Marin Makes Clean Sweep of Forest Floors

It is a dry summer day in the midst of a heat wave in the forested hills of Marin County. At the end of a twisting one-lane road, a small crew of laborers wearing orange vests finish their lunch breaks and head, single file, down a deer trail that leads into a steeply sloping forest of bay trees in the small town of Fairfax.

Most observers would not notice anything remarkable about the forest. Yet, in the past five days, it has been transformed by the crew of workers. Last week, a dense thicket of flammable, invasive French broom obscured the views that now stretch between trunks. Now, the broom plants — pulled from the earth and then dragged by hand along the deer trail — are stacked by the roadside, waiting for a chipper truck to dispose of them while the crew continues to clear a 100- to 200-foot-wide swath through the forest.

This parcel is just one small piece of the carefully manicured 38-mile-long, fire protection project known as the Greater Ross Valley Shaded Fuel Break. When completed, the fuel break will extend from San Anselmo, northward around Sleepy Hollow and Fairfax, and back south around Corte Madera, crossing a patchwork of public and private lands in nine different jurisdictions. 

This is only one of the numerous projects being implemented by the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority (Marin Wildfire), a 17+ member Joint Powers Authority formed in 2020. Today, the authority is emerging as a nationwide frontrunner in tackling the issues of wildfire with a multijurisdictional, hands-on approach.

“Wildfire doesn’t stop at jurisdictional boundaries, so wildfire resilience efforts shouldn’t either,” says Anne Crealock, planning and program manager at Marin Wildfire. 

Tasked to Avoid Tragedy

The joint powers authority formed in the aftermath of the Tubbs, Nuns, LNU, and other massive fires that took dozens of lives and devastated hundreds of thousands of acres — as well as homes, businesses, and other structures — in neighboring counties since 2017. Spurred to evaluate their own vulnerability, Marin County commissioned both a Board of Supervisors-led committee and a Civil Grand Jury report. Both concluded that only luck had prevented large-scale fire in the vast swathes of Marin’s wild open space parks and bucolic, forested residential communities.

“Marin is blessed with lots of vegetation, narrow roads, views, and hillsides, but that also is a huge liability in terms of evacuation and spread of fire,” says Julie McMillan, mayor pro tempore of Ross, which is a member of the authority. “There are many more homes that are built up against the open space than there were 40 or 50 years ago.” 

As a result of these reports, which also identified the lack of a coordinated county-wide fire prevention effort as a key issue, the concept of a joint powers authority was born and championed by both local fire chiefs and civic leaders. 

Put on the ballot in 2020, Measure C passed with support from over 70% of voters. With this vote, they approved a parcel tax of 10 cents per developed square foot. This tax costs the average taxpayer about $200 per year and generates about $21 million annually for fire prevention. 

“It is exciting that taxpayers decided to invest in climate resilience in a tangible way,” Crealock says. “With this, we’re able to make changes at a scale that can make a real difference and keep this corner of the planet livable in a future with more severe wildfire.”

Once approved, participation in the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority was available to all agencies with taxing and fire authority in Marin. All but two — Tiburon and Belvedere — chose to participate. 

Starting with Science

Before enacting any projects, Marin Wildfire first evaluates which would have the maximum beneficial impact within the county. 

“We are big fans of science,” Crealock says, adding that many projects are not only based on modeling and other data but also continue to collect information to improve efficacy moving forward. 

For example, in addition to educating the public about evacuation, the authority continues to educate itself about trends identified during past evacuations — including commissioning an analysis of causes of fatalities that have happened during 50 different previous wildfires in the United States and Australia, in order to better prevent similar incidents in the future. 

Similar levels of analysis, along with consultation with local experts, were used to determine what landscape-level projects would best minimize the most fire risk. As a result, the joint powers authority is implementing wildfire detection, warning, and alert systems; inspecting homes; providing funding to help residents harden their homes and create defensible space; funding massive public education campaigns; developing a network of safe evacuation routes (and, eventually, temporary refuge areas); and managing around 30 boots-on-the-ground projects to reduce flammable vegetation. These include literally landscaping — trimming trees, mowing weeds, and removing shrubbery — along hundreds of miles of narrow roads so that evacuation routes would not be overwhelmed by flames in case of fire. 

Homes Come First

Many aspects of the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority’s work begin with individual homes and the people within them.

“We follow a house-out approach: home, then yards, then roads, which are evacuation routes,” Crealock says. 

As Brian McCarthy walks through sites of current and former projects, the degree to which fire prevention on a grand scale is, in fact, composed of individual relationships becomes evident. McCarthy, a retired battalion chief, who now runs vegetation management crews for Marin Wildfire, is on a first-name basis with the landowner whose carport provides access to a job site. McCarthy knows without being reminded that another man has requested that his parcel be avoided. At a third, he knows that the owner is absentee and that neighbors use her carport to park their bicycles in. 

