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Well good morning everyone and thank you for inviting me to talk about the
Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire program. I know some of you are
already familiar with the program and may have seen me or one of my colleagues
present on this so I tried to spruce this presentation up with some new
information to keep your attention throughout the webinar. Again my name is
Molly Mowery. I manage a company called Wildfire
Planning International or WPI. We partner with High Waters Economics on the CPAW
program and together we deliver community-based services that support
land use planning in the WUI. So I heard the question or the desire earlier
to interest to you know look at how these all these programs fit together
under the FAC umbrella and we see CPAW one just you know one of those
complementary programs to support FAC. I'm a trained and certified land use
planner through the American Institute of Certified Planners and I've been
engaged in WUI planning for the past ten years. I also just want to give a
quick shout out. I'm joined by another CPAW team member here today. Ben
Yellen. I think he's the only one I see on the webinar so if there's anybody
else just say hi in the chat box. Okay so quick lets see here quick overview of what we're
going to cover today is why we even need a program like CPAW, how it works on the
ground and what are some community examples that we can learn from and have
been learning from so far with CPAW? I hope there's time at the end what for
questions. So I'll try and keep things moving forward. So why do we need better
land-use planning in the wildland urban interface? You know in other words why do
we need a CPAW program since that's what our focus is. What I find is that there's a very
common narrative that really shares how today's wildfire problems are a result
of decades of fire suppression and you know different forest management
practices in the past that may not conform to what we now know of as better
forest management practices. And while that
is definitely true I think there's a parallel story that's often been
overlooked through the past centuries. So since this country was founded, the
federal, state and local government decisions have in many cases allowed and
even encouraged people to build towns and cities and homes in wildfire prone
areas without any real forethought to what happens when or if a wildfire were
to occur. So we've created these built environments across the country that has
resulted in many diverse, dynamic and challenging WUI situations. Some of the
current WUI trends contributing to this dynamic complexity are an
increasing population, changing lifestyles, preferences for living in
nature or even finding affordable housing. You know it's not just people
escape to nature but there are certainly many cases where our suburbs are growing
outward to be more affordable for many people. There's also in some cases you
know lack of not the desire to regulate ourselves or impose private property
regulations. Which is a contributing factor for the differences across the
different WUIs and then of course there's a misconception that suppression
will put out our fires. So you know we get ourselves in a situation where we
don't really look at other mitigation aspects of the WUI as a
necessity. But I would argue that our lack of planning is starting to catch up
with us. Most of us are probably familiar with these trends. More structures are
burning as a result of wildfire. This slide is a little bit outdated. I've been
asking the Rocky Mountain Research Station for an upcoming one
since I know they're working on it. But the point of this slide is to also
underscore that these losses are occurring across the country and the
other outcome we see is that suppressing these wildfires are also eating up more
federal budget dollars every year so we know that that's creating an
unsustainable and unpredictable budgeting situation.
And I'd be remiss I know again this is a very educated audience on this webinar
but I just want to acknowledge the countless other impacts that our
communities incur when we experience wildfires. So in order to support
communities in addressing these complexities specifically associated
with planning in the WUI, Headwaters Economics and WPI created a program
called the Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire program or CPAW. This is a
national program. It's only a few years old. But we deliver WUI planning
services at no charge to communities. And this is all on a voluntary basis with
the communities. This slide shows our model. We work with foresters, land use
planners, researchers, economists and scientists to work with communities to
provide these services. On the community side we engage with many different
stakeholders. Primarily though it's fire and planning departments are our main
points of contact. And our program is funded through the Forest Service and
private foundations. So since 2014 we've been working with communities across the
country in varying capacities to support there WUI planning efforts
as shown here. I know that a few of you the names I recognize on this webinar today
so you know please feel free if you want to put your name in the chat box and
share if you're part of the CPAW program it'd be great. So how does this
work exactly? I just want to kind of quickly walk through the basic
steps of the program and give you a sense especially if you or if you're
interested for your community if you know other communities that may want to
engage in this opportunity in the future. So communities first must apply to CPAW
in order to receive assistance. This information is available on our website.
This is not a picture of the homepage, it's a picture of the application page.
And so our annual application cycle opens in late summer and any community
that has the it is the authority having jurisdiction can apply. So typically to
date that's then counties and cities. We cannot work with HOAs.
