A Police-Fire Merger? Oxnard Tried It Once Before : Services: The city consolidated the departments in 1986. Two years later, the experiment was cut short.

Nearly lost in the debate over whether Oxnard should merge its police and fire services is the simple fact that the city has been down a similar road before.

And some of those who traveled that road now say the city once again is barreling toward a dead end.

In a cost-cutting experiment in 1986, the Oxnard City Council formed a Public Safety Department and consolidated the administrative duties of the police and fire departments. Former Police Chief Robert Owens was named public safety director, and became responsible for assembling budgets for both departments and ensuring their smooth operation.

But the operation was not always smooth. Owens said police officers complained that he spent too much time visiting fire stations while trying to learn how to run a department that fought fires in addition to crime.

At the same time, firefighters charged that Owens unnecessarily eliminated fire personnel while making the Public Safety Department top-heavy with police administrators.

In the end, prevailing opinion held that two departments were better than one. The Public Safety Department was disbanded in 1988.

“It just wasn’t working,” Owens explained in an interview last week. “A number of things happened that gave us the impression that we should go back to the old way of doing things.”

In the wake of a gunman’s deadly rampage that killed an Oxnard detective and three people at a local unemployment office, officials say the need to beef up the police force is more evident now than ever.

But City Council members are divided on how to accomplish that goal. Today council members are scheduled to consider a proposal to merge the duties of police officers and firefighters.

Under the proposal, cross-trained public safety officers would respond to all police calls, fires and medical emergencies. Most fire stations would be staffed with a single, cross-trained officer who would drive equipment to a fire or emergency and be met by other officers driving patrol cars.

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Supporters of the proposal argue that the merger would save the city up to $250,000 a year, put more officers on the street and improve the efficiency of police and fire operations.

Opponents counter that the merger would probably not save money and that it would end up jeopardizing public safety by throwing ill-prepared officers into situations for which they are not properly trained.

“We all agree that public safety is our No. 1 priority,” Councilman Tom Holden said. “People are entitled to public safety, period. The only question is, how are we going to give it to them?”

It’s a question that a previous council tried to answer.

The administrative merger that took place in 1986 was driven by a budget shortfall that forced city officials to look for ways to save money, said Salinas City Manager David Mora, who was then city manager in Oxnard. “It seemed to me that one department head could handle both departments,” he recalled. “I thought it worked OK, but it never worked out to the satisfaction of some people.”

One of those was Anna Johs, who served on the City Council and eventually led the fight to split public safety from one department back to two.

“I worked closely with both departments and I just could not see a melding between the two,” Johs said. “I think the Fire Department got a raw deal out of it and ultimately the Police Department kind of suffered too.”

Echoing Owens’ conclusions, Johs said firefighters complained that their new bosses, mostly police veterans, lacked firefighting expertise. Police officers also said Owens was stretched too thin and lost touch with them, she said.

Former Councilwoman Dorothy Maron, who voted in 1986 to merge police and fire administration and then reversed her decision two years later, said the current council should learn a lesson from the mistakes of the past.

“We formed it at the time on the theory that it was going to work out well,” Maron said. “It didn’t work. I think to go back down that road now would be a little foolhardy.”

Owens refused to join the debate, saying only that it would be a “formidable task” to merge the two departments.

Similar mergers have met with mixed success in cities nationwide.

In the Bay Area community of Sunnyvale, for example, city officials say the consolidated departments have put more police officers on the street. But in Durham, N. C., city leaders tried cross-training for 14 years before scrapping the plan in 1985 because the joint department lost its firefighting expertise.

Even though the Oxnard proposal is still being developed and would take an estimated five years to implement, it is being met with stiff opposition. Firefighters have been making telephone calls and going door-to-door to whip up opposition. That effort was suspended temporarily Friday to let the shock of slain Detective James E. O’Brien’s death pass.

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The merger issue has become so heated that Oxnard Mayor Manuel Lopez called a press conference last week to announce that he would ask his fellow council members Tuesday to kill the proposal.

But a majority of council members say that they aren’t ready to follow Lopez’s lead and that the proposal needs further study to determine whether it has merit.

“We are interested in public safety, so we need to explore all of the options available to us to improve services to the community,” Councilman Andres Herrera said. “The easiest thing to do is to suggest that something won’t work. It absolves us of any responsibility for making it work.”