The Ashland lawmaker wants the map to designate the risk level of broad areas rather than naming the risk of individual properties

By Alex Baumhardt, Oregon Capital Chronicle

Nearly four years ago, in the aftermath of the state’s most destructive wildfires in history, the Oregon Legislature passed a bipartisan package of wildfire prevention initiatives, including one that required state experts to create a map showing high wildfire risk areas statewide.

The point of the Wildfire Risk Map, first published in 2022, was to inform lawmakers and agencies like the Oregon Department of Forestry and the Oregon State Fire Marshal’s Office about where to best deploy limited resources to prevent fires. But the map provoked backlash from homeowners in some high-risk areas who were worried about wildfire insurance rates and coverage, and potentially having to comply with new building requirements. 

State foresters and university experts redid the map, renamed it the Wildfire Hazard Map, changed some designations and put it online, searchable by address. But many homeowners are still unhappy about what the designations mean or feel the wildfire mitigation work they’ve already done hasn’t been factored in. 

Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, who supported creating the map, said it’s become counterproductive in its current form. 

“So many people see ‘high hazard’ as basically ruining their lives,” Golden said. “I don’t think anybody dreamed we’d have this problem on the ground,” he said about when the Legislature passed the wildfire package mandating the map in 2021. 

Golden, who chairs the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Wildfire, wants the Legislature to pass an amendment to Senate Bill 762, the wildfire funding package first passed back in 2021 to remove the property-level risk designations in the wildfire map and replace them with low-, medium- and high-risk designations for broad areas. 

The map’s architects have not voiced strong opinions about the proposal, which is not yet in bill form. Rob Odom, an Oregon State University spokesperson, said the university experts who worked on the maps with the Oregon Department of Forestry would “continue to partner with the state when needed.” 

By making the maps identify broader risk areas, Golden is hopeful he can quell anger among property owners over their high-hazard designations and quell growing rumors and conspiracies about what the map was ultimately supposed to achieve. 

“The rumor control is a big thing here. I’m really deeply concerned that we’re close to an explosion in rural Oregon that’s going to make our wildfire prevention efforts almost impossible,” Golden said. 

Map misinformation

He’s heard from constituents at public meetings and via email who believe officials at the State Fire Marshal’s Office will evict them from their homes if they don’t take certain wildfire prevention measures or will prevent them from rebuilding if their house burns down. 

Those are patently false, Golden said, and illegal. 

Others are saying the state is using the wildfire map to try to drive rural people off of their land and into cities where they can supposedly be more easily controlled. The hardest belief to quell among many in his district is that the state map is not behind their rising home insurance premiums. 

The rollout of the map in 2022 coincided with a regionwide hike in premiums from wildfires across the West, and some insurers choosing not to renew or write new wildfire policies in parts of Oregon and Western states. Despite a law passed in 2023 prohibiting insurers from incorporating the map into their own risk calculus for customers, many policyholders have heard from their agents that the state map plays a role, Golden said, or the timing feels too uncanny.

His fear is that if misinformation takes greater root, the state will lose buy-in from property owners it needs as partners in the fight against wildfires, and that those property owners will see state agencies as conspirators rather than collaborators.

Keeping the map

Two other bills proposed in the current session by Republicans would get rid of the map all together or get rid of Senate Bill 762, which also required the electric utilities to create wildfire protection plans, required state agencies to develop new defensible space and building code requirements to protect homes and communities and created programs to mitigate the impacts of wildfire smoke on public health.

Golden said he wants to salvage the usefulness of the map without creating more harm. He said it can still be used to help the state understand where best to direct resources or to advocate for community risk mitigation work.

The map itself, he said, is based largely on sound science. But in two years of meeting with landowners in his district who are upset about their high hazard designations despite expensive and time-consuming measures they’ve taken to prevent wildfire destruction, he says the map lacks the data to tell the whole story about individual wildfire risks.

“I am not saying the map is totally bogus — it’s based on landscape factors that, as a nonscientist, I believe are really important — but a model that gives no weight to the particular characteristics of the property can’t fly,” he said.

Alex Baumhardt has been a national radio producer focusing on education for American Public Media since 2017. She has reported from the Arctic to the Antarctic for national and international media, and from Minnesota and Oregon for The Washington Post.