Missing Apparatus Found as CA County Takes Over Station Firefighters

The county has taken control of the Julian-Cuyamaca Fire Protection District fire station on state Route 79 and located the missing fire engine.

San Diego County Fire Authority employees on Sunday, at the direction of the county counsel, broke into the station and changed the locks on Station 56. They also found E57, the truck that had been missing for two months, inside the bay, Fire Authority Chief Tony Mecham said Tuesday.

“The missing fire engine has mysteriously reappeared,” he said.

On Friday, a judge issued a temporary restraining order that forced the volunteers out of the station. Volunteers had been holed up in the facility since April 8, the day a local agency voted to dissolve the county’s last volunteer fire department and hand it over to the San Diego County Fire Authority. However, an appeal of the restraining order was filed almost immediately Friday afternoon, placing a stay on the order and eviction.

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Then late on Friday, the county learned that the Julian volunteers had apparently abandoned the station that day, and on Saturday county firefighters noticed that it was still locked up tight.

On Sunday, Mecham said, several Fire Authority employees, in the company of a sheriff’s deputy, broke into the station, had the locks changed, and inspected the contents. Inside the station’s bay was Engine E57, which the volunteers had refused to produce during court-ordered inspections conducted over the past month.

“When they were physically occupying the building, we could hold that group accountable for the assets (inside) which by law transferred to the county,” Mecham said. “We had a facility from our perspective that had been abandoned, and we had no way to hold anybody accountable for securing the building.”

Mecham said there are only four keys to the new locks which have been assigned to four county employees who are under instructions to keep a log whenever they are used.

“We have not removed anything from the building,” Mecham said. “We have not taken any apparatus. We have taken no action other than to insure the property and the facility has been secured.”

Cory Briggs, an attorney hired by the directors of the volunteer district, did not respond to a request for comment.

It could take weeks before an appellate court rules on the restraining order. Meanwhile, a significant court hearing is still scheduled for this Friday at 11 a.m. before San Diego Superior Court Judge Randa Trapp.

There are several lawsuits in the court system concerning the Julian volunteer fire district situation. Friday’s hearing features the county asking the judge to throw out and then reverse an earlier ruling she made in a 2018 case. That ruling, made April 5, said the board of directors of the volunteer district that were in control in early 2018 violated the state’s open meeting law by secretly deciding they would vote to seek dissolution of the department due to financial and staffing concerns.

That ruling now forms the basis of an argument being made by the district’s new directors in a separate lawsuit that says the vote of the town and the vote of the Local Agency Formation Commission to replace the volunteers with professional firefighters should be voided because of the earlier open meeting law violation.

The county claims Judge Trapp was duped by two attorneys in March and early April who it says conspired to have the judge enter a ruling in the 2018 unaware of certain facts, including that the town had voted to dissolve the volunteer district.

The judge has already said she made the ruling without knowing all of the pertinent information and has allowed the county to intervene, retroactively, in the case.

Meanwhile, the county’s Fire Authority continues to provide all fire and medical response services in the 87-square-mile Julian-Cuyamaca Fire Protection District from two Cal Fire stations in the area.

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