Humboldt’s Wildfire Resilience Grants Include Millions of Dollars For SoHum

Supervisor Rex Bohn

A Humboldt County effort to coordinate wildfire resiliency is a stepping stone for multi-million dollar efforts in Southern Humboldt. At its June 23 meeting, the county’s Board of Supervisors got an update on Humboldt’s participation in the statewide Wildfire County Coordinator Team program.

Humboldt’s team is made up of staff from the county’s Department of Public Works Natural Resources division and the county Resource Conservation District.

The program began in 2021 with three state grant awards and the funding has been extended through October 2027.

According to a written staff report, the goal of the program is to “educate, encourage and develop countywide community collaboration and coordination among wildfire mitigation groups.”

Southern Humboldt represents a significant part of the effort, under a Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP).

Jill Demers of the Resource Conservation District said the district has $30 million of grant funding for a Forest Health and Wildfire Resilience Program alone.

Among the areas where “landscape-scale projects” are being done is Southern Humboldt.

A “forest health” grant requires a CWPP to be in place and Demers said it’s “just one award that we’ve received from this grant funding source and this is an almost 10 million dollar award for Southern Humboldt.”

Also in Southern Humboldt, a Community Wildfire Defense grant pays for “treatment of about 2,000 acres and about 100 homes” with “roadside fuel reduction projects and shaded field breaks.”

Teamwork makes the funding possible.

“This grant wouldn’t be possible or really any of the grants without the Southern Humboldt partners who are just very numerous, it’s a really active and engaged community,” Demers said. “There are a lot of folks that have offered access to their land for planning and implementation and then a lot of folks with a lot of volunteer time and professional resources to make this work happen with Southern Humboldt and also with the Fire Safe Council.”

Some outside-the-box thinking was advanced by Supervisor Rex Bohn, who vouched for property tax breaks to homeowners who do wildfire protection work on their properties. He said it would pay off considering “the long-term savings of somebody’s house burning down and the loss of the full property tax” and added that “a lot of them aren’t rebuilding” after fires.

Supervisor Steve Madrone has long been advocating for new incentives and seconded the idea.

“We’ll never have enough grant money to do all the work we need to do but there is a huge amount of money in the private sector, right?” he said. “There’s more money in the private sector than there is in the public sector, always will be. So when we can leverage the private sector investment, now we’re really starting to expand tremendously and I think the whole idea of a property tax reduction for doing fuel reduction work or even roadside vegetation maintenance is a very worthy concept.”

He added, “Property taxes are governed by the state but we would be saving money hand over fist to put tax credits or property tax reductions out in front in the equation compared to the cost of the August Complex fire or any number of other fires we can point to.”

Demers said the need for state approval is a challenge but the county has “been able to leverage other grant funding to provide cost share for folks to be able to do this kind of work in defensible space.”

Cybelle Immitt and Jill Demers

Earlier, Cybelle Immitt of the DPW’s Natural Resources Division highlighted “capacity building” work such as creating new Fire-Wise Community groups.

She said the Wildfire County Coordinator Team collaborates with the county’s Fire Safe Council as the program works on “building a lot of energy around working with our communities to become more wildfire resilient.”