Public Safety and Fire

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As the only candidate for Supervisor in District 5 from the unincorporated area, and having been involved in fire policy issues for the last 13 years as part of our Town Council, I strongly support going back to having fire services as part of the County charter, including ALS (advance life support) and BLS (basic life support) coverage. At the moment, the County does not have provision of fire services in their Charter, although there is a County Fire Authority.   The first thing taxpayers expect from their elected officials is provision of public safety, and we need to take full responsibility to do so.

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As a resident of District 5 for 27 years, I have also had to evacuate my family multiple times, including in 1996 when the Harmony Grove fire took the life of a neighbor a few streets over when he was burned alive trying to escape, so I am very passionate about fire protection. Fire issues are the main reason I ultimately decided to run for Supervisor, because I see the pending decisions to place more high density housing in the middle of the Wildland Urban Interface (Lilac Hills, Newland Sierra, Harmony Grove South, etc.), which other candidates support, as literally an existential issue for our residents.  With inadequate infrastructure in terms of two-lane roads in the next wildfire evacuation, we are risking extensive loss of life and entrapment if we don't first consider the ability to evacuate all the way to safety when we consider adding density beyond that allowed in the General Plan. 

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It is ironic that one of the key recommendations in the study the County requested after the 2003 and 2007 fires was to avoid locating homes on slopes and other difficult to defend areas, yet there we are 10 years later, and we don't seem to have learned anything from past fire behavior.

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I am also well versed in fire policy issues, having testified at LAFCO back in 2007 when the "Micro Report" was being considered for reorganization of structural fire protection and emergency medical services in the unincorporated County. Our community argued (successfully) for being left out of the reorganization and eventually merged our volunteer fire department (The Elfin Forest Harmony Grove Fire Department, CSA 107) with Rancho Santa Fe Fire District.  I was also intimately involved with that merger effort, setting up meetings with the deputy CAO and the County Fire Authority Chief, advocating for the merger and the needed funding, rather than leaving us under CFA. We organized petitions, delivered them to the Board of Supervisors, mobilized speakers for hearings, and eventually the merger went through. I would argue I have the best working knowledge of the County fire issues and longest association with those of any of the 4 candidates.

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In addition, a specific policy I would like to work with colleagues to enact if fortunate enough to be elected is the requirement that the process for approving General Plan Amendments within the Department of Planning and Development Services include the mandate for a full modeling of evacuation scenarios all the way to safety, and calculation of likely entrapment statistics based on existing vs. proposed infrastructure. Currently this is not required; the Fire Protection Plans for projects only look at the project footprint, and evaluation of evacuation risk falls through the cracks. I believe we have no higher duty as elected official than looking out for the public's health and safety, and this is a glaring omission we need to fix before we see images like the ones earlier this year in Northern California of incinerated cars and horses on country roads.