Couple’s Fire Hazard Catch-22

They always figured that their fight to preserve open space in Franklin Canyon above Beverly Hills would pay off for future generations.

What Betty and Gerald Decter didn’t count on was that it would cost them $769 every year for the rest of their lives.

That’s the penalty for having 150 acres of untamed Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area land next to their backyard, they have discovered.

The National Park Service refuses to clear brush from a hillside behind the Decters’ home. As a result, the cost of fire insurance for their house has more than doubled, to $1,515 a year.

Like most others living in mountain fire zones around Los Angeles, the Decters buy their fire insurance through the California Fair Plan, a state-regulated insurance pool that offers coverage in high-risk areas.

But tough new procedures by insurance administrators eager to limit the plan’s losses in brush fires are beginning to affect those living next to state and federal lands in the mountains around Los Angeles.

Depending on how dangerous a wildfire threat is deemed to be, the Fair Plan can require property owners to remove brush as far as 400 feet from structures.

Complying with the clearance requirement can be impossible, however, for those whose homes abut parkland and nature preserves. Parks officials usually refuse to remove the brush--and refuse to permit neighbors to do it themselves.

Those who do not comply with the clearance requirement are assessed a penalty in the form of a surcharge on their insurance bills. It can be as high as $20.12 per $1,000 of coverage, in the most severe cases.

The Decters’ house on North Beverly Drive in Los Angeles is required by its insurers to have a 200-foot clearance. Because their house is about 30 feet from the boundary of the national recreation area, they need a 170-foot brush-free zone on federal land.

But the National Park Service won’t remove the brush on its property, which it has staked out with boundary markers.

So the Decters are stuck with a $769 surcharge on top of their regular $746 fire insurance premium.

“We’re in a Kafkaesque nightmare,” said Gerald Decter, a retired retail manufacturer who has lived in the home since 1961. “We can’t go on land that doesn’t belong to us. We’re being charged even though there’s no way we can fix it.”

Even more worrisome is the assertion of fire experts that the uncleared brush is dangerous, said wife Betty Decter, an artist and writer.

“There are probably 100 other homes like ours at risk up here,” she said.

Their dilemma has not gone unnoticed by the Los Angeles Fire Department, which has jurisdiction over the Franklin Canyon area and which also requires a 200-foot clearance. The Fire Department has also wrestled with parkland brush issues, although this year officials say they have reached agreement for the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to clear 200-foot buffer zones on its land close to structures.

The Fire Department last week began mailing thousands of new, colorful brochures about brush clearance guidelines to residents of hillside areas and will begin this year’s round of inspections of fire-prone properties on May 1. To the relief of homeowners, the city has scrapped a controversial plan that surfaced last year to assess a $13 fee for an inspection.

Despite the Decters’ meager 30-foot clearance, city fire inspectors have labeled their property in compliance because the homeowners have no control over the National Park Service land.

Fair Plan administrators--who launched a new brush inspection program of their own last year--have thus far not been as charitable.

In the past, the plan called for brush inspections only when a new property was signed up for coverage. But insurance companies that are required to participate in the plan pressed for additional inspections after suffering $143.5 million in losses in a series of 1993 firestorms.

Plan administrators say they do not know how many of the 31,000 properties they insure are next to parkland. They say it will take about five years to reinspect all of the properties. The Decters’ home was among the first to be checked last year.

Robert Reinertson, vice president in charge of underwriting for the Fair Plan, said state parks officials have turned out to be more flexible over brush removal than their federal counterparts.

“We understand their environmental concerns, but we don’t think their positions should be locked so they won’t consider a clearance program,” Reinertson said.

Federal parks officials say their hands are tied over neighbors’ requests for brush removal.

“By law, the National Park Service is obligated to conserve both natural and cultural resources,” Arthur Eck, superintendent of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, explained in a letter to Decter. “The authority to depart from these requirements is a privilege reserved by Congress.”

His agency is working with local fire departments to develop plans for “strategic prescribed burns” to control brush on some public lands. But brush clearance on the hill behind the Decters’ house might lead to a risk of mudslides, Eck said.

Some of the Decters’ neighbors have taken it upon themselves to remove brush quietly from the federal land without permission. Parks officials praise the couple for not doing the same.

“I’m really thankful they haven’t. It’s good of the Decters not to go in and clear it. The Park Service does not allow neighbors to come in and cut brush,” said Melanie Beck, a National Park Service planner who deals with development issues.

Other agencies also prohibit neighboring property owners from removing brush from parkland.

“The brutal answer is no, they can’t do it. That property doesn’t belong to them,” said Don Garwood, a wild-land fire expert with the Angeles National Forest.

But housing construction that is increasingly crowding against national forest boundaries on the north side of the Los Angeles Basin is causing officials to review their strategy for dealing with what they call the “urban interface,” Garwood said. Revisions to their land management plan could come in 2003, he said.

State parks administrators likewise ban brush removal by neighbors. They are also developing new guidelines for coping with urbanization.

“We know the California Fair Plan has concerns,” said Russ Dingman, of the California Department of Parks and Recreation. “We’ve also had homeowners approach us with concerns.”

Dingman said there are parts of Topanga State Park where parks employees clear brush to protect adjoining homes. And his agency is developing a brush clearance plan for an area near Pacific Palisades homes, he said.

But some property owners are making the problem worse by building new houses “right up to the state park boundary line,” he said.

Back in Franklin Canyon, Gerald Decter pointed out that his low-slung, ranch-style house was built long before the park was established.

In fact, a successful campaign to prevent overdevelopment of the canyon was led by the Decters from the house in the early 1970s, according to a history of the canyon compiled by Allan E. Edwards. That effort ended with the establishment of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in 1981.

“The irony is, after spending all of this time working on behalf of a park, we get nailed with this surcharge,” Decter said. “And it’s not going to be a one-time thing. It’s going to be every year, forever.”