County Defends Higher Fire Dept. Costs : Safety: The per-capita price for protection exceeds that of city forces. Officials point to large service area and more varied duties.

The Ventura County Fire Department costs much more than any city fire department in the county--almost $30 more per person than in the city of Ventura and more than twice as much as Oxnard.

But, as the controversy grows over a proposed new fire tax, the county’s defense of higher costs is that county firefighters do much more than their city counterparts.

County firefighters run bulldozers and hand crews to battle wild-land brush fires in the rugged back country that makes up much of their 875-square-mile service area, where city firefighters tread only when asked on a mutual aid basis.

They fly a helicopter unit for forest fires and steep-embankment rescues, while city departments must rely on ground vehicles for this work.

And they operate heart defibrillators, electric shock generators used to jolt a pulse back in heart-attack victims. Only recently did Oxnard fire officials win their City Council’s approval to buy defibrillators and train firefighters how to use them.

But running the Ventura County Fire Department could cost $45 million this year--an estimated $112.50 spent to protect each of the county fire district’s 400,000 residents.

By comparison, the Ventura city Fire Department spends $81.17 per capita and the Oxnard department spends only $46.82 per capita.

Santa Paula and Fillmore cost even less to protect: their volunteer fire companies each spend less than $25 per capita.

The four city departments have far less property and fewer people to protect, but they also rely far less on state funding--some $20 million of which Gov. Pete Wilson proposes to hack from the county Fire Department’s $45-million budget.

Now, county fire officials are faced with the thorny task of trying to sell the county fire district’s taxpayers on the idea of paying even more--a new fire tax that could average $110 per year for a single-family house and more for commercial properties.

When the city of Thousand Oaks proposed last week to secede from the fire district and set up its own department, more officials began comparing the cost of fire coverage in Ventura County.

While the city departments cost less to operate, they have far less responsibility, said county Assistant Fire Chief Bob Roper.

“Rural and suburban areas will have a higher cost because they’re servicing a greater area,” he said last week.

“But you’ll also find those same county departments have the largest amount of services, and they’re the ones usually augmenting the cities,” Roper said. “Cities do not have hazardous materials teams, they don’t have wild-land fire protection, and a lot of times they have to rely on the county fire departments for mutual aid.”

The city departments also do not have to manage their own weed-abatement programs, as does the Ventura County department, said Oxnard Assistant Chief Ted Christensen.

At one point, Oxnard officials had considered eliminating their department by merging or contracting with the county department to save money, he said.

“But it was never given any serious consideration, because I think you’re going to find that per capita cost is so different that there would have been a service loss and it would have cost more money,” Christensen said last week.

Instead, he said, Oxnard is looking into the costs and benefits of merging its dispatch services with those in the city of Ventura.

For Santa Paula and Fillmore, small communities of less than five square miles apiece, the old tradition of volunteer firefighters has hung on through modern times as a cheap, practical alternative to a more costly full-fledged department.

“Our expenses would be fairly small compared to Ventura County or Oxnard or Ventura,” said Santa Paula Fire Chief Paul Skeels, one of only three salaried employees on the $666,000-a-year department. “I think we’re in pretty good shape, certainly, as a fire department.”

Santa Paula firefighters are summoned by pager and two-way radio to accident and fire calls, which they answer with a complement of only six fire engines.

With only two stations and firefighters who earn only $8 to $12 per hour for emergency calls, the department has nowhere near the overhead costs borne by the county department, he said.

“We have no helicopter units, we have no dedicated hazardous materials team, we don’t run bulldozers, we don’t run jet-fuel tenders and, most obviously, we don’t staff our two stations 24 hours a day with full-time engine companies,” Skeels said.

However, he added: “We’re not anxious to see the county Fire Department cut down in size or scale or effectiveness, because not only do we rely on the ability to call the county Fire Department for an incident, but they call us as well.”

If Wilson’s funding cuts are approved and the Ventura County Fire Department fails to win a bailout of general fund money from the Board of Supervisors, it could suffer closure of up to 18 of its 31 fire stations and layoffs of up to 280 of its 462 employees, officials announced last week.

There is no telling exactly what would happen to fire insurance premiums in Ventura County if the cutbacks are executed, insurance company officials said last week. But the impact may be less than feared, they said.

