South El Monte, 4 Other Cities Will Pay Less for Sheriff’s Copter Patrol

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, responding to complaints that its helicopter service was too expensive, has set a new rate that will cut the annual price tag in half for South El Monte and the four Southeast cities with which it shares the service.

Instead of paying an annual fee, which for South El Monte was $45,200, the cities recently began paying for helicopter service at an hourly rate of $405.

“Our cost is going to go down quite a bit,” said South El Monte City Manager Raul Romero, who estimated that the city’s annual cost would be reduced to around $7,000. “If we want more hours in our city, we’ll just request it. It’s very cost effective.”

Moreover, under the new structure, a helicopter stationed in the north part of the county will service South El Monte, reducing the response time, Romero said.

The other cities, Pico Rivera, Santa Fe Springs, La Mirada and Norwalk, were paying the Sheriff’s Department up to $140,000 annually for helicopter service. The department uses helicopters most often to assist sheriff’s patrols involved in pursuit situations, such as car chases or tracking a suspect fleeing on foot.

Under the old system, cities would pay an annual fee to cover all helicopter service. Under the new fee system, the county will pay for all helicopter responses related to life-threatening emergencies, while cities will pay $405 an hour for other emergency calls or for routine patrol of a problem area. The Sheriff’s Department will eliminate regular helicopter patrols provided under the old system.

Based on the number of emergency responses the cities have required during the last few years, the Sheriff’s Department has calculated that the cities’ costs will be reduced by at least 50%--and perhaps as much as 75%.

The pressure to reform helicopter service began last summer, when cities were reviewing annual budgets.

Under the old structure, Norwalk faced a fee of $138,400 for helicopter service; Pico Rivera, about $100,000; La Mirada, $75,200; Santa Fe Springs, $87,800.

“We felt it was awfully expensive,” acknowledged Romero. “Each of the five cities was participating in this group, and that’s why we felt the sheriff had to come up with another program to reduce the costs.”

The program probably would have been discontinued if one of the cities backed out of the cooperative, because the remaining cities would not have been able to afford to pay a greater share of the costs.

So the cities struck an agreement to keep paying for the helicopter service for six months with the understanding that the department would revise the service and fees by the end of 1988. Sheriff’s officials presented their proposal to the cities a few months later, and the new fee schedule began Jan. 1.

Available to All Cities

The Sheriff’s Department plans to offer the hourly helicopter service to every city in the county, Capt. Bill Mangen said.

The department has divided the county into four regions, over each of which a helicopter will patrol nearly around the clock, Mangen said. No Sheriff’s Department employees will be laid off because of the new billing system, he said.

In fiscal 1988-89, the helicopter patrol program is costing the Sheriff’s Department an estimated $833,000. The largest share of the cost, $386,400, is to be paid by Los Angeles County, with participating cities paying for the rest, a sheriff’s spokesman said. The department came up with the $405 hourly rate by dividing the number of flying hours last year by the annual cost of the program, Mangen said.