SAN DIEGO — San Diego has been slow to revamp how it monitors and removes flammable brush on city-owned land, despite a 2023 audit saying the city’s efforts are poorly coordinated and not comprehensive enough.

Brush management is considered a crucial strategy to help prevent the kind of large wildfires that have devastated the Los Angeles area in the last week and that destroyed thousands of San Diego County homes in 2003 and 2007.

The city’s slow progress comes just as the city auditor is planning to broaden his focus from brush management on city-owned land to brush management on private land, where property owners must follow city rules or face fines.

In the nearly 18 months since the critical audit, San Diego city officials have made only two of the seven policy and procedure changes it recommended — and neither of those was completed until last fall.

A plan to consolidate brush management efforts within the Parks and Recreation Department — instead of allowing 10 different city departments to handle those efforts individually — has run into budget and bureaucratic roadblocks.

City officials have struggled to identify exactly which areas would be handled by Parks and Rec and how other departments would compensate that agency for its efforts.

They said Tuesday that part of the problem is that they believe the audit overestimated how many acres with flammable brush they need to monitor.

The audit put that number at roughly 3,000, but city officials say they have determined it’s closer to 1,500 — 1,100 acres under Parks and Rec and 400 under other departments like Transportation, Libraries, Stormwater and others.

This is the first time since the 2023 audit that city officials have publicly raised concerns about its acreage estimates.

Andy Hanau, the city auditor, said Tuesday that one possible reason for the discrepancy could be that the city lacked a comprehensive list and map of all city-owned lands that require brush management when his staff was completing the audit.

“While we have not reviewed the map Parks and Recreation has recently developed, we are happy to see the city is working to build on the audit findings to refine its mapping so that the city has the best information possible to facilitate brush management efforts,” he said.

The 35-page audit found the city’s lack of consolidation of its brush management efforts had resulted in inconsistent and potentially ineffective work by some departments that oversee land with high fire risk.

The audit praised Parks and Rec for taking a comprehensive approach that includes “regular and effective” brush management — but it criticized Transportation and Public Utilities for policies that are “primarily reactive” and “generally less systematic.”

Another hurdle to consolidation, city officials say, is the need for more workers.

Parks and Rec is requesting two new employees — a biologist and a mapping analyst — to help avoid environmental damage and track brush management work that has been assigned and completed.

City officials said Tuesday they now expect to complete the consolidation by June — about one year after the target date they agreed to when the audit came out in 2023.

But that timing will depend on whether the City Council includes the necessary funding in the budget for the new fiscal year that begins July 1. Because the city is facing a roughly $300 million deficit, early budget discussions have focused more on what might be cut instead of what might be added.

The coming budget will also impact another recommendation the city hasn’t yet implemented: Parks and Rec taking over from Transportation the responsibility for brush management on so-called paper streets — planned streets that as of now exist only on paper. Parks and Rec says it needs a budget boost to make this happen.

One key audit recommendation still in flux is a plan to have the city’s Fire-Rescue Department start proactively monitoring and inspecting city-owned land in high-risk areas.

The audit called for San Diego to begin requiring Fire-Rescue officials to evaluate brush management work that has been performed by other departments and to provide publicly available reports on its evaluations.

The process is supposed to involve Fire-Rescue developing work plans with brush management goals for each department that manages land with flammable brush.

A spokesperson for Fire-Rescue said this week that the department couldn’t respond to questions about progress toward this goal because officials hadn’t yet completed an update due to the city auditor this Friday.

“Our report isn’t ready yet,” said the spokesperson, Monica Munoz.

In the most recent update from Fire-Rescue last summer, officials said they had begun identifying land managed by the city that is subject to brush management regulations.

Officials also said they have developed “a concept” that would allow city departments that handle brush to self-certify that their efforts have met city goals.

But they said finalizing such a process was an ongoing effort. They said a mapping specialist working with a deputy chief would create the self-certification tool and a portal for defensible space requirements by the end of 2024.

Fire-Rescue also said last summer that the department would need several new employees to conduct the kind of proactive monitoring and evaluation recommended in the audit. Those workers would include an information systems analyst, a wildfire program manager and 10 wildfire mitigation specialists.

The audit says the kind of proactive monitoring it recommends for Fire-Rescue is common for fire departments in other cities, citing Oakland and Santa Barbara as examples.

The only two audit recommendations that city officials have completed are an evaluation of contractors the city has used for some brush management work and the establishment of a brush management working group.

The working group, which began meeting in December 2023, includes all departments with significant brush management responsibilities.

The city’s limited progress on flammable brush has some San Diegans worried.

Clairemont resident Mitch Wagner told The San Diego Union-Tribune in an email Tuesday that the lack of proactive effort makes the city ripe for the same catastrophic wildfires engulfing parts of Los Angeles.

He and his neighbor, Derek Trent, submitted a comprehensive request for better brush management to the city in August 2023.

Cheryl Geyerman of University City also has complaints.

“It seems to me that there is little urgency by city government to aggressively clear brush and to urgently insist private property owners clear the brush on their property,” she said by email last week.

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