Hillside Residents Funding Firetruck, Fueling Debate

This was not your run-of-the mill community bake sale--not with Vanna White standing there alongside the long table full of donated goodies.

Indeed, next to the trays of homemade brownies and a “Wheel of Fortune” memorabilia bag signed by the world’s most famous letter turner was a signed black Stratocaster electric guitar from John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival. And a signed “Save the Tiger” movie script from Jack Lemmon, who won an Oscar for his role in the 1973 flick.

Neighborhood residents Jay Leno, John Tesh, Wilt Chamberlain and Natalie Cole also chipped in with personal items to be sold at a silent auction.

The locals staging the star-studded event one recent Sunday had good reason to bring out the big guns: They want to buy a fire engine. A big, red, shiny, gadget-laden new one, with a sticker price that starts at about $300,000.

By crusading to buy the fire engine and donate it to the local fire station, the hillside homeowners have placed themselves in the emerging and at times rancorous debate over the increasing private takeover of functions that local government cannot, does not or will not provide.

The Beverly Glen-area neighbors say they desperately need a new firetruck to protect their brush-fire-prone hillside community, and that, until recently, the Los Angeles Fire Department was telling them that they might not get any replacement for the 18-year-old engine now at Station 99.

So they want to buy themselves a new one?

White and her affluent neighbors certainly think it is “a great idea,” she said. So does Los Angeles Fire Capt. Craig Evans, a station leader who’s been championing the cause with help from homeowner associations in and around Bel-Air and Benedict and Deep canyons.

Such privatization has been occurring in California ever since 1978’s tax-slashing Proposition 13 resulted in severe cutbacks in government services. First it was public schools; parents would fund equipment, repairs, even arts and music programs. Then it was mostly cosmetic upgrades for libraries, police and fire stations. In recent years, merchants have sprung for trash pickup and tree plantings in business improvement districts.

Residents in Pacific Palisades bought their firefighters at Station 69 a Jaws of Life device. Residents near Fire Station 37, on Sunset Boulevard near Kenter Avenue, paid for an expensive system that sucks hazardous firetruck emissions out of the station’s living quarters.

Communities from Brentwood and West Los Angeles to Van Nuys and North Hollywood have “adopted” their fire stations and provided thousands of dollars for paint, supplies and landscaping.

In Sherman Oaks, the local homeowners association spent $40,000 to plant trees along Ventura Boulevard after the city said it couldn’t afford to. Richard Close, the association president, said members are considering hiring off-duty Los Angeles police officers to augment LAPD patrols in the area. In West Adams, residents are creating their own park from a vacant lot near USC.

“In all these cases, we are seeing citizens saying they want to make their community better,” said City Councilman Mike Feuer, who represents the Bel-Air area. “These things are happening in every city in the country.”

Spending Enough on Public Safety

But there are some who don’t think it is a good idea.

“That’s absurd,” said George Burke, a spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based International Assn. of Firefighters, who said that he has never heard of such a thing. “It is a very alarming proposal and could grow into a very alarming trend.

“The next trend would be that if you want more firefighters in your area you would have to pay for them,” he said. “Every citizen in the city of L.A. deserves the same level of services; that’s why they pay taxes.”

A fundamental premise of local government is that it should make sure it spends enough on public safety so that no one has to pay extra for more, says Burke and other critics. Moreover, local governments are supposed to take in the varying levels of taxes paid by the rich and poor and even things out--doling out municipal services and resources equitably and based on need, not based on the ability to pay, they say.

They cite the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1971 ruling that held that public schools in poor areas must receive the same level of funding as wealthy areas to protect against disparities in education.

“It is a difficult issue,” said professor Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law expert at USC who chairs a panel overseeing the redrawing of the City Charter.

“On one hand, certainly it is a good thing for people to augment their government services,” Chemerinsky said. “But when Bel-Air has a nicer firetruck than any of the other areas of the city because they are willing to pay for it, to me that is troubling. It leads to a system where there is a disparity in the quality of services, where the wealthy get something better.”

Others say that condemning the homeowners’ plans to buy the truck--or prohibiting such efforts--would only backfire and cause them to withdraw their political and financial support for municipal services.

William Ouchi, a management guru and former chief of staff for Mayor Richard Riordan, remembers grilling hamburgers at cookouts a decade ago to raise money for the Santa Monica public school that his children were attending. Then the superintendent decreed that to “make things fair,” any money raised by parents would go into a giant pot for the entire school district.

That was the day that Ouchi and some of his neighbors stopped raising money for the schools, he said. “We said, ‘The heck with you. You go flip your own burgers,’ ” recalls Ouchi, who is now a UCLA professor and vice dean for executive education.

For now, no one is asking the hillside homeowners to drop their cause, which began several months ago when Evans suggested that they adopt the station and help the cash-strapped Fire Department.

Perched atop Mulholland Drive, Station 99 services communities on both sides of the Santa Monica Mountain ridge, all the way down to Sunset Boulevard to the south and Ventura Boulevard to the north. The tortuously winding streets it protects are among the most fire-prone in all of Southern California.

Yet its still-shiny engine is 19 years old and on its last legs. It has an open-air cab that makes it uncomfortable for the firefighters and doesn’t have the advanced brush-fighting capabilities that new trucks do, Evans said. And it lacks space for all the paramedic equipment that he said is needed to protect residents suffering from heart attacks and other non-fire-related injuries that also fall under the station’s list of responsibilities.

Evans recalls that he told dismayed homeowners the new trucks the department is buying will go to stations in the busiest urban areas, and that they would most likely get a truck that is about 9 years old and lacks some of the newest equipment.

Fire officials insist that the current truck at Station 99 is fully capable of doing the job and that any replacement truck will be even better.

But the homeowners decided that they need a new one.

“We felt it was important . . . to have the paramedics equipped properly, and to have a new truck in that area for brush fires,” said Harold Tennen, vice president of the Glenridge Homeowner Assn. and the chairman of the committee set up to buy the truck. “We are isolated. It is critical for us to get better equipment.”

Brush Fires an Ongoing Threat

The physical and emotional scars of wildfires are everywhere.

The canyon served by Station 99 is sandwiched between two others where Southern California suffered two of its worst conflagrations--the Bel-Air/Brentwood fire of 1961, which forced the evacuation of 3,500 residents, burned 16,000 acres and destroyed 484 homes, and the Mandeville Canyon blaze of 1978.

Since then, brush fires have been a continual threat. In recent weeks, at least two started just off Mulholland Drive. Both were put down quickly by the firefighters of Station 99.

So the residents put out fliers, made phone calls and knocked on doors, attended meetings, and staged the celebrity bake sale and silent auction.

So far, they have raised about $60,000.

Everyone from Fire Chief William Bamattre on down has signed off on the proposal.

Nevertheless, within the last few weeks some city officials have begun to hedge their support.

Fire Department spokesman Capt. Steve Ruda said Bamattre “wouldn’t ever turn down” a fire engine donated by the community, “but there are other resources we need more desperately than a shiny new truck.”

Evans said he has heard of no formal opposition to the fund-raising effort. And although he said he too has diplomatically suggested to the homeowners that they raise money to buy something else, Evans said several dozen homeowners met at the fire station two weeks ago, discussed the department’s concerns and agreed to redouble their efforts to buy the firetruck.

“There are a lot of strong personalities in this group who say, ‘We are not taking no for an answer,’ ” Evans said.