San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
BORREGO SPRINGS LIKELY LAST TAKEOVER FOR S.D. COUNTY FIRE
County agency, staffed by Cal Fire, formed after deadly wildfires to support rural districts, improve services
There’s been a lot of new stuff showing up at the Borrego Springs fire station this summer: A brand-new $300,000 ambulance. A 2-year-old fire engine. Raises for its 14 firefighters. Fresh blue uniforms.
The patches on the uniforms give a hint as to what’s changed at the single-station fire department located 85 miles east of San Diego. Borrego Springs is no longer an independent fire protection district. As of July 1, it is part of San Diego County Fire with staffing provided by Cal Fire.
Fifteen years after county officials launched an effort to improve and coordinate fire service in rural areas, the county department has absorbed its 20th fire agency — the last one eyed by the county.
Now, fire protection and emergency medical services for the community of Borrego Springs are the responsibility of the San Diego County Fire Department. As part of the switch, all 14 firefighters who formerly worked for the Borrego Springs Fire Protection District are now employed by Cal Fire.
The district has around 4,000 permanent residents, attracts more than 1 million visitors to nearby desert recreation areas and covers about 310 square miles in northeastern San Diego County.
Fire Chief Tony Mecham said Borrego Springs may well be the last department to join County Fire, which was set up in 2008 to support underfunded districts and centralize command of the region’s firefighting resources.
“I would say for now I think the expansion of County Fire has probably gone as far as I see it going,” said Mecham, who also heads Cal Fire San Diego.
The county fire agency was formed in the aftermath of devastating wildfires in 2003 and 2007. The massive fires — which collectively killed more than two dozen people and destroyed nearly 4,200 homes — exposed weaknesses in the region’s firefighting abilities, especially in the backcountry, where fire protection was provided by a patchwork of departments largely staffed by volunteers.
Communications between firefighting agencies also was spotty.
As a result, the county formed the San Diego County Fire Authority with a goal of unifying “the administrative support, communications and training of 15 rural fire agencies covering 1.5 million acres of unincorporated area” that previously had limited on-call protection, according to a 2020 strategic plan for the department. In late 2020, it was renamed the County Fire Department.
Over the years, the organization grew — initially targeting rural fire companies that mainly used volunteer firefighters and then fire departments funded through taxes paid by property owners in county service areas. In its final phase, the department absorbed fire protection districts such as San Diego Rural, Pine Valley, Julian and now, Borrego Springs.
At peak staffing, San Diego County Fire employs 425 seasonal firefighters and 576 permanent full-time firefighters. Nearly 100 county support staff, including those in the Emergency Services Administration, also are part of the department, which operates on a $110.5 million annual budget, said Cal Fire spokesperson Michael Cornette.
The growth of the County Fire Department at times has been rocky, most notably in 2019 when the Juliancuyamaca Fire Protection District was absorbed into the county system. That change came after legal fights and a very public squabble that at one point had volunteer firefighters opposed to the takeover locking themselves into the fire station.
Eventually, the fire protection district — the last volunteer fire department in the region — was dissolved.
The remaining independent fire districts that operate in unincorporated areas of the county are managed by their own elected boards, the chief said. “I think there’s this perception that we are out to take people over and that’s just not true... We don’t go raid other people’s jurisdictions,” he said.
Other fire departments are “always invited to join, but we are not seeking anybody else to join,” Mecham said. “If any of them at any point in the future want to sit down and talk to us and it makes sense for both sides, we will proceed. But there aren’t really any conversations out there that are currently occurring.”
The decision to dissolve the Borrego Springs Fire Protection District came after the district’s voters in November 2018 rejected Measure PP, a proposed special parcel tax increase. It would have provided more revenue to the district, which needed funds to cover increasing pension liabilities and to replace aging equipment.
Bruce Kelley, who headed a group of Borrego Springs residents who studied the issue, said the old setup left the department unable to provide competitive benefits to staff or to update equipment. To cover the district’s needs, the supplemental tax would have had to increase more than six-fold, he said.
Meetings were held with residents in Borrego Springs before the district board voted last year on transitioning to County Fire and Cal Fire control. Three board members were in favor; two were opposed.
Elizabeth Reisman and her father, fellow board member Paul Reisman, voted against the measure. Reisman said she was mainly opposed to losing local control of the department.
“I didn’t feel like the five of us should have said, ‘OK, we are going to let go of our control and send it up to Sacramento without a community vote,’” she said. “I think it should have been a community vote. It is something that is not reversible and it affects the entire community.” Reisman said Borrego Springs is small and has unique needs, which she fears will be overlooked in a large organization. “I hope it works out,” she said. “We are stuck with them now.”
After becoming part of County Fire, Borrego Springs has increased staffing at its fire station, going from four people a day to five. It used to have two people assigned to the fire engine and two on its paramedic ambulance — it now has three on the engine.
Mecham hopes to replace the aging fire station — formerly a drive-thru lumber yard which he described as being in “horrendous condition” — in the next five years. As a temporary fix, the county plans to bring a double-wide mobile home to the site, which is just north of Christmas Circle in the center of town, to give crews better living quarters.
While dissolving the fire protection district brought about a jurisdictional change and better gear, Mecham said from an operations standpoint nothing much has changed. Fire engines in nearby Ocotillo Wells, Ranchita and Shelter Valley, staffed with Cal Fire crews, have long responded to medical and fire calls alongside Borrego Springs crews.
Borrego Springs residents became more familiar with Cal Fire personnel during the pandemic after they ran vaccination clinics in the community. Mecham said he believes those interactions likely left some community members seeing “the benefits of being part of a larger organization that frankly has more resources.”