Fire Dept. Faces Layoffs Without Tax : Safety: State reductions could chop the county agency’s funding in half. Nearly 400,000 people rely on the crews.

On the eve of its 65th anniversary, the Ventura County Fire Department faces two dark paths, knowing full well that tigers lurk down each.

Top Fire Department officials say they must choose either layoffs or a new tax on county residents because funding cuts proposed by Gov. Pete Wilson could chop their $45-million budget nearly in half.

No matter which choice they make, officials say, they are sure to be attacked by angry taxpayers from Thousand Oaks to Ojai. Some 400,000 people--nearly two-thirds of the county’s population--rely on the department’s fire and emergency medical services.

But without the state money--property taxes paid by county residents and ordinarily funneled through the state budget back to agencies such as the county Fire Protection District--the department may have to lay off 200 of its 462 employees, including some of its 330 line firefighters, said Fire Chief George Lund.

While the alternative of levying an annual assessment fee averaging nearly $110 per house to make up for the funding cuts is equally undesirable, layoffs could prove deadly, Lund said recently.

“We currently have average response times of six minutes,” he said. “With the types of cuts we’re looking at, it’ll be 12 to 15 minutes. Someone who has a heart attack, if their brain goes without oxygen for more than eight minutes, they can die. A fire will double its size in four to five minutes. We will have deaths on rescue calls.”

After sustaining cuts of $5 million last year that already have hampered some emergency operations, fire officials say they have run out of ways to cut spending in the 31 stations that provide fire and emergency medical service for the 865-square-mile district.

The district includes all cities and unincorporated areas except for Oxnard and Ventura, which have their own city-run fire departments, and Santa Paula and Fillmore, which have volunteer departments.

“There’s this imaginary fat that I keep hearing about,” said Capt. Larry Henry, who oversees maintenance and brush-fire hand crews. “If anything, we’re understaffed.”

The busiest county fire stations are in east Ventura County, where the department covers all the municipalities, including Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley, said Assistant Chief Dave Festerling, in charge of operations.

The busiest station in Ojai, No. 22, had 782 calls in 1991, while the busiest station in Thousand Oaks, No. 30 on Moorpark Road, recorded 1,343 calls, Festerling said.

“As far as responses and day-to-day work, like inspections, the work’s much greater in east county,” Festerling said. “In the west county, it’s nice. We have the Navy for mutual aid in Port Hueneme” and the city and volunteer departments covering most of the cities, he said.

The Ventura County Fire Department has evolved considerably from its earliest days.

Once a smattering of volunteers who hand-cranked their pump motors to life, the Ventura County Fire Department has become a versatile, well-equipped agency trained to handle everything from brush fires and building inspections to heart attacks and hazardous material spills.

While the department once focused solely on wild-land fires, it has since branched out.

Now, fires make up fewer than 10% of the department’s calls, while more than half are medical emergencies such as heart attacks or car wrecks. In 1991, only 1,392 of the 17,138 calls were for fires, while 11,073 involved rescues and medical emergencies.

“A lot of people will joke, ‘All you guys do down there at the station is play checkers or pinochle or cribbage,’ ” said Engineer Dave Morgan, a 35-year veteran of the Ojai station. “Those days are gone.”

The Ventura County Fire Department was formed on May 11, 1928, in a special election called by the Board of Supervisors, by a 230-47 vote of county residents.

The department’s first fire engine was a Ford truck equipped with a portable pump and 1,000 feet of 1 1/2-inch hose, donated by members of the public who had contributed to its purchase. Residents also paid for four cars, equipped with 45-gallon tanks full of chemical fire retardant, to be stationed in or near heavily populated areas for the department’s use.

In addition, the department acquired eight trailers, equipped with hand tools for 15 to 20 firefighters and posted them at strategic locations around the county.

The department expanded through the World War II era, as the state instituted a statewide Fire Disaster Plan and stationed part of its fleet of fire trucks in Ventura County. And as the Civilian Defense Training plan was put into effect, large numbers of auxiliary firefighters were trained in case of incendiary bomb attacks.

In the late ‘40s and early to mid-’50s, fire officials broadened the use of radios, created battalions led by battalion chiefs and bought some of the state-owned fire equipment that had been stationed here.

As more people and industries moved into the county, the Fire Department kept pace, buying new equipment, updating its firefighting training and learning to deal with the increased number and types of fires sparked by the growth.

By 1976, the department had established a centralized dispatch center, which now receives emergency calls directly from the county’s 9ll center in the basement of the Sheriff’s Department.

