A watchdog panel says in a new report that San Diego’s fire department needs to make changes to cure its inspection backlog of thousands of buildings, including recruiting civilian fire inspectors and collaborating with other agencies.
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All local fire agencies must conduct annual fire safety inspections of schools, hotels and multifamily housing under a 2018 state law enacted after the deadly Ghost Ship fire killed 36 people at a concert in an Oakland warehouse.
But unlike other fire departments, San Diego Fire-Rescue has perpetually failed to comply with that law, The San Diego Union-Tribune found in an investigation last year.
The department completed only 58% of required annual fire inspections during the 2026 fiscal year, according to the city’s draft budget for the 2027 fiscal year. In 2025 the department completed only 50%, and in 2024 only 42%.
In the 2025 fiscal year, the fire department completed 75% of required school fire inspections and 47% of required hotel, motel and multifamily inspections, the department told the civil San Diego County Grand Jury. All told, more than 4,300 residential properties and about 100 schools were not inspected that year.
What’s more, there are hundreds of properties that the department must inspect but doesn’t even know about because its building inventory database is so outdated, as the Union-Tribune found last year.
It appears that’s still true. About 700 properties the city is required to inspect are missing from the department’s inspection database, the agency told the grand jury. Most of those are multifamily buildings.
These problems with the city’s fire inspections aren’t new, the grand jury published Friday.
in 2010 found that the fire department was not completing all required inspections of hazmat facilities, high-rises and other facilities. The audit also found the department’s data systems used in tracking inspections were outdated, inaccurate and incomplete.
“The lack of timely inspections, reliable data systems and practices, increases the risk of fire resulting in the loss of property or worse, the loss of life,” the audit stated.
The audit made more than a dozen recommendations for improving the city’s fire inspection compliance, including steps to ensure inspection database accuracy and increase personnel for handling inspections.
But 16 years later, the department has failed to fully implement recommendations, the grand jury said. Some longtime department officials were unaware of the audit.
“We were surprised that so little had been accomplished from the earlier audit report from 2010 and we were also surprised that the fire department hasn’t come up with more creative ways of staffing,” grand jury member and La Mesa resident Barry Levine said in an interview.
San Diego Fire-Rescue has attributed the inspection backlog to its perpetual understaffing.
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But also part of the problem, the grand jury report said, is that the firefighters union’s agreement with the city says the department cannot hire any civilian inspectors. The union’s contract says all inspectors must be sworn firefighters.
The grand jury said the department should be allowed to hire civilian inspectors, who are paid less than sworn inspectors and would help address the understaffing.
Department leaders told the grand jury they would support changing that language; the union did not answer the grand jury’s questions about doing so.
Much, if not most, of fire inspectors’ time is spent not on the actual inspections but on administrative tasks like tracking down property owners.
The grand jury recommends the department hire more administrative assistants, who cost less than sworn firefighters, to help track down owners and their contact information, schedule inspections and follow-ups and arrange inspectors’ driving routes.
The grand jury said the department should work with the county assessor and the city treasurer to ensure their inspection inventory database is accurate — something that other fire departments do.
The 2010 city audit said the fire department should establish such a policy, and the department agreed to do so at the time — but the department still has not implemented that change, the grand jury noted.
The fire department also needs to be more transparent about its inspection compliance, the grand jury found. The jury commended other local fire agencies, including Heartland, Chula Vista and Oceanside, for producing detailed annual reports outlining their inspection compliance data.
Finally, the grand jury wants the San Diego City Council and fire department to set a “realistic timeline” for full compliance with SB 1205.
It also wants school districts with schools in the city to review fire inspection reports annually.
A fire department spokesperson declined to comment on the grand jury report Monday.
The City Council, Mayor Todd Gloria, the County Board of Supervisors and the county assessor are required to respond to the jury’s recommendations within 90 days. The jury also asked for responses from the fire department, city treasurer and local school boards.
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