By Vianna Davila
San Antonio Express-News
Copyright 2007 San Antonio Express-News
All Rights Reserved
SAN ANTONIO — On a chilly October night in 2005, as Ron Pelkonen watched two of his neighbors’ homes on Widefield Lane go up in flames, he assumed that somewhere in the sea of firetrucks was at least one engine from the San Antonio Fire Department.
He was wrong.
The trucks that responded came from the Geronimo Village Fire Department, nearly 7 miles away on Talley Road. A second small department later arrived for backup as part of a countywide mutual aid agreement.
Pelkonen lives in the far west portion of unincorporated Bexar County, where fire protection is not guaranteed by state law, but he said recently that he assumed things had changed since that night two years ago. Surely, he said, the San Antonio Fire Department station, located less than 4 miles away within the city limits, would respond if a large blaze broke out today.
“Do they?” asked his wife, Audrey.
Though SAFD could have responded as part of the mutual aid agreement, fire protection in the Belkonen’s subdivision falls to Geronimo Village.
Today, smaller departments like the Helotes Fire Department or Geronimo Village’s, which, until recently, was entirely volunteer, and the equally taxed Bexar County Sheriff’s Office find themselves overseeing fire and police public safety needs in an area of concentrated growth that stretches from Potranco Road north to Bandera Road.
The lure of affordable housing draws home buyers to these parts of unincorporated Bexar County, where residents can avoid city taxes, send their children to the popular Northside Independent School District, and still enjoy proximity to city conveniences.
But they can’t get the same city-funded public safety services.
It’s a reality too many eager buyers don’t realize as they’re snapping up affordable homes, or may easily forget, until the day they call 911 and a sheriff’s deputy or a volunteer firetruck pulls up to the curb.
And the calls for help continue to grow.
Last year the Geronimo Village Fire Department -- which serves roughly 12,000 addresses in a 65 square-mile area between Potranco and FM 471 -- made more than five times the emergency responses it had in 1998.
Once purely volunteer, the department created four paid firefighter positions after the formation of Emergency Services District 2 in 2003. Property owners tax themselves to create a pool of money designated for fire protection.
Homeowners and business owners pay 7.1 cents per $100 of property value to support the district, Treasurer Frank Partee said, but that rate could climb as the Fire Department’s needs increase.
“Right now we’re way behind because we didn’t see this coming,” Partee said. “I don’t know that anyone did other than maybe the school district. The school district has quite a bit more funds than we do.”
The future looms
Just as fire protection needs have intensified, calls for service have more than doubled in the western sheriff’s patrol districts since 1998. On any given day, about 10 deputies per shift cover the area from Interstate 10 West in the north all the way to U.S. 281 in the south.
Bexar County Commissioners Court approved $1.2 million to hire 15 new sheriff’s deputies in 2006; about half were designated for the western district.
The additions help, as deputies race to cover vast distances between calls.
But sheriff’s officials anticipate that roughly 47,700 people will move into the western half of the county every year for the next three years, said Gail Morozoff, a patrol analyst for the office.
Even the most hopeful public safety officials can see the future looming: more houses and commercial development, bringing with it more people and their problems -- calls for barking dogs and domestic violence, dizzy spells and house fires.
“The area has always been larger than the population,” said Bexar County Commissioner Paul Elizondo, whose Precinct 2 includes the fast-growing Helotes area. “This development that’s occurring is flipping that around.”
Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said laws regarding annexation have changed, requiring cities to give residents in unincorporated areas warnings years before they annex. The result has been that San Antonio’s historical trend of aggressive annexation has slowed, leaving many residents adrift in the county and without city services much longer than they expected, he said.
Others believe the city has annexed too quickly, before the money and resources were available to provide adequate public safety.
“I don’t think the city was quite ready for as much growth as we’re seeing (within its own limits),” Partee said.
Whatever the reason, many parts of the county remain untouched and unincorporated.
Pelkonen moved into his home on Widefield to avoid taxes. But he always assumed annexation was quick on his tail.
Twelve years later, he’s still living in the county.
A changing dynamic
Not once in nine years of county living has Brenda Faz-Villarreal found a reason to call the Sheriff’s Department for help.
“The neighborhood’s very quiet,” said Faz-Villarreal, who lives in a subdivision off of West Military Drive.
But crime is finding its way into what was once a rural area mainly occupied by mom-and-pop stores and ranchland.
Assaults in the western sheriff’s patrol districts went up 74 percent and burglaries shot up by 94 percent from 2005 to 2006. Sex crimes increased by 105 percent in the same time period, according to Morozoff.
This year a jury convicted Theodore Streater for the 2005 sexual assault of a mother and her young daughter in their home tucked inside a Bexar County subdivision across the street from North Side’s Ott Elementary and Luna Middle campuses on Grosenbacher Road.
“To most criminals, there’s no boundaries” Bexar County sheriff’s Capt. Rey Lujan said.
