Oxnard Rejects Fire-Police Merger : Safety: Council scraps the staff’s proposal. Firefighters say they will work with the city on other ways to trim costs.

Pressured by a boisterous crowd and an unprecedented outpouring of calls and letters, the Oxnard City Council has scrapped a money-saving plan to merge the city’s police and fire departments.

In exchange, firefighters promised to work with city leaders to find alternative ways to trim the department’s budget if the city is again forced to cut spending.

With a unanimous vote, the council rejected a staff proposal late Tuesday that would have joined the two agencies in a Department of Public Safety and would have required firefighters to take low-priority burglary reports during their spare time.

First proposed in June as part of a plan to reduce city bureaucracy to cope with budget cuts, the merger was viewed by city officials as a way to combine the two departments that concern public safety. City staff had predicted savings of $185,000 by combining administration and another $500,000 by having firefighters perform some police duties.

“We are not interested in firefighters carrying guns or police officers carrying hoses and ladders, but in doing everything we can to improve public safety,” City Manager Thomas Frutchey said.

But the proposal foundered in recent weeks after the Oxnard Firefighters Assn. rallied public opinion against the merger. By Tuesday, the city had received more than 2,000 postcards and letters opposing the plan and nearly 3,000 phone calls, which at times tied up phone lines into City Hall, City Clerk Daniel Martinez said.

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The volume of calls and letters dwarfed the public response to other recent controversies, including a proposal to build a card club and another to restrict pornography, he said.

While the city had already backed off from the initial proposal to cross-train the city’s police officers and firefighters so each could do the others’ job, a noisy, overflow crowd of 300 at Tuesday’s council meeting adamantly opposed any consolidation of the two departments.

By the end of the stormy meeting, council members who had earlier voiced support for some type of merger agreed to keep the departments independent and find other ways to save money.

“I don’t believe the savings we have been given are sufficient (to merge the departments) at this time,” said Councilman Michael Plisky, who had drawn heat for criticizing the firefighters’ campaign.

“If this is to work, it can’t be forced on the city by staff or City Council. It must be embraced by the community,” Plisky said.

Fire officials disputed the city’s estimate of the savings that would be achieved, saying that the Fire Department had already realized what little savings were possible by leaving vacant an assistant fire chief position.

“Firefighters have (already) taken the budget cuts and program cuts,” Oxnard Fire Capt. Michael O’Malia said.

Instead of performing low-priority police functions, O’Malia said firefighters want to do other jobs they are specially trained for--handling hazardous materials, urban search and rescue, disaster preparedness and rescues from confined spaces. To the extent firefighters have free time, he said, they should use it for fire-related education programs.

Oxnard Fire Capt. Robin Miller, after noting that Oxnard had created a combined Public Safety Department in 1986 only to abandon it three years later, pledged the department’s support in the city’s effort to cut spending.

“From the chief on down, we are willing to make the commitment to save you money,” Miller said.

Mayor Manuel Lopez, the council’s lone critic of the merger prior to Tuesday’s tumultuous showdown, suggested that the city could charge a fee for emergency medical responses as a way to keep costs in line.

Lopez said fire departments often lose out in mergers when the combined departments are headed by police administrators, and said a merger is unnecessary to save money. “Anything we can do through consolidation, we can do with separate departments,” Lopez said.

After listening to four hours of comments from a somewhat unruly audience, other council members agreed.

“The City Council has been preoccupied with efficiency and cost saving, and may have lost our perspective on the human values,” Plisky said.