Homeowners Fuming Over Fire Notice

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’s lived on her well-maintained property since 1961, and never once had she 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 inspection 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 their property.

What’s more, the document arrived Saturday but stated that the due date for paying the fee was two days earlier, April 1. The letters also said that payments after the delinquent date of May 1 would be subject to a 200% penalty.

“If there is such a fee, it should be included in our property tax,” said Gardemann. “No one ever voted on this. They are trying to sneak this in. This is why Valley people want to secede.”

The Los Angeles 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 city’s brush clearance inspection program. That fee was expected to generate more than $3 million.

An inspector with the Fire 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’s brush clearance unit. “I’ve requested that additional lines be installed. Some people have been calling two to three days and can’t get through. The lines are lit up constantly. It’s literally a crapshoot.”

The City Council decided last week to temporarily halt collection of the fee after council members received their own deluge of phone calls from confused residents.

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

“If folks live in a nice, landscaped development area, they don’t even know they got the inspection--it’s like the gas meter,” Quagliata said. “We’ve been in and out and they don’t even know it, if they don’t have any violations.”

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

Many of those residents, such as Gardemann, did not even know they lived in a fire buffer zone. These areas extend down into the flat basin of the Valley, sometimes miles from hills and dry brush that act as kindling for wildfires.

Quagliata acknowledged that the Fire Department should reconsider which areas should be included in the fire buffer zones.

“I agree we should and can reevaluate some of the areas in the buffer zone,” he said. “Maybe they needed to be 15 years ago, but now it is a developed landscape situation.”

He said redrawing the lines of the fire zone is an arduous task that will require a physical survey and would take about a year. There was no way to complete such a survey before the new fee went into effect, he said.

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 Angelenos,” Humphrey said.

They begin with an apology for the “tone and lack of compliance implied in the Brush Clearance Notice mailed last week.” The department began to send them out Monday, Humphrey said.

The fine is likely to be reimposed at a later date that will be determined by the City Council, Humphrey said.

As city and fire officials did damage control Monday, some residents stewed in their homes and tried to figure out what to do next.

“Tomorrow I’m going to start investigating,” said Lisa Smith of Woodland Hills, who was home with her sick baby. “We’re in the flats here. There are no hills. We do not live in a fire-burning town area here. Let the people in the million-dollar homes in the hills pay the huge insurance bills.”

Her cousin, Deirdre Bence, who lives on Burbank Boulevard, even farther from the hills, also received the notice.

“We like to keep our garden lush,” she said, watering the ankle-high grass of her lawn. “There is no danger here whatsoever. This is just one more reason for us in the San Fernando Valley to secede. This city has just gotten too large.”