The county’s dynamics have changed, said Lujan, who commands the sheriff’s west substation, which operates out of a trailer at SeaWorld San Antonio off West Military Drive. New homes and street names appear so quickly now that his deputies sometimes get calls to respond to addresses that aren’t in the dispatch system.
Typically, one deputy watches over an entire patrol district per shift, Lujan said. Deputies are “constantly on the move,” or tied up on emergency calls, sheriff’s Lt. Dennis Casillas said.
Deputies usually average a 20-minute response time to less urgent, nonemergency calls, Sheriff Ralph Lopez said. Ideally, they shoot for a 10-minute response time.
By comparison, San Antonio Police Department officers working the city’s West Substation area responded to emergency calls in an average of 2.61 minutes last year, according to Public Information Officer Sandy Gutierrez. They made nonemergency calls in an average of 14.24 minutes.
The addition of the 15 new deputies helped shorten overall response times for all deputies working patrol. A performance study released to Commissioners Court last week showed that average response times dropped from 16 to 15 minutes for most deputies since manpower increased.
The study also showed property crimes dipped 3.6 percent in the county since the additional deputies were hired, according to Precinct 1 Commissioner Sergio “Chico” Rodriguez. Deputies also patrol less area -- 40 square miles instead of 48.
Even with these improvements, home buyers often don’t realize that life outside the city limits means accepting certain compromises.
“The expectations that people have, unfortunately, are not realistic if they want the same level of life safety protection,” said Elizondo, who added that a tax increase might be the only way to pay for more patrol officers in the county.
“We do not provide the same level of protection the city does,” he said. “There’s no way.”
Catch-up
Where Geronimo Village Assistant Fire Chief Brad Phipps once knew the names and faces of nearly everyone who attended the department’s barbecue fundraisers, more and more are strangers.
Last year, for the first time, the department gave up its annual Christmas tradition of driving firetrucks through area neighborhoods, a firefighter dressed as Santa Claus at the helm. It also no longer relies on homegrown fundraisers to make money since the department’s budget swelled from $75,000 a year to nearly $800,000 after formation of the Emergency Services District.
“It’s developed a whole lot,” said Phipps, whose father was chief here when he was a child. “We’re a lot better now than we were five years ago.”
Money from emergency services district pays for maintenance, manpower and equipment -- eight trucks, including two brush trucks, a rescue unit and a tanker filled with 3,000 gallons of water, for parts of the response area that still don’t have water hydrants, Phipps said.
Now at least four firefighters are on duty 24 hours a day. They can handle about 90 percent of the calls.
If help is needed, “you’d probably have 10 to 12 volunteers show up in five minutes,” Phipps said.
Last year, Geronimo Village responded to emergency calls in an average of 7.53 minutes. Partee, the Emergency Services District 2 treasurer, said they want to lower the average to five minutes.
Limited fire protection also can mean higher fire insurance rates.
With 1 considered the best rate, the emergency services district came back with an Insurance Services Office rating of 6 in neighborhoods with a water system and 9 in those without.
San Antonio maintains an ISO rating of 3, according to SAFD Assistant Chief Carl Wedige.
Partee noted Geronimo Village was named the county’s most progressive fire agency in 2004 by the Bexar County fire marshal’s office and again in 2006 by the Bexar County Firefighters’ Association. This is about an area that keeps growing.
“I have visions of Houston,” he said. “Oh my God, help us.”
Ironically, increasing the department’s size and resources will be slow-going until more residents and businesses move in, supplying the necessary tax base to pay for these improvements, Partee said.
“It seems like (with) emergency services, we’re always playing catch-up to what was already there,” Partee said.
The future
Phipps only needs to look out his window to see bulldozers tearing out trees to make way for the area’s newest subdivision next door to his station.
Partee can hear the changes in his neighborhood off Potranco Road, where the din of traffic has replaced the howls of coyotes.
Options are limited for county residents, Wolff said.
They could vote to create their own city governments.
They could fight for the creation of public improvement districts, like the one that funded the PGA golf course on the North Side.
Lujan said there is talk of requesting 15 more patrol deputies in 2007, including eight additional deputies for traffic. But Rodriguez, the county commissioner, said approval of more hires will come down to need.
“Unless we start hearing more and more it’s (crime) really out of hand, that’s when it gives you no other alternative but to go out on another tax, some kind of crime tax,” he said. “I don’t think we need that right now.”
Without a substantial tax base and precluding an annexation resurgence, Wolff predicts residents will remain without beefed-up public safety services for some time.
“Long term they’re going to be in trouble -- in terms of just about everything,” Wolff said.
Geronimo Village officials hope to build a station in the northern part of their district, near FM 471 at Old FM 471. And in the next two months, crews plan to break ground on construction of a fire station in the southern part of the district, near Cagnon Road around Loop 1604 -- not far from the site of the fires that devoured the Widefield Lane homes.
A station in the southern part of Geronimo Village’s coverage area is crucial, Partee said, because it is on one of the most populated areas of the county -- for now.
“Things are changing fast,” he said.