Latest / KMUD News / Humboldt Wildfire Coordination Includes Millions of Dollars of Work in SoHum

Transcript

Humboldt Wildfire Coordination Includes Millions of Dollars of Work in SoHum · KMUD News

• 0:00
  Speaker A: A statewide program to coordinate wildfire resiliency is active in Humboldt county, including some major efforts in southern Humboldt. At its June 23 meeting, the county's Board of Supervisors got an update on Humboldt's participation in the Wildfire County Coordinator Team program. Humboldt's team is made up of staff from the county's Department of Public Works, Natural Resources Division and the County Resource Conservation District. The program began in 2021 with three state grant awards and the funding has been extended through October 2027, according to a written staff report. The goal of the program is to educate, encourage and develop countywide community collaboration and coordination among wildfire mitigation groups. Southern Humboldt represents a significant part of the effort, Jill Demers of the Resource Conservation District said The district has $30 million of grant funding for a forest health and wildfire resilience program alone. She said among the areas where landscape scale projects are being done is southern Humboldt.
• 1:14
  Speaker B: We were able to then leverage several implementation grants being the North Coast Resource Partnership's Cal Fire Forest Health Pilot for a little under a million dollars and a new forest health grant that was awarded not long ago of about $5.3 million. The planning grants we were able to leverage to get environmental compliance covering about 45,000 acres of land. So again, large project, large scale, and the implementation funding to date is really only treating about 3,000 acres of it. So you can see that the project need and the cost right now are really high and we are actively looking for ways to continue to work with the community to steward this this kind of work and without having to bring in tens of millions of dollars. But again, we are happy to do so to get even more acres treated. This is a grant that is a U.S. forest Service grant, a Community Wildfire Defense Grant, and it requires an active CWPP and it requires it to be active within the last updated in the last 10 years. So while the timeline is a little flexible from the state level, it's still getting that 2019 plan done in the next couple years will be really critical so that the county can keep on leveraging these kind of grant funds. This is just one award that we've received from this grant funding source and this is almost $10 million award again for Southern Humboldt.
• 2:36
  Speaker A: The Community Wildfire Defense Grant is further explained here by Demers.
• 2:40
  Speaker B: This is the final grant I'll speak about in the Southern Humboldt area. This is a Community Wildfire Defense grant. Again treatment of about 2,000 acres, about 100 homes. There was a roadside FUE reduction projects and shaded field breaks. Additionally, those Prescribed fire projects, leveraging the PBA and other partnerships. Those are really critical for long term maintenance, environmental compliance and future planning support, as well as education and outreach. I'll note that there are a lot of organizations involved with this. Even though this is an award to the rcd, this grant wouldn't be possible or really any of the grants without the Southern Humboldt partners, who are just very numerous, really active and engaged community. Really a lot of folks that have offered access to their land for planning and implementation, and then a lot of folks with a lot of volunteer time, professional resources to make this work happen. With Southern Humboldt and then also with
• 3:41
  Speaker A: the Fire Safe Council, Some outside the box thinking was advanced by supervisor Rex Bone, who vouched for property tax breaks to homeowners who do wildfire protection work on their properties. Supervisor Steve Madrone acknowledged that the county would have to get state support on doing that, but said incentivizing wildfire work is key to avoiding impacts.
• 4:04
  Speaker C: We have always been leaders with our community wildfire protection plan and other kinds of things being out in front of the curve there. And I absolutely agree with what supervisor Von was saying is, is there a way to engage more incentives, you know, because we'll never have enough grant money to do all the work we need to do. But there is a huge amount of money in the private sector, right? There's more money in the private sector than there is in the public sector. Always will be. So when we can leverage the private sector investment, now we're really starting to expand tremendously. And I think the whole idea of a property tax reduction for doing fuel reduction work or even roadside vegetation maintenance is a very worthy concept. And I applaud supervisor Bone for suggesting it. I think, you know, it obviously has to happen at the state level. It's beyond all of our pay grades because property taxes are governed by the state. But we would be saving money hand over fist to put tax credits or property tax reductions out in front in the equation compared to the cost of the August complex or any number of other fires we can point to. And the cost of that not only in, you know, loss of forest and habitat and everything else, but lives, you know, and property.
• 5:23
  Speaker A: Sibel Emmett of the DPW's Natural Resources Division highlighted capacity building such as creating new firewise community groups. She said the Wildfire county coordinator team works with the county's Fire Safe Council as the program works on, quote, building a lot of energy around working with our communities to become more wildfire resilient. In Eureka for KMUD News, this is Daniel Metz.