County’s Open Space Plan Underscores Tension Between Fire Safety, Vegetation

Over the course of several hours at the Marin Board of Supervisors’ meeting Tuesday afternoon, Marin County Open Space District officials and consultants laid out a 380-page report on how they plan to manage the county’s 16,000 acres of open space, hoping to support biodiversity and stave off non-native species without jeopardizing the safety of the thousands of homes adjacent to that open space throughout Marin.

Exactly how to do so will be the subject of plenty of discussion over the next many months, as the report itself pushes back on the need for “fire breaks,” where thick, fire-fueling vegetation is cleared along ridgelines on district land near homes. The report says that current fire policy in the county, which calls for the “construction of an additional 70 miles of fuelbreaks,” “would result in a 10-fold increase in direct loss of native vegetation, and in associated costs of maintaining access and managing fuel loads, in the Marin County preserves in less than 20 years.”

The report concludes that “a new approach to addressing these issues is warranted by the recent advances in the science of vegetation management, the severity of the threats facing natural resources on (district) lands, and the magnitude of environmental changes anticipated to occur over the next few decades due to climate change.”

Fire officials said they’ve already met with district officials and look forward to continuing to do so to make sure the right balance is struck between the two priorities of the two entities.

“We’re not going to compromise the public safety by any means,” County Fire Chief Jason Weber said. “That’s of paramount importance – that’s really what it comes down to.”

“We’re very committed to having input into the planning process,” added Mill Valley Fire Chief Jeff Davidson, whose city abuts hundreds of acres of open space. “We’re very excited about being able to help the district find that balance between community safety and fire safety and biodiversity and the environmental issues.”

In presenting the plan, consultant Loren May, whose firm May & Associates Inc. drafted the plan at a cost of $407,000 to the county, emphasized that the plan “does not provide specific prescriptions," "does not constitute unilateral decisions” and “doesn’t tell you what to do but informs you on how to decide what to do – you have to follow a system for making decisions.”

She said the plan involves a ranking system incorporating a wide range of criteria, and that county officials will come up with a system to rank vegetation management projects for inclusion in the district's annual budget, which is approved by the board.

Dave Bacon, the founder of San Diego-based wildland fire prevention consulting firm FireWise 2000, told the supervisors that the fire service industry is evolving away from creating ridgeline fuel breaks in favor of defensible space areas around areas of development. Fire officials in Marin have long called for both strategies to be used in conjunction with one another.

“The cost benefit wasn’t there (for fire breaks),” Bacon told the board. “It was costing more to build and maintain these things than the budget could stand. We need to invest our money more wisely” by “treating the fuel hazard itself as a compartment or watershed instead of putting it in this box.”

In areas of heavy winds and strong fire fuel, “fires burned across those (breaks) as if those breaks weren’t even there,” Bacon said.

The board accepted the report and kicked off a lengthy process  that includes a 30-day public comment period and an environmental review that is scheduled to last until late 2014. But in doing so, they stressed the need to prioritize public safety above all else.

“If one of fire agencies was asking to cooperate in a (Wildland-Urban Interface) zone where there was a lot of property with people, we should try to find a way to make sure that those kinds of projects are given the importance,” Supervisor Susan Adams said. “We live in a high fire fuel area.”

When Supervisor Judy Arnold asked district officials about who exactly would be the agency in the driver’s seat when it came to proposing vegetation management projects, Elise Holland, the district’s director of planning and resources, hinted at the tension in balancing its own priorities of biodiversity and fighting non-native plant species with the need to protect the homes around its lands from a wildfire.