And by the early 1980s, nearly all county firefighters had been certified as emergency medical technicians. Although only private ambulance company paramedics are authorized in Ventura County to perform invasive medical procedures in the field, fire crews are often the first to arrive on the scenes of medical emergencies, and recently began using defibrillator equipment to help heart attack victims.

Since then, the Fire Department has expanded its equipment to include 89 vehicles, including a hazardous-materials trailer, portable lighting units and Tele-Squrts--ladder trucks equipped with remote-controlled water nozzles.

Now, the department has 31 fire stations scattered around the county, each equipped with at least one pumper truck and staffed with three firefighters.

“We’re a sizable fire department, we’re probably the 10th largest in the state,” Henry said. “The job is much more complicated than when I came on in 1970. We were firefighters and performed advanced first aid and rescue work, but through the years, things have been added, and rightfully so.”

The department’s firefighters have received more training, to keep pace with the expanded duties, taking classes in first aid, hazardous-materials handling and in specialized work such as swift-water rescues for floods and confined-space rescues in the case of collapsed buildings.

Meanwhile, the number of building fires in the county has decreased as ever stricter building codes have eliminated many fire hazards, said Morgan.

Morgan said when he first started as a teen-ager, Ojai’s 20 or 25 volunteer firefighters were summoned to the station by a loud siren sounding in the city’s center.

On arriving, they read the fire’s location off a chalkboard and mounted up to drive to the scene, he said. Once they got there, they had to hand-crank the pump on the back of their engine to start it, he said.

As the years went by, Morgan said, he and other firefighters have been asked increasingly to focus on fire prevention.

Over the years, firefighters have inspected new buildings, recording details about their construction that could prove vital in battling fires, he said.

“Weed abatement is probably the most aggressive thing we have done” to prevent fires from destroying property, Morgan said.

In the 1970s, the department began mandating that property owners keep their land clear of weeds and brush for 100 feet around buildings.

Notices are sent out each spring and firefighters begin inspecting properties in preparation for the June 1 deadline. After that, the Fire Department calls a private contractor to clear brush off any violating properties, and then bills the property owner for work costing 4 to 10 cents per square foot, plus a $221 administrative fee.

And although the supervisors have rejected the idea, many in the department would still like to have all firefighters trained, equipped and authorized to act as paramedics, said Assistant Chief Bob Roper.

“The people see the firefighters as this emergency response pool of individuals at strategically located points where they have fire stations,” Roper said. “With that in mind, we don’t just sit around waiting for fires. We train, we do public education, and when we see the need for response to hazardous material spills, we pick up that slack.

“We started going to traffic accidents, then we started getting tools to pry people out of cars,” he said. “It’s not that we can do it so much better than private enterprise. It’s just that, from our standpoint, we have a labor pool of people in those strategic locations and we can provide those services.”

But while the department has expanded dramatically to adjust to increasing public demand for services, it must also grapple with shrinking funds.

Ken Maffei, president of the Ventura County Professional Firefighters Assn., has criticized the department for not finding more ways to streamline and adapt.

But even the union leader admits that the department is in a bind that probably will be solved only by laying off firefighters, levying the assessment fee on property owners or somehow persuading the Legislature to soften the blow.

The department could save a little money by consolidating facilities with similar county facilities, such as vehicle repairs, emergency dispatchers and warehouses, Maffei said.

However, he added, the department might never have landed in such a predicament if it had not relied so heavily on funding that the Legislature provided to make up for funding controls instituted in 1978, when voters approved Proposition 13.

“They bailed us out and bailed us out, and we were like a drug addict,” Maffei said of the county government. “We got hooked on this money, and now the state Legislature is trying to cold-turkey us, and it doesn’t work. We’re guilty of getting addicted to that money, but at the same time, the Legislature is guilty of being our supplier.”

County Fire Department Calls

The Ventura County Fire Department will spend roughly $45 million by the end of this fiscal year protecting 400,000 residents of every unincorporated area and city in the county except for Ventura and Oxnard, which have their own fire departments, and Fillmore and Santa Paula, which have volunteer fire companies. This is a breakdown of calls the department answered in the 865-square-mile Fire Protection District in 1991, according to the latest statistics available. Ventura County Fires Structure fires: 296 Wildland fires: 225 Vehicle fires: 391 Refuse fires: 341 Other fires: 138 Total: 1,391 Other Emergencies: Rescues: 11,073 Gas or water leaks: 3 Public services : 1,082 Hazardous conditions: 753 Alarm, no fire: 1,744 False alarm: 241 Electrical failures: 260 Mutual aid to other departments: 591 Total: 17,138