho Santa Fe,” Taylor said last week. “But many times the second generation can’t get away with what the first generation did. Personalities change, time changes. The words are the same but the effect is different.

“I think that’s what got Peter in trouble with the employees. He was similar to his father in his use of authority, but it went over much differently. It’s like a wildfire when something like that gets started, it’s sometimes impossible to stop. I think Peter is holding on for dear life.”

Fox, whose British accent remains despite four decades in the United States, dismisses the firefighters’ complaints as nothing more than everyday employee-employer grumbling.

‘I’m the Boss’

“I’m the boss,” he said. “I think that says it all. We all get this (employee unrest and no-confidence motions) in this business. Look at Encinitas, Fallbrook, Ventura. I think it’s cyclical in the fire service, every few years.”

Firefighters want Fox out, said county employees’ association field representative Nancy Roberts.

“Ideally, the firefighters want Fox’s resignation,” Roberts said. “But since the board still supports him, that doesn’t look promising. Rancho Santa Fe is still a good-old-boys system.”

Griset, who plays golf with 72-year-old James Fox, declines to talk in detail about the upcoming decision. He says his respect for Peter Fox is undiminished (“No one has done more for fire protection than James and Peter Fox”), but he does not envision a full-time role for him.

“We probably won’t use very much of his time,” Griset said. “One thing we might want to keep him on board for is dispatching. We’re dispatching for Vista, San Marcos, Encinitas, Solana Beach, Rancho Santa Fe, Elfin Forest and Deer Springs, all out of Rancho Santa Fe--in a computer system that Peter Fox designed and built.”

As it stands now, the Rancho Santa Fe Fire Department, with a $3-million annual budget and 31 firefighters, has a $55,500-a-year chief in the firehouse and a $62,940-a-year former chief doing paper work in a nearby office.

James Fox, a naturalized American who learned an authoritarian manner while serving in the British fire service, is credited with numerous advances in fire protection and overall public service.

Rancho Santa Fe is a firefighter’s nightmare: isolated, surrounded by the dry brush that is North County much of the year, replete with narrow and winding streets and trees that explode like torches at the smallest spark.

Add to that the fact that the ranch’s 5,000 residents, mostly affluent and management-minded, are not reluctant to demand service. Home prices start at $400,000 and quickly reach the millions, so any fire damage is costly.

Under James Fox, Rancho Santa Fe was the first community in the county to have a 911 emergency system, the first to have ambulances that were more than just hearses painted white, and among the first to have paramedics.

He organized a private security force to supplement the Sheriff’s Department, hooked up hundreds of private burglar alarms to a central dispatcher, arranged CPR classes for the public, taught firefighting at local community colleges, and retrofitted old fire rigs to make them more efficient in the deep brush.

Stories abound of James Fox or his firefighters responding to any call for help, from rescuing a cat in a tree to lighting a pilot light to killing a snake on someone’s lawn. And he did it all while keeping the tax rate among the county’s lowest.

Self-Described Autocrat

Along the way, however, he demonstrated his lack of regard for a number of groups, including employee associations, paramedics, the press, the county Grand Jury and dissenters of any kind. He readily referred to himself as an autocrat.

Lee Taylor, who has lived in Rancho Santa Fe for 33 years, said that in terms of public acclaim, James Fox’s only rival in Rancho Santa Fe is longtime school superintendent Dr. Roger Rowe.

“People depended on Jim Fox and trusted him completely,” Taylor said. “Peter has had to live with that. To call it a dynasty is not wrong. Jim is British and he thinks in those terms. In America, every son wants to do something different, something better than his father.

“But in Britain, if your father is a cobbler, so are you,” he added. “And if your father was a fire chief, so are you.”

Peter Fox was one of two Fox boys; his brother is a civil engineer in Rancho Santa Fe. Peter received a degree from San Diego State University and for several years was a chemist for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography while still working part time for his father.

“He was my right-hand man since he was a boy,” James Fox said in the Reader article.

In April, the county Grand Jury criticized Peter Fox for alleged mismanagement in running the Solana Beach department, including favoritism, using firefighters for personal errands, and poor training. A week later Fox resigned as Solana Beach chief, and a month later he announced the search was on for a new chief for Rancho Santa Fe.

Fox refuses to discuss the Grand Jury report. Like his father, he feels it is unprofessional to publicly discuss criticism or Fire Department problems.

On the wall of his office is a quotation from Abraham Lincoln which begins, “If I were to try to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business. I do the very best I know how--the very best I can . . . . “

An example of Peter Fox’s tight-lipped approach is his never having answered allegations about his conduct as assistant chief during the Sept. 15, 1979, fire that began on Black Mountain Road near Interstate 15. The blaze burned more than 7,000 acres and destroyed four homes in Rancho Santa Fe. With his father out of town, Peter Fox was in charge.

A report later prepared by the department at his father’s direction exonerated the son, but homeowners’ anger left a residue of suspicion that Peter Fox was afraid of fire.

Asked about the fire and his performance that blazingly hot day, Peter Fox winces and reaches for a 3-inch-thick report on the fire, but refuses to make any on-the-record comments. The report is on the top of a pile of documents in a drawer directly behind his chair.

Asked whether he is afraid of fire, he responds, “How can I answer a question like that? Why would I be in this business if I was afraid of fire? I’ve had my eyebrows singed and burned off enough times.”

Pedersen, the new chief, is a native of South Dakota who served three years in the Marines, received a degree from Santa Ana College in fire science, and rose to the rank of battalion chief-training officer in the City of Orange. Without criticizing Fox, he has offered a new deal for Rancho Santa Fe firefighters.

“An organization works a lot better if everybody is pulling the rope in the same direction,” Pedersen said.

“I don’t want to criticize anybody’s management style, but I’m probably a little more into participatory management,” he said. “I see my style as soliciting input, but when it comes time to make a decision, I’m willing to accept the responsibility.”

So far, Pedersen says, he’s impressed with what he’s seen.

“I’m particularly impressed with the crews’ quick response out of the station, their good attitude about answering alarms,” he said. “That can be a problem in the fire service because so many calls do not turn out to be serious. But when an alarm goes off here, engines are rolling within seconds.

“Somebody here has certainly maintained as a priority the necessity of timely response.”