Ashland Fire & Rescue awarded $250K grant to form Management Advisory Committee, hire contractor to update plan for wildfire prevention, response & recovery

By Holly Dillemuth, Ashland.news

It’s better to take a minute and make a plan than to be making a plan every minute.

That’s how Chris Chambers, wildlife division chief at Ashland Fire & Rescue, looks at wildfire prevention.

“We’ve definitely been making a plan a minute for the last 19 years,” Chambers told those gathered in the Meese Room in Hannon Library at Southern Oregon University on Wednesday.

The group of nearly 40 participants in person and nearly 10 more on Zoom were invited to begin the process of rewriting the Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) created in 2004. Representatives of agencies, businesses and individuals from across the city of Ashland and Jackson County will work to lay out a plan to prepare for wildfire in the city of Ashland, how to respond to it, and how to recover as a community if and when it occurs.

The revision of the CWPP plan in the next year and a half is a prerequisite for Ashland Fire & Rescue to apply for a grant of up to $10 million over five years to implement recommendations laid out in the plan.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), through the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), awarded Ashland Fire & Rescue a  Community Wildfire Defense Grant in the amount of $249,700 on March 21. The federal grant will fund the process to rewrite the CWPP, Chambers said. Ashland Fire & Rescue executed the grant last week, officially starting the planning process.

Ashland Fire & Rescue hosted Department of Agriculture Under Secretary Dr. Homer Wilkes, and U.S. Forest Service Deputy Chief Jaelith Hall-Rivera, along with community leaders at Southern Oregon University in March.

“We’re really honored to receive this award because our wildfire situation has changed dramatically in just a decade and we need a new game plan,” Chambers said at the time, according to a news release. “Ashland has always come together to work on topics critical to this community, and we want to bring citizens and local partners to the table to chart a new course to wildfire safety.”

Ashland’s 2004 CWPP document guided the creation of the Ashland Forest Resiliency Project (AFR) and laid out actions to increase community safety, according to a release about the grant.

Since the original plan was created in 2004, the city has worked with local, state and federal partners to do nearly 14,000 acres of fuels reduction around the watershed, develop the Fire Adapted Ashland program, grow 35 Firewise USA neighborhoods, build a Wildfire Division within the fire department, secure tens of millions of dollars in grants, and become known across the country for proactive wildfire mitigation and forest restoration, according to the release.

Chambers shared at the gathering on Wednesday, which was the kickoff of the implementation piece of the grant, that the 2004 document had items that did go unfinished, emphasizing the need to revise the document.

“There were 14 action items in that CWPP – I went through them – and I could say, honestly about nine of them were completed, so there was definitely some ‘fall down’ in that 2004 document,” Chambers said. “We haven’t done any updates in the last 19 years. We tried a couple of times but we are just so pressed with doing the thing that we can’t stop to make a plan.

“It’s time and this CWDG grant has really given us the opportunity to get the capacity to make the update to the 2004 plan and to create a structure around it that will keep it updated and keep us honest and following the plan and finding funds to make the deliverables happen,” he added.

Wednesday’s meeting included state Sen. Jeff Golden (D-Ashland), Mayor Tonya Graham, SOU Provost and Vice President of Academic and Student Affairs Sue Walsh, Parks & Recreation Director Leslie Eldrige, and Jackson County Emergency Manager Holly Powers, among many others in the community. 

“In our day-to-day this week, we are living the effects of climate change,” Graham said in introductory remarks to the group. “This year, it is no longer something for us to think about in the future. In our particular region, wildfire is the biggest existential threat to this community in terms of a disaster that could overnight, put us in a place where we’re looking at a decades — potentially — long recovery so this is some of the most critical work that we have in front of the city.”

Graham emphasized, looking around the room at the range of community leaders present, that the revision of the CWPP will take more than the city.

“This is a whole community problem that requires a whole community response,” Graham said.

She noted that the work to revise the former plan builds on years of work on what’s already been done to mitigate wildfire.

“We are out ahead of many communities and we are not where we need to be,” Graham said.

Chambers told Ashland.news following the presentation that the ultimate working group will not include multiple individuals from single departments, though that was the case at Wedneday’s meeting.

“There will just be one representative from the particular organization,” Chambers said. “It’s going to shrink naturally to something that’s going to be a manageable oversight committee for the process and then we’ll be populating the subcommittees or working groups and that’s where we can use a lot of expertise and more people from the community and from businesses and agencies and organizations to really help us actually put the plan itself together.”

Creating the plan calls for collaboration between communities and agencies interested in reducing wildfire risk and planning for when it occurs, not if. The Wednesday meeting kicked off a 12-to-14 month, grant-funded process to create the plan with the help of a contractor, the first such effort since 2004. 

Once the document is in draft form, it will go through a public review before being considered for approval by the City Council. The goal is to have it approved within 16 months.

“If we had signatures in a year and a half, I think we would be highly successful,” Chambers said. “If we could pull it off earlier, that’s even better. But, we know that it’s a deep, complex topic and there’s a lot of feelings about it and difficult emotions about it. There’s a lot to work through because of what our region has experienced and the smoke that we are getting nearly every summer now and just the fear and the threat that people experience every year.

“It’s really heavy,” he added. “So it’s going to take a while to sort through all of that and make sure to address concerns.”

Next steps include sending out a request for proposal in the near future for a contract facilitator who will lead the group going forward, paid for through the grant awarded to Ashland Fire & Rescue.

“The grant is giving us the capacity to hire somebody to do the stitching together of all of this,” Chambers said. “There’s no way our staff would have time for that, so that’s what we hope is going to put us over the hurdle for this particular plan revamp.”

Chambers added that the group working to revise the CWPP, which is known as a Management Advisory Committee (MAC), will be in contact with the Firebrand Resiliency Collective, an organization working closely with the Jackson County Community Long Term Recovery Group (JCCLTRG), the long-term recovery group for the Almeda Fire.

“There’s obvious lessons to be learned from Almeda because it was literally right in our backyard,” he said.

Reach Ashland.news staff reporter Holly Dillemuth at [email protected].

Aug. 29: Corrected second-from-last paragraph concerning groups working on Almeda Fire long-term recover.