Keep the fox out of our henhouse

Editor:

What people in the Town of Discovery Bay need to know when we had our own fire district, we were known as the Byron Fire District.

The firehouse on Discovery Bay Boulevard was paid for by the property owners here in Discovery Bay back in 1970.

We had a budget of $500,000 and at the end of each year we had money left over.

The county supervisors called a public meeting, just as a formality, in Brentwood. Our supervisor was Donna Gerber (in my opinion, our "misrepresentative"). It was a cut-and-dried deal before anyone in the audience could state their objection to consolidation.

Now they want to weigh in on a new "fire tax," and adopt a model that puts three fighters in the "four busiest stations" now and more firefighters in the future - when the economy improves and the public might be (asleep) more receptive to a tax. (Discovery Bay station will not be considered as one of the four busiest.)

Our County Supervisor Mary Piepho and our town directors need to give a good hard look at what the California Department of Forestry can provide.

When you compare with what we have now, with what we had before (1997), in my opinion, you can't get much lower.

Doing business with the county, I'd be very leery, like putting a fox in our henhouse, we'd end up losing every thing again - hen and eggs and our tax money.

Could they be thinking 10 years have passed and a lot of the old timers are gone and what old timers are left have forgotten? And all of the new property owners here, they would not know anything about the dirty deal we got from the county before.

I'm still here, and I haven't forgotten.

John E. Fritz