New plan’s focus shifts away from fire-adapted forests to involving residents in hardening homes and neighborhoods against fire

By Sydney Seymour, Ashland.news

Two decades after it last adopted a wildfire protection plan, the Ashland City Council is due to consider whether to approve a vastly revised plan on Tuesday, Aug. 19.

As wildfires increasingly devastate urban centers and threaten the loss of entire towns — like Lahaina, Hawaii, Paradise, California, and, of course, the 2020 Almeda Fire — Ashland’s focus for wildfire protection has shifted.

The city’s 2004 Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) emphasized wildlands and fire-adapted forests. Moving away from that, Ashland’s nearly 400-page 2025 CWPP prioritizes community engagement and urban preservation.

To bring Ashland down from the top 3% of communities in the U.S. at risk from wildfire, the area must become “a fuel break — not a fuel source,” the plan says.

Only 15% of homes currently meet wildfire-resistant construction standards in Ashland, the plan states. To meet the plan’s goal of 90% wildfire-resistant properties by 2036, it estimates it will cost about $8 million a year, split among the city, community groups and property owners over 10 years, with the expectation some funding will come from state, federal and private foundation sources in the form of grants or matching funding.

In addition to sustained funding, meaningful progress requires community buy-in, a coordinating body and a trained workforce.

“There’s nobody in Ashland that doesn’t have a role in this,” Chris Chambers, Ashland Fire & Rescue’s forestry officer, said.

Taking into account an overextended city staff and the overwhelming task of preparing communities for an extreme wildfire, it will be a collective effort. Businesses, nonprofits, educational institutions and individual residents in Ashland and the surrounding areas will have to take part in the efforts to preserve the community against the threat of catastrophic wildfire.

The plan calls for a “paradigm shift” from reactive response and individual voluntary compliance to proactive and accountable actions that prioritize long-term resilience and shared responsibility, whether you live right next to town or out in the woods.

“We just can’t keep doing business as usual,” Chambers said. “We need a massive project to give our town a facelift and educate people to be ready for the next Almeda Fire day coming in the future.”

Efforts extend beyond Ashland

Chambers said that more than 100 individuals from various organizations in the Southern Oregon region provided advice in creating the plan, surveys of residents informed it and public comments helped in revising it. Thus, he said, the 2025 CWPP is “not meant to be a plan from the city government, but a plan from the community.”

The plan “pushes the boundary” on community engagement, which is vital in terms of reducing wildfire risk for urban configurations, said wildfire risk assessment volunteer Charrise Sydoriak, who became the lead researcher and author of the 2025 plan.

“Community members are the key to all of this,” Sydoriak said. “They’re the ones that need to drive the process — not the city — and figure out how to make themselves and their homes more fire-resilient.

“This isn’t all Ashland-focused, but we are collectively, as a coordinating body, sharing similar information across municipalities, which wasn’t happening before. The development of the CWPP and demonstrating that we can partner has been a big win here.”

Chambers explained that Ashland doesn’t have the capacity to respond with only its resources, which is why they are working with departments across Jackson and Josephine counties.

“We’re starting to knit together pieces of the landscape into cohesive areas where we have a better opportunity to manage wildfire,” Chambers said. “All the way from the Siskiyou summit to Jacksonville is now stitched together with fuel reduction projects. We’re really wanting to accelerate that work and the big limiting factor is just funding.”

Funding $8 million a year for 10 years

The Community Wildfire Protection Plan has 44 challenge statements and over 220 initiatives, Chambers said. He added: “It’s not going to be cheap, and it’s not going to happen overnight.”

The only money currently available is from the city government’s wildfire risk reduction fee, which, starting July 1, increased to $7 from $3 per month added on Ashland residents’ water bills to support wildfire mitigation efforts. The fee will increase every year based on inflation.

Chambers said the fee is projected to generate $1.9 million over the next two years. That is expected to cover the staff expenses of the city’s Wildfire and Community Risk Reduction Division for two years, support forest management projects to reduce wildfire risk and fund protection plan priorities.

If the plan is adopted by the City Council on Aug. 19, the next steps are to apply for external funding, create a plan for spending and build partnerships to ensure implementation of the plan.

The plan’s team is currently forming budget proposals and spending outlines, prioritizing critical resources the community “can’t afford to lose because it will make recovery that much more difficult,” Chambers said. Those are outlined in the plan as high-value resources and assets, and include schools, the hospital, and cell towers.

By the end of 2025, the team hopes to assess opportunities for funding sources outside of the city government’s fee, such as state and federal grants. And it plans to establish a working group of funding partners to implement the plan.

Sydoriak emphasized the importance of developing a Fire Safe Council or another coordinating body to keep the plan alive. She spoke of revising the plan annually to ensure actions remain relevant and efficient, something the city has not done in the past, she said.

Including renters and vulnerable populations

Unlike the 2004 plan, which briefly mentions single-family households, the 2025 CWPP aims to provide equitable access to wildfire services and resources — specifically for renters, who make up nearly half of Ashland’s community and have little control over property-level wildfire risk, and socially vulnerable populations who may lack access to information about wildfire preparedness.

The socially vulnerable include low-income individuals, those experiencing housing insecurity, people with disabilities, single parents, residents of multifamily homes and limited-English-speaking households.

To ensure better communication and improved strategies on how those groups can prepare for wildfire, the CWPP includes preparedness initiatives rooted in research that surveyed where members of vulnerable residents and renters in the Ashland area stand in regard to wildfire safety, preparedness and recovery.

“We really have to meet them where they are,” Chambers said. The CWPP team, he said, hopes to host events in places those groups frequent and build partnerships to help overcome distrust of government.

“If we understood their voice,” Sydoriak said, “we might be able to help them become better prepared for a life of wildfire.”

A technological investment

In addition to the continuation of automatic smoke detection cameras and regular drone flights with infrared cameras to look for fire starts, the 2025 CWPP especially invests in the use of lidar, or light detection and ranging, which utilizes aerial devices to strategically identify where disastrous fires are most likely to start.

By using lidar, Ashland Fire & Rescue has constructed 3D models of the landscape to analyze vegetation and topography, specifically areas of the city that have the highest risk of fire because of dense vegetation near structures and power lines.

Firefighters look at vegetation density along evacuation routes so they can reduce vegetation with a high risk of wildfire.
“We’re just at the tip of the iceberg as to what we can do with lidar,” Chambers said. “We’re really trying to leverage that technology and data in a way that I don’t think any other community has done for wildfire risk.”

Email Ashland.news Snowden intern Sydney Seymour at [email protected].

Related stories:

Draft wildfire plan considered by Ashland City Council (July 15, 2025)

Meeting kicks off planning for first revision of Community Wildfire Protection Plan in 19 years (Aug. 24, 2023)