San Mateo’s Fire Chief Eyes Consolidation – But How to Proceed?

As budgets continue to tighten for Peninsula cities, most local officials agree that, in the interest of cost savings, municipal fire departments can and should be consolidated in the near future.

As San Mateo fire Chief Dan Belville put it to Patch on Wednesday, “Philosophically, I have been a proponent of any kind of consolidation.”

Consolidation, Belville says, allows cities to share training officers, fire marshals and other roles, cutting back on costs for everybody.

“We can do better within a larger group because you can spread your resources and talents,” he said. Increasingly, he added, local city leaders are embracing the idea “because their backs are against the wall with budget cuts and all that. So it’s more popular than it ever has been.”

Even so, differences remain on precisely how to proceed. And lingering grudges over relationships gone sour – as happened recently between San Carlos and Belmont – make common ground harder to find.

The San Carlos-Belmont feud as council members from the neighboring cities bickered before supervisors during a county Board Finance and Operations Committee meeting in Redwood City.

San Carlos city leaders now say they want to join Cal Fire, the state fire agency. Belmont city leaders say they want to go it alone. And each side blames the other for the recent meltdown between their once-consolidated fire departments.

"They’re the ones that wanted the divorce, and they have done nothing to appease the situation," said Belmont Mayor Coralin Feierbach. "I think we need to be strong and say we’re doing our own fire department, and if they want to contract for our services they can."

"I can’t trust them, simple as that," she added.

As for San Mateo city officials, they apparently decided to keep out of it on Tuesday, opting not to attend the meeting at all. According to Supervisor Carole Groom – one of the committee’s two members along with Supervisor Adrienne Tissier – San Mateo city manager Susan Loftus did not attend Tuesday’s meeting because the fight between Belmont and San Carlos is too “explosive.” Loftus’ outgoing phone message said she is away on business this week.

But some San Mateo officials have been working behind the scenes in favor of consolidation. Belville, who is also chief of Foster City’s fire department, has long been a vocal proponent of the idea.

Belville said he takes an opportunistic approach to consolidation, depending on the circumstances, because “I think it only makes sense for the taxpayer.”

When the Belmont-San Carlos Fire Department, in existence since 1979, started to fall apart about two years ago, Belville and Jim Skinner, the Redwood City fire chief, got together and “started to look at what was possible.”

“We thought we would take advantage of sharing some of those positions,” Belville said.

Similarly, he said, Burlingame and Hillsborough currently share a stable fire department, the Central County Fire Department. But “if they had a situation right now, we’d be looking into that,” he said. “So wherever the opportunity is we look, we extend out a hand. … For me it is all about efficiency.”

“Where it goes now I don’t know,” Belville said. “I don’t personally want to get too far out in front of it because I want to partner with all the cities that are within” the region he hopes will consolidate – San Mateo, Foster City, Belmont, San Carlos and Redwood City. “I’m willing to help lead that or work with my peers with it.”

Cal Fire Joins Fray

Further complicating matters is a recent proposal from Cal Fire, put forth by San Mateo/Santa Cruz Unit fire Chief John Ferreira, to take over fire services in San Mateo, Foster City, Belmont, San Carlos and Redwood City. A memo from Deputy County Manager Peggy Jensen estimates that shifting to Cal Fire in those cities would decrease total fire service costs from $42.2 million to $25.4 million.

The San Carlos council supports the idea, and Tuesday’s committee meeting spent some time discussing it.

“People say consolidation means we’ll lose local control,” said San Carlos Mayor Omar Ahmad. “Well, we’ve never had local control and not regionalizing could put us in fiscal ruin.”

But local rank-and-file firefighters, largely represented by San Mateo Fire Fighters Local 2400, consider Ferreira’s proposal to be “out of the blue,” as one firefighter put it, and Belville says they have reason to be concerned.

“Local 2400 is really sort of anti-Cal Fire,” he said, in part because firefighters wonder what a consolidation would mean for them.

As for Cal Fire, Belville said, the agency’s role is “very conflicted” when it comes to urban firefighting.

“Cal Fire was originally intended to provide SRA” – state resource area – “fire protection,” he explained. Over the years, however, development has encroached on rural and unincorporated land, altering Cal Fire’s coverage area and creating overlap.

“What’s happened is that Cal Fire has become very involved in LRA,” or local resource area firefighting, he said, meaning fewer grass and forest fires and more structural fires, which require a different kind of training.

But now the state, due to budget limitations, is pushing to return Cal Fire to its original mission of rural-only firefighting, creating a conflict between the local Cal Fire proposal and intentions in Sacramento.

“It’s two totally different animals,” Belville said. “They don’t do the urban situations in most cases like we do.”

Furthermore, he said, the estimated cost savings are not as great as some county officials think.

“A lot of their costs start to roll up,” he said of Cal Fire.

“They’re a big agency and they run themselves well,” he said, praising the professionalism of his colleagues at Cal Fire. But he said their size leads to “one-stop shopping” for services such as training – which after all was designed for “primarily rural firefighting.”

He said that Half Moon Bay’s fire department, which was absorbed by Cal Fire in 2007 to become the Coastside Fire Protection District, has seen “much higher costs than anticipated.” (A civil grand jury recently concluded otherwise, saying other municipalities should follow in Half Moon Bay’s footsteps.)

In the end, he said,  “They come out in the newspapers at a much lower cost, but I think (the real difference is) probably somewhere in between.”

‘We need to save this marriage’

Ideas for cooperation continue to percolate amid the controversy. On Tuesday, San Carlos council member Andy Klein was critical of the cities of San Mateo and Menlo Park for not making a bid for fire services themselves.

“There’s a lot of talk about consolidation, but no action,” Klein said. “People can say San Carlos leaving Belmont is the opposite of collaboration, but joining Cal Fire would be another form of regionalization.”

Ultimately, both Groom and Tissier said they were committed to making some form of fire regionalization a reality. The two-member committee decided to continue dialogue rather than move any decision to the full Board of Supervisors for approval.

And both admonished San Mateo’s bickering neighbors to the south to get along.

“We need to save this marriage between San Carlos and Belmont,” Groom said to the two cities’ representatives. “You need to roll your sleeves up and go back to work.”

As with the supervisors, Belville seems to have more than a few allies when it comes to consolidation.

Peter Carpenter, director of the Menlo Park Fire Protection District, agreed that county-wide discussion needed to take place.

“There will be resistance from local fire officials who feel that their empire is threatened,” he said. “But our responsibility is to the residents we serve.”

Even on the Belmont City Council, member Warren Lieberman said that in the long run, he thinks it will be financially beneficial for cities to share as many services as possible.

"The closer that the cities in San Mateo County can work together, the greater the ability for the cities to provide the best possible services at the least possible cost," Lieberman said.