Saratoga News

Fire district works on ways to prevent accounting errors

By Sarah Lombardo

Saratoga Fire District officials said they are satisfied with efforts being made by Santa Clara County's finance director in the wake of news that county accounting errors left the district more than $300,000 in debt to the state.

"I think [director of finance William] Parsons is doing all he can," fire commissioner Jay Geddes said.

Geddes and Saratoga Fire District Chief Ernie Kraule met with Parsons March 2 to discuss his department's error, discovered by Parsons Feb. 19. The mistake is a result of a mixup in how much the district should have been paying to the state's Educational Revenue Augmentation Fund (ERAF), which is a redistribution of property taxes created in 1992 to help shift money to the state's schools after Proposition 13 left many short of funds. The district, according to Parsons, should have been paying more into the ERAF fund to the tune of $311,000.

In addition to resulting in a district debt owed to the state, the error means the district will owe about $87,000--or about 4.5 percent of the district's annual budget adopted last June, Parsons said--to the fund in future years.

Fire officials said they were interested in how the error was made and hoped to find ways of preventing future mistakes.

"We showed them worksheets and told them about the legislation," Parsons said. "We're going to work through this."

Parsons said the issue has been included in legislation introduced by Assemblyman Jim Cunneen and Sen. Byron Sher that would, in effect, forgive the debt, along with that of the Central Fire District, which owes the state more than $15 million as a result of similar accounting errors.

Parsons said if the debt is not forgiven, officials are hoping a payment plan will be created that will spread the debt over a long period of time.

Geddes said he felt confident that changes would be made to prevent a similar situation from happening again.

"He explained to us how he got in trouble," Geddes said. "My guess is there will be some changes."

Some of those changes have included staffing changes, according to Parsons.

The accounting error comes on the tail of news by fire district officials that they plan to put a bond issue on the Saratoga ballot in 1999 to fund the construction of a new firehouse at the corner of Saratoga Avenue and Los Gatos-Saratoga Road. The current facility is seismically unsafe, according to a 1994 engineer's report.

Kraule said those plans should not be affected by current county budget problems.

"It isn't something that will interfere with the growth of the district," he said.

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