Atherton council, Menlo fire board members to explore future ties

For years, the Atherton City Council has been complaining about the disparity between the fixed percentage of tax revenues the town’s property owners hand over to the Menlo Park Fire Protection District in return for emergency response services and how much it actually costs the district to provide those services to the town. A report prepared by a consultant hired by the town found that the fire district receives millions of dollars more annually than the town keeps to spend on government operations.

At a joint meeting of the council and Menlo fire board in Atherton on Jan. 22, officials agreed to form a subcommittee to talk about ways to resolve the issue.

The subcommittee, which will consist of two people from each agency, will discuss three options before the town: continue with the status quo, detach from the fire district and seek an alternative for emergency services, or find a mutually agreeable way to increase services to the town.

Serving on the subcommittee and representing Atherton will be Mayor Bill Widmer and Councilman Cary Weist. Fire board President Virginia Chang Kiraly and board member Jim McLaughlin, an Atherton resident, will represent the fire district.

It’s not yet clear how often the subcommittee will meet or what its timeline will be, Atherton Town Manager George Rodericks said, adding that he doubts the meetings will be open to the public.

The consultant’s report showed that Atherton’s property owners provided the fire district with $11.8 million in property tax revenues in fiscal year 2015-16; the town received $7.5 million for its general fund. The consultant derived the district’s costs of emergency services provided within the town by extrapolation, Rodericks told The Almanac.

Atherton receives 10.6 percent of the revenue generated by its property owners’ taxes for government operations; the fire district receives 15.7 percent, slightly more than the 15.6 percent paid to the high school district, and a bit less than the 16.6 percent paid to the elementary school district.

Atherton is home to 8 percent of the district’s residents – the district also serves Menlo Park, East Palo Alto and nearby unincorporated communities – and provides 31.7 percent of the district’s revenues, according to the consultant’s report.

At the joint meeting, Kiraly also introduced discussions on how emergency-response routes could be impacted when Caltrain electrifies its service, and the possibility of a secondary emergency alert system.

The fire district will continue testing a movable long-range siren also capable of transmitting spoken messages in more than one language, Fire Chief Harold Schapelhouman told the group. The systems can be encrypted to foil hackers, and the speakers have a range of 1 square mile, Schapelhouman said.

Weist noted that modern homes are well insulated, making them harder to penetrate with sound. Councilman Rick DeGolia commented that the device, when heard from Las Lomitas Elementary School on Alameda de las Pulgas during an early test on Walsh Road, sounded like a truck horn.

The sirens, Schapelhouman said, would be a secondary alert system to be used in conjunction with the primary system, currently SMC Alert messages sent to subscribers by email, phone and text message by the San Mateo County Office of Emergency Services.

Fifty percent of East Palo Alto is a flood zone and officials there are particularly interested in the siren system, Schapelhouman said.

Electrified trains

Switching Caltrain away from diesel power to electricity will mean more trains running at higher speeds and more quietly. To avoid conflicts with vehicles at grade crossings – there are two in Atherton, at Fair Oaks and Watkins avenues – those crossings would need to be raised above the tracks to create underpasses or lowered into tunnels.

Raising or lowering the tracks – known as grade separation – costs millions of dollars, and there is opposition in Atherton to elevating the tracks. Councilwoman Elizabeth Lewis said in 2017 that raising the tracks “is going to ruin our neighborhoods.”

Lewis has been studying the issue for the council. “We need to somehow figure out how to finance the real solution” of dropping the tracks into a trench or tunnel, she said in 2017. “I think our communities could come together and figure out a way” to finance such a project, she said.

Fire board member Chuck Bernstein suggested at the Jan. 22 meeting that a tunnel is the chosen method in communities that care about their land.

Councilman Mike Lempres asked the fire chief whether firefighters could force trains to stop to allow emergency vehicles to cross the tracks at grade level. That would be done only if someone has been injured or a fire hose is lying across the tracks, Schapelhouman said. Otherwise, fire engines wait for the crossing gates to go up just like other vehicles, he said.

Working together?

No one on the Atherton council is unhappy with the fire district’s performance when emergencies occur in town. “The service we get … is top class. No question about the service,” Mayor Bill Widmer said. In thinking about the revenues-for-services issue, “there was discussion on what steps could we take,” he said. “One of the steps was detachment, yes … (but) we said, ‘We’re not interested in building our own fire district.'”

“We do think that there’s a disconnect in the amount of money that each jurisdiction is paying based on the amount of service they’re receiving,” he said. “That’s what we wanted to discuss.”

“Atherton residents are committing more revenue into the system than they are taking back for the cost of their services,” Lempres said. “That (difference) is fairly substantial, however you look at it.”

“Our preference is to stay in the district,” he added. “Our preference is to work cooperatively to get more resources in Atherton. We don’t know if that’s going to work or not. Thus far … there have been mixed results. We don’t know whether we should be considering withdrawing or not.”

“It would have been nice to have a small (fire) engine in the civic center to respond locally to things,” he said. “That’s an example where the district could have put a little more resources into Atherton. We would have appreciated it greatly, and it changes that whole equation” of the allocation of property taxes.

While no one from the fire district disputed the disparities presented in the report, Bernstein did argue with the methods the consultant used, including the calculation of service calls to Atherton based on where the calls originated.

Atherton residents cannot shop in town – it has no retail – or visit a doctor in town, so they must travel out of town for such matters, Bernstein said. “They may be having heart attacks and traffic accidents elsewhere,” he said.

“The fact is that Atherton residents have no reason to go to Atherton other than to go home,” he said. Likewise, it’s not clear whether emergency calls within town are always for residents. “We don’t know exactly how much service the residents got,” he said.

Bernstein also noted that the study implied that if Atherton were to detach itself from the fire district, there’s an assumption that the fire district would still cover a third of the town where emergency response times from two Atherton stations would not be acceptable. “That isn’t fair either,” he said.

The fire district provides services to communities outside the district without being reimbursed, such as Stanford Weekend Acres and parts of unincorporated Redwood City, Bernstein said. “We shouldn’t be doing that,” he said, referring to the practice in general.

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