San Diego isn’t effectively clearing flammable brush from private properties due to a haphazard inspection system that doesn’t include hefty fines and often fails to re-inspect properties deemed dangerous, a new city audit finds.
The audit also says the city hasn’t established productivity standards for its brush inspectors, which has helped lead to properties getting inspected once every eight to 10 years — much slower than the national standard of once every one to three years.
A recent shift to inspecting private properties from public spaces without actually going on-site is speeding up inspections, but the audit says it’s 30 times less likely to identify violations of brush rules than the old method.
Fire Chief Robert Logan acknowledged the accuracy of essentially all the findings in the 48-page audit and agreed to implement all 14 of the audit’s recommendations.
But in a 10-page response that was released Wednesday along with the audit, Logan said he won’t be able to fully comply with some of the recommendations without more money from the city for additional staff.
That’s similar to how the Fire-Rescue Department handled a highly critical 2023 audit of how the city coordinates brush management on city property, including in parks, wildlands and canyons.
Logan acknowledged Wednesday that he still hasn’t gotten the money from City Hall to hire three wildfire prevention specialists needed to centralize and modernize brush management efforts on city-owned land.
“The department still does not have any full-time staff dedicated to community outreach efforts or working with city staff responsible for city-owned land,” Logan said. “Without these positions, there continues to be no training, oversight or enforcement of city-owned property.”
The new audit focuses instead on brush management on private properties, which the city began inspecting proactively after the 2007 wildfires. Before that, inspections on private property were conducted only in response to complaints.
And perhaps because the city’s budget crisis has made money scarce, the audit focuses not on new programs but on helping fire officials do a better job with the resources they already have for brush management on private property — about $700,000 a year for seven employees.
The audit says the city’s inspection program focuses only on 45,000 properties of the 220,000 located in the city’s very high fire hazard severity zone.
The audit doesn’t criticize the city for not inspecting all 220,000 properties, acknowledging that it makes sense to prioritize the highest-risk properties in the highest-risk areas.
But the audit says the city isn’t handling inspections of those properties strategically or effectively. Inspectors choose their own routes without much supervision, which often leads to inefficient routing, it says.
“Inspection routes appear haphazard and skip parcels,” the audit says. “Inaccurate data and underutilization of system capabilities has led to some parcels receiving multiple inspections while others were not inspected at all.”
Under both inspection methods — on-site before early 2025, or inspecting from nearby public spaces since early 2025 — the city has failed to establish productivity goals for inspectors, leading to widely varying productivity among inspectors.
The audit also says bureaucratic protocols sometimes require inspectors to start their days at City Hall instead of in the field, costing them about 90 minutes of potential inspection time per shift.
The audit is highly critical of the city’s follow-up procedures for properties found to have violations.
“Of the 910 proactive inspections that identified violations between August 2020 and April 2025, only 747 — 82% — had a documented reinspection to verify compliance,” the audit said.
For properties that were found to have violations during inspections prompted by complaints instead of proactive city inspections, the re-inspection rate was dramatically lower at 46%.
The audit also criticizes the city for not trying to boost compliance by issuing fines.
“Despite having authority to impose non-compliance penalties and force abatement after repeated violations, Fire-Rescue assessed no penalties or reinspection fees from August 2020 through June 2025 — even in cases where violations persisted after multiple inspections,” the audit says.
The audit also notes that fines in San Diego are relatively low. San Diego charges $50 for a re-inspection, compared to $500 in Oakland, $555 in Beverly Hills and $764 in Los Angeles.
The audit was created by City Auditor Andy Hanau and his auditing staff, who operate independently from other city agencies so they can evaluate without interference.
The auditors said they chose to evaluate brush management on private property because of its importance to public safety.
“When property owners and/or residents do not maintain defensible space, they can put their neighbors and the larger community at greater risk of devastating wildfires,” the audit says.
In his response, Logan noted that the city began offering home-risk assessments for wildfires this year and is also among the first agencies in California to enforce new Zone Zero rules, which prohibit flammable items like landscaping within 5 feet of a home.
Those rules became effective in San Diego for new homes in February and will become effective next February for all homes in the city’s very high fire hazard severity zone.