LEGISLATIVE WATCH
Senate Bill 1617, is in the Legislature to boost Cal Fire funding. Residents would be assessed steep new fees, as high as $400 per house, added to their property tax bills.

The state is struggling to close a multibillion-dollar deficit, and lawmakers are suggesting dozens of new taxes and fees. This new fee will be particularly onerous for some residents in El Dorado County. This bill would establish a fee on buildings and structures in state responsibility areas in order to fund fire prevention and suppression activities, a firefighting fee, on residents of the foothills and forests to supplement the Cal Fire’s budget. (SRA - All lands where the state has the primary financial responsibility are designated state responsibility areas.)

The proposed Bill would require CDF to charge SRA landowners, who have at least $100,000 in improvements on their property, a service fee on 2009-10 property tax bills based the property's fire hazard severity zone level (irrespective of the property's acreage). 

Homeowners could cut their fees, though, by maintaining good defensible space or building according to the latest fire-safe codes. The fees would drop in communities that met fire-safe planning guidelines. In districts where local fire protection was deemed adequate, the fees could be scrapped altogether.

Those are incentives to do the right thing, but they would also be an administrative nightmare. Who will inspect hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of houses' brush and grass that grow back every year? Simply enforcing the law could cost as much as any fee could reasonably generate.

This legislative package is based on the premise that homeowners in the SRA are getting a free ride from Cal Fire, whose primary job is protecting watersheds, not structures. The numbers do not bear that out, said Paul Smith, legislative director for the Regional Council of Rural Counties, which opposes the fee. 

Many area residents within SRAs already pay taxes to their counties and community fire districts (CSD) for fire protection service. The El Dorado Grand Jury just released a report that that calls for the county to stop subsidizing six west slope fire districts and to instead encourage the small districts to consolidate or merge with larger districts. "These subsidies raise a fairness issue for taxpayers outside these districts who are supporting their own fire protection district through various taxes while also contributing, through the county's general fund, an extra amount of money to these subsidized districts," the grand jury report says. The grand jury's findings were similar to those presented in a recent LAFCO municipal services report on fire and emergency medical services.

This triple (County/CSD subsidy/State) fire taxation proposal comes from a state that also gave us the “triple-flip”, a financial plan that reduces the amount of the 1 cent in sales tax revenue going to local governments by half a cent. In both cases, taxes that were originally controlled “locally” get shifted to control by the state.