“If it’s only one out of six or seven stations, it may not have any major effect,” said Robert J. Larkin, who runs a State Farm Insurance agency in Simi Valley. “It may have some, but it’s not going to be a real dramatic change.”

Much depends on how the cutbacks affect the insurance rating that each city or county earns from the Insurance Services Organization, a private East Coast-based consultant that evaluates risk for insurance companies.

The company rates cities’ insurance risk from best to worst on a scale of 1 through 10 and changes the rankings depending on the efficiency of a community’s water supply, the density and staffing of its fire stations and other factors, said June Bruce, a spokesman for ISO in California.

Bruce declined to predict what would happen to the county’s insurance rating if the 18 stations were to close, but she said that even if the ranking were to drop one or two levels, “For homeowners, it’s not likely to affect them at all.”

Santa Barbara County and Los Angeles County’s fire departments are in the same fix as the Ventura County Fire Department.

Although their size and responsibilities differ greatly, they have two things in common: They cost far more to operate than city departments and are facing massive layoffs due to Wilson’s proposed cuts in local aid.

At $112.50 per capita, the Ventura County Fire Department costs less to operate than the massive Los Angeles County Department--which protects 2.89 million people in a 2,234-square-mile area--and the smaller Santa Barbara County Fire Department, which serves 137,000 people spread over 1,400 square miles.

Fire and emergency medical coverage in Los Angeles County costs $124.29 per capita, while in Santa Barbara County it costs $131.39.

All three county departments have proposed taxing property owners in their districts to soften the blow, a move that has met with varying degrees of resentment.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors refused even to let voters consider raising an existing fire tax from an annual average $35.99 for a single-family home to a proposed $196 per year, said Barbara Herrera, supervising administrative assistant for the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

Now, that department may have to lay off 926 of its 2,800 employees, she said.

The Santa Barbara County Fire Department faces losing 30% of its revenue to Wilson’s cuts and has proposed an annual fire tax of about $40.90 per household. That measure has already drawn protests from property owners representing about 15% of the income that could be expected from the tax, and is headed for a probable vote by taxpayers, Santa Barbara officials said.

“We’ve got a stack of over 3,000 to 4,000 letters of protest,” said Battalion Chief Dan Gaither. “They don’t want cuts in essential service, but they don’t want any new tax, either. I’m sure that puts the board in a hard spot. The state hits could have a major impact.”

On Friday, the Ventura County clerk’s office announced that it had counted 8,831 protests on the fire tax so far out of 28,000 letters received--enough to top the 5% of potential revenue from the tax that could place the measure on the ballot in June, 1994, if the Board of Supervisors authorizes an election.

If protests among the remaining uncounted letters and others arriving before the June 29 protest deadline top 50%, the tax would be defeated without a vote, according to county officials.

Fire Department Comparisons Jurisdiction: Ventura County Budget: $45 million Area (sq. miles): 875 People served: 400,000 Per capita cost: $112.50 Total employees: 462 Firefighters: 330 Stations: 31 Field vehicles: 89

*Jurisdiction: Los Angeles County Budget: $359.2 million Area (sq. miles): 2,234 People served: 2.89 million Per capita cost: $124.29 Total employees: 2,800 Firefighters: 2,433 Stations: 127 Field vehicles: 481

*Jurisdiction: Santa Barbara County Budget: $18 million Area (sq. miles): 1,400 People served: 137,000 Per capita cost: $131.39 Total employees: 191 Firefighters: 168 Stations: 16 Field vehicles: 59

*Jurisdiction: Ventura Budget: $7.8 million Area (sq. miles): 20.5 People served: 96,100 Per capita cost: $84.64 Total employees: 87 Firefighters: 72 Stations: 6 Field vehicles: 27

*Jurisdiction: Oxnard Budget: $7 million Area (sq. miles): 26 People served: 149,500 Per capita cost: $46.82 Total employees: 82 Firefighters: 71 Stations: 6 Field vehicles: 31

*Jurisdiction: Santa Paula (volunteer) Budget: $666,130 Area (sq. miles): 4.1 People served: 26,750 Per capita cost: $24.90 Total employees: 3 paid Firefighters: 29 volunteer Stations: 2 Field vehicles: 11

*Jurisdiction: Fillmore (volunteer) Budget: $184,000 Area (sq. miles): 1.4 People served: 12,800 Per capita cost: $14.38 Total employees: 2 paid Firefighters: 20 volunteer Stations: 1 Field vehicles: 4