“How do we start pre-defeating fires instead of chasing them?”
That’s been Supervisor James Gore’s mission for the last three years, leading up to the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors meeting on October 6 when he posed the question to his colleagues on the board.
The meeting took place during the all-too-familiar setting of firefighters working to contain the Glass Fire along the border of Sonoma and Napa counties, directly adjacent to the footprint of the Sonoma Complex Fires of October 2017.
The discussion began with a staff presentation recapping the damages from the October 2017 fires, the $149.3 million litigation settlement with PG&E, and the board’s previous allocation of $26.8 million in September to stabilize the County.
Also summarized was community feedback about how to invest the funds, gathered from about 2,000 community members through surveys and emails following a robust outreach campaign. Feedback indicated top priorities included road repair, vegetation management, public safety, housing, and community preparedness/warning systems. This feedback aligned well with the Recovery & Resilience Framework, the County’s long-term vision and approach for how the County will recover from the October 2017 wildfires.
Supervisor Gore has been pushing for these improvements.
“The grunt work or what I would call the trench work, trench warfare, of resilience is really in vegetation management; it’s in community preparedness; it’s in home hardening. It’s in all of these deeper level things that go far beyond alert warning systems, far beyond the number of firefighters who can respond, far beyond how well we forecast and how we do evacuations,” he advised.
Community members, including wildfire survivors who pointed out that this funding is only available because their homes were destroyed, implored the board to invest in resiliency.
The board discussed whether to take immediate action with preliminary allocation of funds or to postpone until specific dollar amounts of projects were fleshed out.
Supervisor Gore wanted to ensure that the County takes swift action and that a minimum dollar amount is established with potentially more funds later added toward the most critical services as details are developed.
He made a formal motion to authorize a minimum of $25 million for vegetation management for fire prevention, $10 million to replace destroyed workforce housing, and $34.2 million for roads damaged during the wildfires.
The board decided to revisit the minimum allocation for roads at a future meeting when staff comes back with project proposals with specific dollar amounts.
Supervisor Gore said, “Every single proposal that comes forward out of this has to have leveraged dollars…community partners…the equity lense of how we put people to work and protect vulnerable people, a focus of true preparedness and an ethos that leads us forward.”
As he asserted, the County is moving from “Sonoma Strong” toward “Sonoma Ready.”
