Blog note: this article mentions several grand jury reports addressing public safety issues in the eastern part of the county.
The roadside sign announcing East Contra Costa County’s public safety emergency, erected along busy Vasco Road south of Brentwood, was taken down recently at the end of its contract term.
The billboard was put up six months ago by a group of concerned area residents, and it announced to 22,000 passing motorists each day that the area they were entering had been called a “public safety emergency” region.
East County Voters for Equal Protection, a nonpartisan citizens action committee founded to improve funding for public safety in East County, coordinated the grassroots public education effort, along with the Contra Costa Taxpayers Association.
On Feb. 13 emergency services took 16 minutes to respond to a two-car accident in Oakley, a city of more than 40,000 residents, the second largest within the service area of the East Contra Costa Fire Protection District (ECCFPD). The response came from Contra Costa Fire Prevention District (ConFire) stations in Antioch, more than 10 miles away from the accident, because all ECCFPD assets were already deployed.
While emergency medical and fire services are funded at a rate of $449 and $370 per resident in central parts of the county, ECCFPD gets just $94 per resident to provide the same services to the East County population.
This uneven structural underfunding was established by the California Legislature and continues to get worse as the area grows. East County has experienced 1,500 percent growth since the funding methodology was put in place four decades ago.
ECCFPD closed its fourth fire station last June due to fiscal constraints. Each month since then the district has been unable to respond to emergency calls for significant periods of time. In March, the district was unable to respond for three hours and twenty-nine minutes. The average time that the district is unable to respond is more than seven hours per month. When ECCFPD is unable to respond, fire and emergency medical services come from other agencies.
It should be noted that during March ECCFPD responded to six residential structure fires and one commercial structure fire. For each structure fire a minimum of five fire units are required, and with only three units available, ECCFPD is forced to rely on support from neighboring fire districts, in these cases, ConFire.
Statistical industry research by the National Fire Prevention Association predicts that in just three minutes a fire can grow 16 times larger than when it started. The additional travel time of firefighters from neighboring districts can cause catastrophic loss for East County property owners.
State Sen. Steve Glazer and Assembly Member Jim Frazier, East County’s elected representatives, have known about the unsafe situation for years. It has been the subject of numerous county Grand Jury reports, Local Agency Formation Commission reports, a government task force and has been reported the media.
The district requested that the state Legislature change the funding methodology back in July 2016, when the ECCFPD board passed Resolution 2016-21, “Supporting State Legislative Action to Facilitate Re-Allocation of Property Tax Revenues”.
Since January the ECCFPD has taken steps to change the state-mandated funding mechanism by engaging Townsend Public Affairs to assist the district in getting its story told. Once legislators become more familiar with the area’s crisis, a funding solution will emerge, it is hoped.
Until a solution is implemented, the 115,000 residents of 249 square miles of eastern Contra Costa County will have to do their best to live with life-threatening medical emergency response times and the assurance that if a structure catches fire, the resources necessary to put it out will have to come from neighboring fire districts, many miles and minutes away.
April 15, 2018
East Bay Times
By Bryan Scott, co-chair of East County Voters for Equal Protection
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