We work with them through the CPAW process but they're not a direct
recipient. Communities are competitively selected and you know based on what
they're looking for, we identify the level and type of need. So once selected,
our typical planning process and I say typical because this does vary a little
bit from community to community but our typical process is one full year. And
during that year long process we work with a number of stakeholders to
identify and discuss WUI planning challenges. We also spend a good deal of
time reviewing the community's planning and fire-related codes and policies and
we make several site visits to work with stakeholders and you know during our
interest on the ground and you know talk through some of these topics. With
several of our communities we also provide a risk assessment. And that's
currently provided through the U.S.. Forest Service. We consider a number of
different planning tools throughout this process and we either make direct
recommendations on how to use them or we make connections within
the community. So for example, we look at you know how can communities better plan
for their subdivisions and we look at whether WUI risk is incorporated into the
subdivision regulatory process. So for example is there secondary access
required? Is there a vegetation management plan to ensure that hazardous
fuels are removed before development occurs? What kind of landscaping is being
required for long-term maintenance and what kind of roads or driveways are
allowed? What's the grading or width etc? And we also look at you know where are homes
being sited if there are topographical considerations. So these are the type of
questions that we start really digging into when we look into policies and plans.
But they're looking at the details because we know on a surface level these
tools work well but unless you get down into the weeds and what the actual
standards say or the policies for that matter, it's really hard to know how to
change them. And that's where we come in. So at the end of the process,
ultimately we come up with three different things. One is that we present
communities with a final report of customized recommendations and when I
say there's more than one thing it's because I believe that not only is this
report useful but this whole CPAW process is really a
capacity-building process you know. So some of our you know communities
throughout the process, we offer trainings, we offer discussions, we offer
ways for the community stakeholders in the planning and fire
departments and other organizations and agencies to understand why we're doing
this. And at the end of the process, some of our communities have now quote
"graduated" from the first year and so we're finding other ways to support them
through ongoing implementation. I do want to be clear that CPAW is not mandatory.
There's no way that we can you know make anyone do anything. So what we do is we
provide our recommendations that are all voluntary and you know we'll get into
this in a few minutes but a lot of what happens is, communities take our
recommendation so far and they say "oh yes we like this" or "well we like
that but we're not going to do it right now." and "well that's a good
recommendation but it really doesn't fit where we want to go now." So
it's ultimately up to the community. It's also not an emergency management plan
but there are other practitioners that are really good at doing that already
and we don't interfere with that process. It's not one-size-fits-all.
We don't copy and paste recommendations from one community to the next. While
some of them may actually look similar on the surface, they aren't similar in
the details. And then finally, it's not fuel treatment planning.
You know we reserve that for the appropriate venues and stakeholders as
well. So I wanted to give a couple examples. As I said, some of these
recommendations may look similar from the outside but I think it's really
exciting as we're starting to see now some of the communities that have gone
through the process or are going through the process currently and
what they're working on or how they started implementing some of their
recommendations. So I broke this up into four just general categories for us to
go through and this doesn't mean all of the recommendations fit in one of these
four but these are some of the themes so it's an easier way to organize it. So
last year we worked with the city of Bend Oregon and Bend's in the county of
Deschutes and there is a Greater Bend CWPP that the city was a part
of. The Greater Bend CWPP includes or it serves eight different communities at
risk and this included the core Bend if you will, which is the city in
the downtown core. And while we found that the Greater Bend CWPP identified
really good priorities and strategies for hazardous fuel reduction and
improving fire protection capabilities and activities that at a general level it
didn't really get into the weeds for a comprehensive set of actions for the
city to have them really have that specific guidance to ensure measurable
risk reduction. So you know as we worked with the city stakeholders we
recommended that they look at and create a Bend specific CWPP.
And this could be an addendum to the Great Urban CWPP or it could be you know
its own freestanding document. But we encouraged them that this was an
opportunity to focus more on local risk factors and prioritize actions really
unique to their city scale. This would also encourage local and ongoing
stakeholder discussions at the city level because they didn't have a city
like a council if you will, of wildfire stakeholders that regularly got together.
