Tuesday: Fire board to discuss district's grand jury response

On balance, I have agreed with 11 of 19 findings and 7 of 10 recommendations and I would frame our respectful disagreement with the other Civil Grand Jury items on “context”, which will first be discussed with the elected Fire Board, who has the ultimate say in this matter.

That’s an improvement of our initial June 2018 preliminary interaction with the Civil Grand Jury’s “Facts and Findings” where I recommended, and the Board agreed, that we were in agreement on 13 of 18 statements of “fact” and 6 of 21 statements of “findings”. We essentially helped them with their final report.

The Civil Grand Jury spent a year looking at almost every aspect of the Fire Districts Operations. We provided them with timely information, responded to numerous public records requests and spent over a hundred hours of staff time in interviews and researching and finding documents for them.

Overall, the issues in this report are important, but in the big picture analysis of the Fire District, the Civil Grand Jury noted that the District excels in its Core Mission of protecting and responding to the emergency needs of the communities we serve daily. That’s important but rarely mentioned.

We agree and acknowledge that in many areas, as listed, there is room for improvement and we are already working towards some of those areas, However, in other areas, I will simply recommend that we respectfully not agree. As the Fire Chief, and after 37 years of working in this organization day in and day out I can’t recommend to the Fire Board that we agree with some of the findings and facts, as listed, and i will discuss why in a public meeting with the elected Fire Board that will be available for our residents to watch, if they are interested, on YouTube by going to our website at Menlofire.org.

Harold Schapelhouman, Fire Chief

The Grand Jury report says by accepting money directly from Facebook the District has "has created the possible appearance of favorable treatment or disparate application of rules or laws."

This language is way too mild. A public agency cannot accept money from an entity when it enforces rules and laws against it. On its face it is wrong for the District, or any other government agency to accept money directly from Facebook. Elected leaders vote to tax a new development and then allocate those taxes to meet public needs created by the development. The public then holds those elected leaders accountable.

Public agencies routinely negotiate impact fees with developers.

For example, Menlo Park negotiated significant impact fees for the city from the Gateway Project and then told the Fire District to do the same.