Supervisors Approve Talks on Creating a County Fire District : Public safety: The 16 cities that now contract for protection would run the independent system. The county could wind up with $15 million from the transfer of Fire Department assets.

The county wants to have a fire sale.

Fire stations, equipment, even firetrucks--all could be sold by the county to a newly created countywide fire district under a plan that cleared a key hurdle Tuesday.

At its weekly meeting, the Board of Supervisors signed off on a progress report on the plan, directed county staff members to move ahead with the proposal and established guidelines for priorities in negotiations over the next three months.

The idea is to transfer responsibility for fire protection from the county to an independent fire district made up of the 16 cities that now contract for fire protection service from the county. The district would then run fire operations.

City leaders said they would get a greater voice in deciding policy in such an arrangement. And the county could wind up with perhaps $15 million more in its coffers from the transfer of department assets to a new district.

With Tuesday’s vote, said Laguna Niguel City Manager Tim Casey, who is part of the negotiating team for the cities, “the county and the 16 cities now seem fully committed to realizing this. . . . It’s certainly good news.”

Officials hope to apply by April to the Local Agency Formation Commission for an Orange County Fire Protection District and to offer it to county voters in November. If approved, the district would begin taking over fire operations in January, 1993.

The county would be expected to have one seat the district’s governing board. Each of the 16 member cities would also have seats on the board, officials said.

Many details remain to be worked out on finances and management of the plan, but officials predicted that the public would not notice a change between the present system and the new.

“The only difference should be the name on the uniform,” said Ken MacLeod, deputy chief for the County Fire Department. “Literally, that’s the only difference the community may recognize.”

The role of the department has changed radically since the county took over service of unincorporated areas and some cities from the California Division of Forestry in 1980.

At that time, the county provided fire protection under contract with nine cities, amounting to about half the size of its coverage area. Today, largely because of rapid incorporation, the county contracts with 16 cities--making up 83% of the service area, or 524 square miles.

The cities now getting county fire service are: Cypress, Dana Point, Irvine, Laguna Hills, Laguna Niguel, Lake Forest, La Palma, Los Alamitos, Mission Viejo, Placentia, San Juan Capistrano, Seal Beach, Stanton, Tustin, Villa Park and Yorba Linda.

Meanwhile, the department’s budget has grown fourfold--from $25.7 million in 1980 to $102.7 million today.

As a result of the county’s swelling responsibility for fire protection, the county and the cities began talking nearly two years ago about restructuring the system.

The cities want a more direct voice in deciding matters of budget, service and governance. County officials have thus far been willing to go along. The proposal, Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez said, “is a sign of the times and indicates how we need to reorganize.”

A private consultant hired by the cities came back with a report in December declaring the proposal to be both “practical and feasible.”

The Fire Department now gets more than 60% of its money from property taxes in its service area. While the people responsible for managing that money would change under the district plan, revenue sources for service are expected to remain largely unchanged, officials said.

In recent weeks, all 16 cities have endorsed the report’s findings, and the supervisors did so Tuesday.

The supervisors approved $9,000 for studying the district issue and directed county staff members to move ahead with negotiations with the cities on transferring county assets to the district, selling fire headquarters property, determining the makeup of the district’s governing board and implementing other changes.

The county department includes 47 fire stations, 86 engines, five crash trucks and an array of other equipment. The county estimates that it has contributed $14.7 million toward that equipment and property; a key point of the coming talks will be to determine how much the fire district would compensate the county for those assets.