So we saw this as a really necessary coordinating mechanism for their
activities. And you know this could also promote greater coordination with other
land-use planning activities. The city recently went through an urban growth
boundary expansion that was finally successful after many many years the
annexation process. And we thought one of the things
that came out of that process is that they weren't they were interested in how
wildfire risk should be considered in the annexation process and what new
development would be required to go through any kind of mitigation in some
of the areas especially in the western part of the city. But they didn't
have anything on the books to really address that. So we helped them through
that process to think about it. But we also it was one more reason to
encourage a CWPP because we said look you know this ongoing planning can help
you have you know look out for these opportunities and really link land use
planning and wildfire risk reduction planning together on a more regular
basis not just as it comes up. So of the recommendations that we made to
Bend we prioritized this one because we said this is really a starting point for
you know, if you're going to move forward, we think this is the right place
to start. And since then they have been beginning to have discussions on
developing a CWPP. And again I want to make this clear that
this was not intended to be at odds with the regional CWPP planning
in any way. You know we know that locally the county and the Project Wildfire
efforts are fantastic and we saw this more as an opportunity to encourage and
prompt the city's momentum moving forward to play a greater role within
this you know regional context. So anyway it's been encouraging to see the city
move forward with one of the recommendations already. Another one,
another example that we work with communities on that often comes up, is a
comprehensive plan and I picked out the city of Wenatchee for this. We also
worked with them last year and the irony with the city of Wenatchee Washington
was we found they already had really fantastic regulations in place but
ironically wildfire was largely absent from their primary comprehensive
planning document which is called the Wenatchee Urban Area plan. So since 2006
when the plan was last updated, fires have occurred that have directly
affected the city. So the timing now that they're
going through is an update to their comprehensive plan and the timing was
really perfect for us to make our recommendations to include wildfire into
the plan update. So since we made a series of recommendations on different
ways they could start thinking about you know which elements they could mention
wildfire, how they wanted to organize their new plan and and make wildfire
part of that, they have created a draft update to their urban area plan that's
available on their website and is out for public review and comment. And so
these are just still in their draft phase but since our recommendations have
what the city has done in terms of moving forward is incorporate wildfire,
again this is just a draft but the draft has wildfire incorporated into
their natural environment element. So this is one element within their urban
area plan. And this element now includes a brief but good background on wildfire. It
also includes a new draft goal and corresponding policies. So just to give
you a quick flavor of you know what those what that's about is the draft
goal has been added to acknowledge the impacts that wildfires have on the
Wenatchee Valley and seek to develop and implement approaches to adapt to the
risks of wildfires making the city of Wenatchee a more fire-adapted community.
And some of their policies include coordinating with regional stakeholders,
review and revising the development code based on CPAW recommendations and
stakeholder and public input, to consider allowing design deviations for primary
WUI zones so they can have greater fire resistant construction methods and
linking transportation to improve circulation and access for effective
emergency response capabilities in public safety.
So all this is to say that you know what the city is really moving forward is their
you know now creating ways to support future work and we really encourage this
because what we see is that communities are interested and their
taking proactive steps in wildfire but when they have of policies in their
comprehensive plan it's a lot easier to stand in front of City
Council or the Board of County Commissioners and say "You know our plan,
our city, our community's vision supports this and in order to be consistent with
the plan, we want to or need to move these activities forward." So that is a
City of Wenatchee example. I also wanted to just go up the road from Wenatchee. We
worked with the City of Chelan, which is a smaller community, also in Chelan
County and during the process we worked with them, we you know this is another
typical recommendation as to help communities really delineate what is
their WUI and where could recommendations apply. So if they're
going to pursue recommendations and they don't have any yet, they need to know
what's the applicability and what's the rationale? So in this case we worked with
them to provide a risk assessment and make recommendations for regulations. I
think Patrick may have mentioned this during his presentation that during the
well he mentioned the Chelan Complex in 2015 and the number of fires that the
region has recently seen. And during that particular fire the
City of Chelan lost several orchard processing warehouse facilities in
addition to homes. So this was a huge economic impact for a small community.
And the reason why these warehouse facilities burned was because they had
thousands of wooden crates stacked outside of warehouses. And so what we
found in working with them as we said, well ironically right down the road
while we've been working with the City of Wenatchee, we saw that the City of
Wenatchee had an ordinance for outdoor storage of combustible materials. So our
team, in addition to a number of other recommendations, said you know we would
recommend you review and consider adopting a similar ordinance. We also talked with them about revising
landscaping requirements to better promote wildfire safety such as requiring the
use of low flammability native plant species in lieu of some of the other
predominant species that we were seeing. And so that's all to say that at this point,
the city has taken these and other recommendations forward
is pursuing the adoption of a WUI code which incorporates many of our CPAW
recommendations and obviously will be tailored to the city's needs. Our final
example is more in the capacity-building side with the current community we're
working in which is Huerfano County Colorado. Huerfano County is the
second poorest county in Colorado. It's very rural. There's very limited staff,
one planner also serves as the chief building official. They've been trying to
fill another planning position. There's also one wildfire mitigation coordinator
which is a grant funded position too. So I think sometimes there's a perception
that communities that pursue wildfire planning and regulations are you know
have their on, that they certainly are on the cutting edge but that they
have the capacity to do this. And this is a common challenge we see coming up is
well if we create this how are we if we create a planning regulation, how are we
going to enforce it? So one of the things we've been really
excited to work with Huerfano County on is is exploring what that capacity
looks like to move this forward. Because they came to us in the application
process and said "We want a WUI code. We know we have future or we know we
have existing subdivisions that may not be you know they may not be regulated
through the WUI code because they already exist but you know as we start
thinking further down the road we want to look at the limitations that we have
on our response and suppression capabilities and we want a WUI code
to support that." Because these are very rural areas. In some cases the response
time by volunteers is an hour or longer. And as you can see from some of these
pictures you know you have highly flammable vegetation in remote areas
that is certainly going to burn quite quickly and especially if it takes up to
an hour and there's very limited water supplies, they really see the code as
something that supports their capacity in the long run. So you know I wanted to
just share in the words of the local wildfire mitigation coordinator,
for them CPAW is a fresh emphasis on the importance of planning for fire adapted
communities development and a framework for stimulating and guiding constructive
discussions on their WUI intermix. You know it touches on building, land-use,
planning zoning codes and WUI hazard mitigation planning and economic
development strategies etc. And by that he means that it's really bringing
together as a focal point, things that they've been trying to talk about with
stakeholders for a while but having this outside team come in and really gather
stakeholders together to talk about some of these issues has been extremely
helpful for them and really serving at the capacity building process
in and of itself. So quickly, resources I wanted to let you all know that you can
go online at planningforwildfire.org and we have all the community profiles
up there and so you can actually click on them and look at the recommendations.
