CA Fire District Close to Dissolution Vote

Oct. 17, 2018
Residents in the Julian-Cuyamaca Fire Protection District have turned in just enough signatures to force a ballot vote on the dissolution of the district.

Oct. 16 -- Whether the Julian Cuyamaca Fire Protection District will dissolve and be taken over by the county comes down to a couple dozen signatures.

On Tuesday morning, 615 signatures of registered voters who live in the district were submitted during a rare “protest hearing” at a meeting of the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO).

The residents are trying to overturn a decision last month by LAFCO to transfer control of the county’s last volunteer fire department to the regional Fire Authority.

LAFCO is responsible for overseeing changes to local governmental boundaries, including the formation, consolidation, merger and dissolution of special districts.

If all the signatures are valid, they represent 26 percent of the registered voters in the 52,000-acre district and as such would force an election to decide the ultimate fate of the volunteer department.

But should 24 or more of the signatures be invalidated by the Registrar of Voters in the coming weeks, then the percentage will fall below the 25 percent threshold and the dissolution will become official.

“There’s 26 percent protests. If that number holds, and there’s a whole validation process that needs to occur, there will be an election,” said LAFCO Executive Officer Keene Simonds.

Usually when signature campaigns are waged for such things as citizen referendums, the goal is always to gather far more signatures than are needed because ultimately a number of them are invalidated. Sometimes, people who sign aren’t actually residents of the jurisdiction, or they have changed their address without notifying the registrar’s office, or they sign twice.

For instance, a countywide citizens initiative being circulated now to overturn a decision allowing a large housing development in North County requires roughly 68,000 signatures to be placed on a future ballot. But the goal of the signature campaign is to get 110,000 signatures as a cushion.

The Julian situation, of course, deals with far fewer numbers, and leaders of the effort to retain the volunteer fire department say they are confident the signatures will hold up because they have been checking them along the way.

Still, it will be up to county Registrar of Voters Michael Vu to check each signature. Simonds said they’ve been assured the process won’t take more than 10 days, and probably less.

Ten years ago, after huge wildland fires burned into urban areas in 2003 and 2007, the County Fire Authority was formed to consolidate all the backcountry fire departments.

All of the volunteer departments in the rural areas eventually dissolved and became part of the Fire Authority, which staffs the stations full time with professional firefighters under contract with Cal Fire.

But the Julian department, despite having struggled for years financially, has held out. The volunteers and their supporters insist that the area is better served and safer with locals in the engines — locals who know the area and care deeply for its citizens.

They say the fire department is a source of great pride for the unincorporated communities it serves and that the county and Cal Fire, which the county contracts with, are power hungry and have consistently misrepresented facts and figures.

Things have gotten to this point because the board of directors of the Julian district voted earlier this year, 3-2, to begin the dissolution process. The matter came before LAFCO because the directors and the county asked for the change. The issue has divided the community. Friends have become enemies. Names have been dragged through the mud.

Should enough of the signatures be validated, an election of some sort will be scheduled in December, which is the next time the LAFCO commission meets. The election would likely take place during the first half of 2019. At that time, voters will either give the ultimate thumbs up or thumbs down to the dissolution question. Simonds said LAFCO will absorb the cost of the election and has set aside $40,000 for that purpose.

Meanwhile, the volunteers are no longer in control of the department. The county and Cal Fire are staffing the stations under an interim agreement until the dissolution matter has been settled.

To confuse things a bit more, voters in Julian will be asked on Nov. 6 to quadruple their parcel tax from $50 to $200 annually to fund the volunteer department should it ultimately continue to exist. Should the county take control, the vote will become moot.

There was one other way that an election could have been forced but it failed miserably Tuesday. Had 25 percent of the more than 4,000 property owners in the district protested, that too would have led to an election. However, only 1.6 percent of the property owners did so.

___ (c)2018 The San Diego Union-Tribune Visit The San Diego Union-Tribune at www.sandiegouniontribune.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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