6 San Joaquin County rural fire districts challenge data review

Several rural fire districts in San Joaquin County are pushing back on data included in a draft Municipal Service Review, saying inaccuracies could affect how their departments are evaluated and potentially impact future funding and service decisions.

"If decisions are going to be made on bad data, you're going to get a bad decision," said Waterloo-Morada Fire District Chief Eric Walder.

The Mokelumne, Waterloo-Morada, Eastside, Lincoln, Montezuma and French Camp-McKinley fire districts are all sounding the alarm over the data that was released in the review.

The report was prepared by the San Joaquin County Local Agency Formation Commission, or LAFCo, which has the ability to determine fire district boundaries that can, in turn, impact how much funding districts receive for their departments.

"There's a lot of impacts that can happen from inaccurate data," said Mokelumne Rural Fire Protection District Chief Mark Weber.

Weber said the draft contains population and housing figures for his district that he believes are significantly off.

"It showed they were way off on population. It showed we were way off on how many housing units we had," Weber said.

He said that information can become the basis for future decisions about what a district needs.

"It can be used against the agency as like, 'Oh, you don't have this much population, maybe you don't need certain things,'" Weber said.

Walder raised similar concerns about the Waterloo-Morada district, saying some types of emergency calls, including water rescues, were not accurately reflected in the data.

He also pointed to changes in the district's boundaries over the years.

"This district especially has been hit hard over the years," Walder said. "There's been over 400 acres of land detached and annexed by the city of Stockton, so over the years that reduces our ability to fund our fire service to our citizens that are still here."

Walder said that makes it particularly important that the information used in the review accurately reflects the communities and services that remain within each district.

"We want to make sure that report is correct and accurate," he said.

CBS News Sacramento asked LAFCo about the concerns. In a statement, Executive Officer J.D. Hightower said some of the perceived discrepancies may have resulted from efforts to make comparisons between districts using raw dispatch data.

"Any perceived missteps may have been derived from the attempt to provide an apples-to-apples comparison using the raw dispatch data. Another source of confusion is that socio-economic data from census tracts don't match district boundaries," Hightower said.

Now, LAFCo is allowing another 60 days for the fire districts to review and mark any corrections.

"The fact that the data is skewed is the issue, and it's something that we got to make sure is right for the future of our agencies," he said.

He said the last review was done around 2011 and after this one is complete, it could carry on for at least the next five years, making this document's need for complete accuracy extremely important.

Both chiefs say they appreciate the additional time given and are looking forward to the next review.