180,000 Notices Mailed in Brush Clearance Snafu

Diane Gardemann has a freshly cut green lawn, an azure blue swimming pool, a backyard of well-watered ivy and a gardener to take care of it all.

She has lived on her well-maintained property since 1961, and never received a warning about brush clearance, much less a bill to pay for it.

So when she received a tersely worded notice in the mail Saturday from the Los Angeles Fire Department ordering her to pay a $13 brush clearance fee or risk a stiff penalty, she was surprised and outraged.

“I’m furious,” Gardemann said Monday. “Nobody knew anything about this. It was not voted on as a tax, and suddenly we get this thing in the mail.”

Many of the 180,000 Los Angeles homeowners who got the same notice also felt perplexed. Their irate phone calls forced the City Council to temporarily rescind the order and the Fire Department rushed to send out letters of apology.

The original notice threatened to slap homeowners with a $204 fine if they failed to comply with any future orders to clear brush from her property.

What’s more, the document arrived Saturday but stated that the due date for paying the fee was two days earlier, April 1.

An inspector with the department’s brush clearance unit said his four-person office has received thousands of calls in the last week.

“It’s been 5:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. nonstop, since Monday of last week,” said Capt. Paul Quagliata, commander of the city brush clearance unit. “I’ve requested that additional lines be installed.”

The City Council voted in January to charge more than 180,000 residents citywide in fire-prone areas a $13 fee to help pay for the brush clearance program.

In the past, only homeowners in the mountain fire districts--the most at-risk hillside areas--received brush clearance notices, said Brian Humphrey, spokesman for the Fire Department.

But inspectors check the yards and homes in the low-lying fire buffer zones every year as well, Quagliata said.

This year, as part of the new fee program, the department sent letters to homeowners in the buffer zones.

Fire department officials regret that the notice “looks like a summons or a citation,” Humphrey said.

“Fire Chief William Bamattre is already sending letters of explanation, apologizing to these 180,000 Angelinos,” Humphrey said.