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Opinion: Dust-Up debate rages

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Were state, local and federal responses to last week’s devastating wildfires above average, adequate or poor? This week, UC San Diego’s Richard Carson and San Diego tax fighter Richard Rider debate fire policy, and start by critiquing San Diego’s preparedness.

Carson argues the city was ‘woefully outgunned, with no workable plan to bring in firefighting resources from outside the county in time to stop a runaway fire’:

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San Diego’s pension fund scandal has effectively gutted its ability to increase spending in response to the increasing fire threat. The public bought into belt-tightening as the way to deal with the pension fund issue and believed that public safety was still being protected. Politicians have been afraid to level with the public and reluctant to impose large impact fees on developers, whose ever-growing expansion into fire country is the root source of many of the problems.

Richard Rider counters:

I think you could have shortened your opening essay to two words — ‘more money.’ Hardly a new idea, but certainly an ineffective one.Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to expand the city of San Diego’s professional firefighting force to fight a major fire event that happens once every four to 20 years is madness. As it now stands, professional city firefighters spend only 3% to 4% of their average shift actually fighting fires. What will the hundreds of additional firefighters be doing 24/7, 365 days a year between those rare, huge brush fires? Besides getting paid, that is?

You can read the full, fiery exchange here.

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