East Bay suburbs lack resources to fight fires
Thick morning heat scorched the east Contra Costa County suburb of Brentwood. At Fire Station 52, the calls were already coming in.
There was one fire that day: A transformer explosion in nearby Oakley downed two power lines and set a fence ablaze. But the radio also buzzed with multiple medical emergencies, including a stroke and sudden death, which required firefighters to go out again and again. This was the relative calm in midJune, before another wildfire season threatens to engulf vast
swaths of California in flames this summer and autumn.
Battalion Chief Jeff Burris, of Station 52, gritted his teeth.
“It’s nerveracking,” he said. “You try not to think about it.”
In many ways, east Contra Costa County shows the disconnect between public attitudes, development patterns and increasingly bleak environmental realities across California. The residents’ predicament stems from Proposition 13, a rigid cap on property taxes that state voters passed in 1978. At that time, east county was a sparsely populated string of farm towns and orchards, served by oncall or volunteer firefighters. The cost of battling blazes was low; the law assumed it would stay that way.
“When Prop. 13 went into play, there were 3,000 residents out here,” Oakley resident and fire district board President Brian Oftedal said. “And the volunteers would be mowing their lawns with little Plectron radios at their hips, and then they’d jump in their pickup trucks” to drive to an emergency.
Yet that was before the suburban boom and climate change converged to turn fire season into a ruthless new normal. East Contra Costa County Fire Protection District currently has three fire stations and crews — half of what it needs to serve a 249squaremile area with 128,000 people, according to multiple studies commissioned by the district.
In August, the district’s firefighters spent more than a week battling lightning complex fires that gnawed through Marsh Creek and Morgan Territory, where mansions line twolane roads on the north side of Mount Diablo. This summer could be worse, given the sweltering heat, the drought and a dearth of firefighting resources amid changing times.
East county’s population and emergency call volume swelled over the past decade, from 6,260 calls in 2011 to 7,639 in 2020. Average response times increased by 32% in those nine years, from 6:27 in 2011 to 8:29 in 2020.
While district spending and staffing have appeared to keep pace, east Contra Costa receives half the property tax share granted to neighboring fire agencies. The low allocation was based on population demands in the 1970s and locked in by Prop. 13, which has so far withstood court challenges and reform efforts.
“We have this pie that’s allocated based on the way the world was back in the 1970s,” Michael Coleman, an expert on local government finance, said of Prop. 13.
He noted that some jurisdictions are facing the reverse plight of east Contra Costa: Sacramento and Los Angeles counties have large urban fire districts in their unincorporated areas, so Prop. 13 cemented their property tax allocations at a relatively high rate at the expense of other services.
That’s not the case in east Contra Costa, where Oftedal is among many local officials pressing for an overhaul. They want to merge operations with the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District — the bigger agency in the central county — and extract a third of the $81 million annual revenue generated by Measure X, the halfcent sales tax that passed last year.
The idea has skeptics, from the Antioch mayor, who would like to see the Measure X tax spent on other things, to residents who don’t want to give up local control from their elected fire board. Advocates call it a sensible compromise for a district where taxpayers complain about the inadequate fire response but have resisted three attempts to fix it.
Voters rejected ballot measures to raise taxes or fees in 2012, 2015 and 2016. Now the district routinely pulls engines and crews from greater Contra Costa to supplement its modest labor force and equipment.
On June 14, for example, Antioch Station 88 sent an engine to respond to a vehicle accident in Oakley at 3:49 p.m. Three hours later, the city dispatched two more engines to a medical emergency on Lone Tree Way in Brentwood. Although the jurisdictions have automatic and mutual aid agreements, east Contra Costa needs assistance at about four times the rate that it sends out help, says east Contra Costa district fire Chief Brian Helmick.
He took an extraordinary step last year, enacting a policy to send three engines to structure fires in his jurisdiction. Other parts of the county get four engines and a truck.
“I had to live within our means,” Helmick told The Chronicle.
He and Burris noted that the outside help had effectively become a oneway subsidy.
“Like the neighbor who is always borrowing your lawn mower, who never gives it back,” Burris said.
In 2002, the east county area — Brentwood, Oakley, Discovery Bay, Byron and Bethel Island — had about 62,000 people and eight fire stations. Housing developments were starting to blossom along the twolane highways that crisscross the Delta.
Over 19 years, the population doubled and the number of stations shrank. Some of them were relics of the volunteer era, which didn’t have the capacity to hold modern engines. Station 54 in Brentwood was “basically a cardroom,” Burris said. Built in 1957, it closed in 2012 and briefly reopened the following year before shuttering for good. Station 57, in Byron, shut down in 2010 because the call volume was too low, he added.
By 2017, this cluster of suburbs and towns was down to three stations, a choice Helmick made to create a leaner, more professional organization. Though there were few firehouses, they each had dormitories and a 24seven staff. But each day is a scramble, Burris said.
“People move out to Brentwood and they get a 3,500squarefoot home on a nice lot” for half what it costs anywhere else in the Bay Area, said Bryan Scott, an emptynester who moved to the suburb in 2009. The tradeoff, he noted, is “shoddy fire service.”
Scott cochairs a grassroots group called East County Voters for Equal Protection, which is pressing for more robust fire and emergency services throughout the area. The group endorses the plan to merge with Contra Costa County Fire, saying it would allow the combined district to cut back on administrative and legal costs, buy equipment in bulk, and spread resources throughout the region.
Such streamlining would save about $7 million annually, not enough to staff the three new stations the region needs, according to the studies. So, the county’s nine executive fire chiefs are asking for $27 million in annual Measure X revenue, plus a onetime grant of $1.5 million, and would use some of that money to fill the hole. The rest, they say would be split among the nine fire agencies in Contra Costa County.
Both plans require approval from multiple governing bodies. Neither plan is guaranteed.
Still, the firefighters at Brentwood Station 52 are resolute. After years of leaning on neighbors and working mandatory overtime, they finally see a viable solution, station Capt. Robert Ruddick noted.
“I’ve just never seen it this close to being fixed,” he said.
Others, however, are dubious. Antioch Mayor Lamar Thorpe hasn’t taken a formal position on the plan, yet he questioned the amount of money the firefighters are seeking. Thorpe pointed out that the campaign literature for Measure X also emphasized health services, early childhood education and investment in “vulnerable populations,” such as the unhoused. County officials have discussed the possibility of starting a regional mental health crisis response program, and this sales tax would provide the funding to do it, Thorpe said.
“It just seems that fire service (in east county) is not the reason we voted for Measure X,” Thorpe said, adding that east county residents “have their own problems paying taxes for their own services.”
Even within east county, people have raised concerns about the proposed consolidation. Some critics are wary of giving up their local elected board and ceding all decisionmaking power to the county Board of Supervisors. Speaking at a recent meeting of the fire district board’s finance committee, Discovery Bay resident Bob Mankin reminded the board directors that local governance “was a big selling point” when east county formed its own fire district in 2002.
Ruddick, the captain at Station 52, is hopeful that firefighters can rally support for their consolidation plan, because the status quo clearly isn’t working.
Around noon Thursday, Ruddick’s battalion chief gave him some bad news. His 48hour shift — which would have been done that day — was being extended for another 48 hours. The district was shortstaffed, with three people out nursing longterm injuries. Another pitfall of working in a slim operation, Ruddick said. He flinched.
“The overtime is nice,” he said. “But I can’t say I want it.”