NFPA Journal - Summer 2023 - 39

MICHAEL CIAGLO/GETTY IMAGES
The Marshall Fire
destroyed nearly
1,100 homes in
Boulder County,
Colorado, in the
closing days of
2021. According
to the author, the
event prompted a
newfound urgency
among elected
officials in the state,
who seem to realize
that more destruction
is inevitable unless
something changes.
private property. The reasons included a mismatch
of regulations, inconsistent review processes across
the regional offices of the federal funding agency,
conflicts with state environmental rules, and more.
Federal programs designed to rebuild county roads
and state-run dams turned out to have rules such
as cost-benefit analysis requirements that can
stymie efforts to assist individuals with home safety
upgrades. A lack of technical assistance to support
small and rural communities was also an important
gap described by participants. Even as new federal
funding was becoming available from the Community
Wildfire Defense Grant, it was clear that bureaucratic
limitations on the use of the funds would similarly
hinder attempts to protect vulnerable homes via
structural retrofits. The red tape associated with
this grant involved triggering a tax burden, since the
Internal Revenue Service flags funds going to individuals
to make home improvements as income. There
are ways around this kind of problem, but the very
short timeframe written into the statute hamstrung
the Forest Service, at least in the first round of funding
availability.
Despite such snags, the recurring themes I've
observed over the past two years in the wildfire policy
space are encouraging. There is a lot of agreement
on what the problems are, as well as the solutions to
those problems-more than I had expected. I have
heard over and over from wildfire safety advocates
and wildfire management practitioners how much
they yearn for real and radical change. At the same
time, though, there are very real obstacles to progress.
There is clearly no purpose-fit funding stream that
would enable more worthy projects to obtain funding
and implement wildfire risk reduction at scale. It's a
There is a lot of agreement on
what the problems are, as well as
the solutions to those problems-
more than I had expected. At the
same time, though, there are very
real obstacles to progress.
remote possibility that Congress would create a new
agency to administer such funding; the more likely
path will be to direct agencies to streamline the complex
processes that have effectively prevented many
wildfire mitigation projects from winning grants.
Holding state and local governments accountable for
their role in wildfire disaster prevention is challenging
in part due to states that maintain a home-rule
prerogative, as well as the dire lack of technical capacity
among small and rural communities across the
country. Among my government colleagues, especially
at the state level, there is cause for concern that new
statewide regulations will meet with enough political
resistance to render them meaningless.
It might sound weird, but those moments that
make us all feel worried and uncomfortable are the
moments when things become most interesting-and
we're in one of those moments right now when it
comes to national wildland fire policy. Looking back
on a 20-year career of promoting wildfire safety
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NFPA Journal - Summer 2023

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