They're all posted there if you really want to get into the weeds and see what
some of these things say in the fine print. And then we also have a couple
WUI trainings and courses coming up that may be of interest to you or anyone
you know. The first one is specific through CPAW, the Western Planner. We're
doing a one-day pre-conference WUI training as part of a Western Planner
conference. You don't have to sign up for the whole conference. It's in Spearfish,
South Dakota. You can just come I think it's $50 for the day for the pre- conference WUI CPAW training.
And that information is on our website and then just a shout out to a couple
recent FEMA courses that piloted that I worked on with a
couple other colleagues. One of them also from CPAW. We develop and it very much
is a complement to the CPAW work we do. It's the there's an introduction to
WUI land use planning. There's now an intro to adopting WUI regs and an
intro to WUI evacuation planning. So if you're interested in that it's a neat
opportunity. These are all two-day courses offered through FEMA and the
National Fire Academy and I don't know when they'll next be scheduled but
again it's a deeper dive into this topic if its something that really appeals to
you. So I tried to leave time I successfully left a few minutes for
questions and discussion. It looks like Marie had a question on typical team
size and makeup and I think that was applicable to this this section of the
webinar. So I just will respond to that quickly. Our typical team size on our end
is it varies anywhere from usually three to five of us go out to a community and
have a designated team. It does vary a little bit but it's you know one
representative from Headwaters Economics you know really focused on the policy
and research side. It would be typically myself and or another land use planner
that we may use as a contractor. Ben Yellin as I mentioned is my colleague. He's
also a trained planner who comes on some of our with our communities on the team.
And we have a forester and fire behavior analyst, Kelly Johnston, who we also work
with very closely as a core team member. So we have our core team and we then
work also with the U.S. Forest Service more recently in the past year to come
out and provide information to communities on the risk assessment
process. And you know it's a small team and it's small on purpose
because we also in this process really work closely with the local expertise
from the fire department and planning department. So we you know we look at
this as something where we come in and can then bring outside national
expertise but we really like to leverage the on-the-ground you know expertise as
well. In some ways I consider that part of our team in the process. Great I
see Marie another question. Do we consider post fire threat? We do to some
extent. We really encourage that in the overall messaging of the CPAW
presentations as one of the reasons why it's important. We have encouraged some
communities, they're a little bit more I would say in position to consider this,
is whether or not they have ordinances for post fire or post disaster
redevelopment. Often in fact, I don't think we've worked with any communities
yet that really even consider it. So we think of that as a starting point to
look at you know in the case of a wildfire disaster have they considered
how quickly they would be able to rebuild and under what conditions? And so
there's a couple neat examples out there. Larimer County Colorado does have a
post disaster redevelopment, they have regulations in their ordinance to
consider this very thing and so I think it's a good question. It's
not very well or it's not often seen but it's a good best practice that we do try
to encourage. I guess I just wanted to also reinforce I normally include a FAC slide
with the all of the different rays of the sunrise graphic that probably many
of you are familiar with and I think it's a neat slide because it shows how
plans and codes and ordinances really one of the often overlooked rays on the
sunrise graphic. But I think it also shows that this is a complement to all
of the other good work that everyone else is doing in terms of mitigation and
outreach and so it's very much part of the process as opposed to a new program
duplicating anyone elses efforts. Yeah thanks for that Molly and it's a really
important point.
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