This article was originally published by The San Diego Union-Tribune:
In 1980, the nation’s 30,000 fire departments responded to 10.8 million emergency calls, about 3 million of which were classified as fires. By 2013, total calls had nearly tripled to 31.6 million and fire calls had fallen to 1.2 million, only 500,000 of which were actual structure fires.
This remarkable drop-off and other factors prompted Phil Keisling, the director of the Center for Public Service at Portland State University’s Hatfield School of Government, writing in Governing Magazine last year, to call some politicians’ seemingly perpetual insistence on more fire stations, more fire trucks and more firefighters “a doubling down on a long-outdated delivery model that requires a fundamental re-thinking” and “an unrealistic non-starter for most cash-strapped local governments.”
So why is the San Diego City Council pursuing a $205 million public safety bond to build 18 new fire stations? …
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