“It is rewarding, but it is slow going,” Crealock says. “In many cases [homeowners] would like to walk their back yard with us and show us the hedge that they would like to keep, the dead tree that has them worried, or the gate that we can use to access their property.”

Homeowner preferences aside, determining what projects would make the most difference at a county-wide level was based on the county’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan, along with a combination of modeling and local expertise, Crealock says. 

This includes public education –– not only how and why to “harden” homes and gardens against fires but also how to prepare for evacuations: what to pack, when to leave, what route to take, and even a video of strategic tips for driving when surrounded by fire. 

The joint powers authority also has a free chipper program — a feature that, on its own, offsets the tax for those who choose to use it, Crealock says.

Moreover, enacting Marin Wildfire’s many plans requires thousands of conversations — with jurisdictions, homeowners, and residents. Each home inspection and each parcel of land the shaded fuel break crosses, represents another set of hopefully lasting relationships. 

“Even once we walk away, we know we will be trying to come back and maintain that land every few years for as long as the taxpayers fund us,” Crealock adds. 

Delivering Results to Taxpayers

As a publicly-funded effort, Marin’s new joint powers authority was designed from the outset to address fire prevention while also centering priorities common among Marin residents, including avoiding environmental impacts and limiting the duration of the tax (and hence, the project) to a 10-year lifespan before it will need to be re-approved. 

“[Otherwise] it might have been a bit nerve-wracking for some people to just let all these fire agencies loose onto the landscape without some sort of checks and balances,” Crealock says. “We meet regularly with the environmental community to share what we’re up to and ask for feedback.”

That the continuation of the authority depends on the continued support of the community has served the project well, says McMillan, who is also a current board member and former board president for Marin Wildfire. 

“Other local measures have raised millions but have produced very, very little in the way of tangible projects. Nearly all of it has gone to [planning] and consultants,” McMillan adds.

By contrast, Marin’s new joint authority has taken a multipronged approach that has sent teams of inspectors to evaluate approximately 30,000 homes a year; provided roughly $800,000 in annual grants to help residents address issues identified during those inspections; and launched a public outreach and education program along with their local fire safe council, Fire Safe Marin, that includes a September festival called Ember Stomp. True to its name, the festival features live burn demonstrations, as well as landscaping tips, face painting and live music. 

Re-imagining Normal

As with other MWPA projects, the two massive, shaded fuel breaks — totaling nearly 100 miles together — are designed to slow fires, while also providing a base for firefighters and helping stop flames from reaching the forest canopy where they would grow and spread rapidly.

These fuel breaks are not the bare-earth, sun-baked fire road that many envision, McCarthy says. Instead, they look like a healthy forest, one where trees don’t grow too close together, branches are trimmed up to 10 feet from the ground, and the forest floor is clear of the most highly flammable plants and other debris. 

While the understory can look bare at first, that is just because so many flammable invasives such as French broom had to be removed, McCarthy says. In time — and with continued maintenance, which is a planned part of every project — less flammable, native species such as sword fern and annual wildflowers that were crowded out by the invasives should have a chance to return. 

Meanwhile, the shaded fuel breaks not only combat fires but also retain all of the important features that forests provide: beauty, wildlife habitat, and cool shade that fights climate change. In fact, they may more closely resemble what local forests looked like before they were remade by invasive species and fire suppression. 

“We’ve all gotten so used to very, very dense, overgrown forests — people think that that is what’s normal and natural,” Crealock says. “But this landscape reflects a century of fire suppression and an invasion [of] nonnative plants and trees. Our aesthetic vision of what a healthy landscape looks like needs to be adjusted.”

Nothing Else Like It

To date, a multi-jurisdictional approach such as the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority is unique in the fire prevention landscape.

“I am not aware of any other such entity in the state,” McMillan says. “We have 17 members, ranging from San Rafael to tiny little Inverness.”

And each has its own set of rules, regulations, and ordinances to follow — meaning that as a single project crosses from one jurisdiction to another, it will have to comply with different guidelines. 

“We have one project that crosses maybe nine jurisdictions, plus county parks and local parks,” Crealock says. “Once you cross into [each] jurisdiction, you have a different set of local rules such as tree ordinances — so we’re very precise about how we implement that project.”

“Being able to work on projects that cover multiple jurisdictions is one of the things that makes us unique,” Crealock added. 

However, plants continue to grow — and the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority only has funding for six more years. They are already planning to campaign for a continuation of the tax and hoping that the residents of the county will agree. 

“It’s a tough sell to tell communities to tax themselves,” Crealock says. “And [moving forward], one of the challenges is that if we are successful, nothing happens — so how do you prove you’ve succeeded when success is so quiet, right?”

Top Photo: Marin Wildfire