Truth Versus Cityhood Opponents' Claims
in Fire Department Mailer

This letter was sent by El Dorado Hills Fire Department Chief Larry Fry and Fire Captain David Roberts.
Original text of the letter is in black, annotations in red. This is a transcription to a web page format (html).
Here is an annotated scan of the original letter as an image file .

Chief Fry was a highly vocal supporter of the 2004 El Dorado County General Plan, which was chosen to maximize housing growth and minimize road system growth. He now chooses to advocate keeping our status quo for public safety, which involves no traffic patrol on surface streets.


Fire letter head
Dear El Dorado Hills Residents,

    Firefighters oppose Measure P.

    The Comprehensive Fiscal Analysis of a new city of El Dorado Hills shows population growing from 28,169 to 50,325 by the year 2015.
Truth:
This is growth that has already been imposed by the County, incorporating as a city adds no new growth..
We need to get control of our own land use policy and zoning.

    It also shows that the way to balance the new city's budget is to provide 1/2 the police public safety protection that Folsom provides.
Truth:
It shows that this is the level of service we get NOW from the County Sheriff. We now get no traffic patrol from the CHP, they have no resources to do it.
City police will give us both traffic patrol and general law enforcement, and city finances will allow increasing police service.

    Wildland fire protection costs us nothing now but it WILL cost us $216,000 a year if we incorporate.
Truth:
And it brings in $1.2 million in new revenue from gas taxes alone!
Our total budget averages $2.3 million surplus per year.

    We have enclosed the actual page from the Comprehensive Fiscal Analysis for your review.
Please read the rest of the CFA as well!

    Measure P does a great disservice to you, the residents, and those of us who are expected to protect you.
Truth:
It is our firefighters and the others in the political network of the El Dorado County real estate and construction interests who do us a great disservice.

By opposing Measure P they would have us continue without traffic patrol for our public safety, sacrifice tens of millions of dollars of our tax money over the next decade, and continue to be dominated by the "Greater Placerville" politicians.
Firefighters letter signatures

[sic:  Chief Fry's name is misspelled in the original letter.]

Ironically, in arguing for Measure B (the General Plan referendum) Chief Fry wrote "Opponents of Measure B aren't telling the truth. they're running a campaign based on fear, not fact." when opponents took care to base their arguments on the county's own documents. Please read the full CFA and judge for yourself whether in fact it is Chief Fry who is not telling the truth and is running a campaign based on fear, not fact.

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