A Santa Rosa man who mistakenly received several hundred calls from frustrated residents ordered to pay a new California fire prevention fee says the state not only botched mailers by sending appeals to his personal phone number but appears to have used a faulty billing list.
George Macauley says he's heard from more than 200 callers, many of them senior citizens, saying they've been charged the $150 a year fee even though one of their properties is vacant, their house long ago burned down or they live in city limits, for instance.
Many others claim the fee is an illegal tax that should have been subject to voter approval, he said.
"It's a very poorly managed program," Macauley said, "and I've told Mr. (David) Gao (a deputy director with the state Board of Equalization) up in Sacramento: This program should be brought to a screeching halt until you've got your act together."
Macauley's receipt of the phone calls was occasioned by the omission of a numeral "1" before the toll free 888 area code initially included in BOE correspondence and online information directing residents how to petition for redetermination on their liability for the SRA fee.
The missing "1" meant local callers ended up dialing Macauley's cell phone number, which has an 888 prefix. BOE personnel said the agency has never used used a "1" in such situations because 888 had not previously been used as prefix. New mailers have been printed and the agency web site corrected to reflect a correction, they said.
But with the bills going out at a rate of about 10,000 a day, county-by-county alphabetically, since Aug. 13, Macauley found himself inundated with calls from Humboldt, Lake, Mendocino and Napa counties in recent weeks. Close to 27,000 Sonoma County residents are to be billed sometime after Nov. 8.
Macauley, who lives in Santa Rosa and is not subject to the fee, says his experience exposes the fee rollout as "a fiasco" and was very disturbed to know the phone number error would means citizens on fixed incomes incurred toll charges they shouldn't have to pay.
But state officials say what's illuminated are the challenges and controversial nature of the new assessment, enacted by state lawmakers to fund fire prevention efforts in Cal Fire's State Responsibility Area.
It also highlights the existence of a waiver process built into the system precisely because some mistakes were anticipated, state officials said.
California has about 31 million acres of land over which Cal Fire has jurisdiction for fire prevention and wildfire suppression.
Just under 800,000 residents have been deemed eligible for the fee, aimed at generating about $84 million a year to prevent the kinds of wildfires that so far this year have cost Cal Fire more than $148 million since July 1, Upton said.
The department had to determine which properties fell within those jurisdictional lines, which were developed and to what extent, and whether those who owned the parcels were already paying into a local fire district, entitling them to a $35 discount. Mobile homes and modular units count as "habitable structures" triggering the fee, though who pays it depends on whether the residents own or rent it, said Cal Fire Deputy Director of Communications Janet Upton.
The process required overlays of data from different agencies that virtually guaranteed some duplication, error and the possibility of outdated information, Upton said. Since the initial billing is retroactive to the 2011-2012 fiscal year, it also needed to reflect ownership as it existed July 1, 2011, further complicating the matter.
"We expected to have to do some fine tuning on the data," she said, noting the appeal rate was projected at 1-to-2 percent.
With about 300,000 statements sent out so far, the appeal rate is actually closer to 4 percent, she said Monday.
But about 60 percent of those are from residents claiming the assessment is an illegal tax -- some of them part of an organized movement to overturn it, saying the fee should have been subject to a statewide vote and received approval by two-thirds of voters before it could be collected.
The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association vowed to challenge the fee in court even before the notifications went out to property owners alerting them that bills were on the way.
The organization has since contacted the Cal Fire legal department saying it plans to follow through with a suit, Upton said.
Macauley, meanwhile, said Monday that the calls to his cell phone had begun tapering off but he's still disturbed by what he's heard from callers along the way.
One of them, 81-year-old Fort Bragg resident Joyce Dempsey, told The Press Democrat she wasn't even sure how she'd pay her taxes on her fixed income before the "double whammy" of the fire fee.
"I'm really upset about it," she said.
Copyright 2012 - The Press Democrat, Santa Rosa, Calif.
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
