Dear Friends and Residents:

Our firefighters are seeking your vote to transfer to County Fire. The big attraction for them is, of course, greater pay, better benefits and a very generous retirement. Who can blame them for trying? But hold on to your pocketbooks, because the County will then be sending us all the bills! And the only way that we can realize a saving is by gutting our services. In fact the County plan is to permanently cut 15 firefighters from our city staff.

Sure we can save lots of money if we get rid of a third of our people. But is this smart? The firefighters say it’s O.K. because aid from other cities will be on standby. Granted this regional solution can be adequate during pleasant times. But what about the day when a serious natural disaster strikes? These far away firefighters will be completely busy in their own neighborhoods–and guess what, we will be simply out of luck. It is very unwise to shortchange our protection. I for one say I want full-fledged service, not a watered down skeleton crew.

Now let’s take a look at another critical area, our Ambulance Service. We have a fire/ambulance department. 85% of our calls are for medical reasons. The time it takes for one of our ambulances to get to your doorstep is about four or five minutes. This is a good quality response. On the other hand, the county has no ambulances as part of their regular gear. They refer calls to private, for-profit ambulance companies. Since any such ambulance will be coming in from outside our city, we can expect a response time of 20 minutes or longer. Waiting four times longer for medical transport is a deep and scary concern.

Our firefighters are under strong temptation to enrich themselves at our expense. Their sugarcoated campaign is based on less than the whole truth. So let’s take a look at the rest of the story.

° Believe it or not, we will have to hand over about $30,000 per firefighter as they will get to cash out such benefits as vacation time and sick days. The firefighters say that they will give us a break by not collecting their money right away. Thanks but we are still on the hook and sooner or later they will be collecting.

° Even our police department will suffer. If our fire department goes away, so does our retirement group discount. This will cost our police an extra $300,000 per year.

° L.A. County Fire will be requiring us to retrofit, remodel and repaint our fire stations and fire trucks. Hold on tight…the price tag is estimated to be over two million dollars!

° Every year our fire department helps our city budget by putting back over 1.5 million dollars from fees and charges. Without our fire department, this revenue will soon go missing. Our firefighters promise to just give us this money “forevermore.” Is this a bet-worthy expectation?

° Just like rent, County Fire will be able to raise our bill 1/2 million dollars every year and we will have absolutely no say so in this matter.

° Another selling point submitted by our firefighters is that County Fire has superior and cutting edge equipment that would become available. What they leave out is that we already enjoy the use of all County hardware and personnel through our mutual-aid agreement.

For many, many reasons being taken over by the big government of Los Angeles County Fire is a raw deal. I for one want to retain our wonderful hometown fire / ambulance department and I want to keep our quick ambulance service. Please join me to continue home rule and local control and say so by voting…

NO ON FF

Sincerely,

Francisco Alonso,

Former Mayor, City of Monterey Park