Friday, 16 December 2011 05:22

Fire Safe Council seeks stakeholders for Pine Grove Fire Plan

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slide2-fire_safe_council_seeks_stakeholders_for_pine_grove_fire_plan.pngAmador County – A disappointingly light turnout of two members of the public went to the second workshop of the steering committee of the greater Pine Grove Community Conservation Wildfire Protection Plan.

Amador Fire Safe Council Consultant Jim Simmons said “we’ve educated the steering committee,” after going through what the Plan is, and why it is important, to bring funding to the community. He said “hopefully we will do many more of these outreach group meetings,” because “it is a community-driven process.”

He said if each parcel owner cleared their undergrowth, the 55,000-acre Greater Pine Grove planning area it could be the largest land clearing project ever done without an Environmental Impact Report. He said the area is from just above the Jackson Rancheria, to Highway 26.

Simmons said comprehensive, community-based forest planning and prioritization was not new, but it “was given new and unprecedented impetus with the enactment of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003.” The Act was the “first meaningful statutory incentives for the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to give consideration to the priorities of local communities as they develop and implement forest management and hazardous fuel reduction projects.”

To take full advantage, a community must first prepare a Community Wildfire Protection Plan, without which the Act limits “Wildland/Urban Interface” (encroachment into forests) to within a half-mile of a community boundary or within one-and-a-half miles when mitigating circumstances exist and create a fire break. With the plan, “you can define that Wildland/Urban Interface,” Simmons said, and “it could be 3 miles deep.”

He said 50 percent of the Act’s funds “must be used within the Wildland/Urban Interface as defined by either a Community Wildfire Protection Plan,” or by the limited definition provided in the Healthy Forest Restoration Act. The Act also “gives priority to projects and treatment areas identified” in a plan “by directing federal agencies to give specific consideration to fuel reduction projects that implement those plans.”

All decision-making members were represented at the meeting, held at the Volcano Communications Tech Center on Church Street in Pine Grove. Simmons said the group will work to get more participation from the community stakeholders, that is, the public, who will help the steering committee develop the plan, and say what it wants in the plan.

He said the federal land management agencies will be advisors, and the Amador Fire Safe Council will be consultants and grantees on the project. The decision makers of the Plan’s contents will be Cal-Fire, Amador County, Amador Fire Protection District, and Lockwood Fire Protection District.

Simmons said collaboration means that people who live in the area have a say.

Story by Jim Reece This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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