EDITORIAL: State right to slow fire risk project

Published 2:15 pm Friday, August 5, 2022

Oregon’s goal of helping to protect rural homes from wildfires is admirable. Unimpeachable, really.

We all want to avoid a repeat of the terrible Labor Day weekend of 2020, when blazes devastated several towns in Western and Southern Oregon.

And there’s no doubt that the danger is growing.

More people are living in and near forests and rangelands, and those lands are more prone to burning as climate change leads to longer and more severe fire seasons.

Senate Bill 762, approved by the Legislature in 2021 and signed into law by Gov. Kate Brown, was prompted in part by the 2020 catastrophes. The legislation, among other things, required the Oregon Department of Forestry to compile a map showing the wildfire risks — no risk, low, medium, high or extreme — for each of the state’s 1.8 million tax lots. In addition, other state agencies were directed to write regulations mandating that some property owners, whose land is within the wildland-urban interface (WUI — the zone where homes are in or near forests or other areas where wildfires are more common) and deemed at high or extreme risk, will have to take steps to reduce their fire risk. The basic idea is to create a “defensible space” — a zone, usually within 50 to 100 feet of a home, where there is little or no combustible material that could ignite if a fire comes close and lead to the destruction of the home.

Although the legislation called for requiring such work, adding a potential expense for landowners, the cost is small compared with the value of a home and its irreplaceable contents. Indeed, many people who live in the WUI, including some in Baker County, have already taken steps to protect their properties. In a few areas neighbors have worked together to create a “Firewise” community.

Little wonder, then, that Senate Bill 762 easily passed, 22-7 in the Senate and 49-6 in the House. Both of Baker County’s legislators, Sen. Lynn Findley, R-Vale, and Sen. Mark Owens, R-Crane, voted for the bill.

But the effects of the bill, and the reaction to it, have been quite different from the intent.

On June 30 the state published the risk level map put together by the Forestry Department and Oregon State University. The state also sent letters to the owners of about 80,000 tax lots that are both within the WUI and designated as high or extreme risk.

Findley said he believed the map would assign a risk level only to tax lots in the WUI, which constitute less than 1% of the state’s total tax lots.

That’s one reason Findley and Owens, along with some other lawmakers, on Aug. 3 called on state officials to withdraw the map and cancel the notices sent to property owners in the WUI. The next day, State Forester Cal Mukumoto did so.

The process was flawed in multiple ways. For one, Senate Bill 762 required the Forestry Department to finish the risk level map by June 30, 2022. That didn’t give the state sufficient time to meet with property owners, fire protection district officials and others whose knowledge could have helped produce a more accurate map.

Mukumoto acknowledged as much, saying there “wasn’t enough time to allow for the type of local outreach and engagement that people wanted, needed and deserved.”

But although the legislation has yet to mandate anything for property owners, it appears to have already had expensive ramifications for some. The issue is homeowner’s insurance.

Kevin Cassidy, who lives along Rock Creek west of Haines, said his longtime insurance provider declined to extend his policy recently, citing as a reason that his property is at high risk. Cassidy said he found another insurer, but his new policy is twice as expensive — $2,400 per year — as the previous one.

Cassidy said his former insurer didn’t cite the new, since withdrawn, state risk level map as the reason. But he said the issue of fire risk had never been mentioned before, in about 20 years of coverage.

Legislators have also cited canceled insurance policies, or more expensive coverage, as a reason for asking the state to revise the map.

Others are skeptical of the link between the new map and changes in insurance coverage or cost. Michael Wara of Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, told The Associated Press that “insurers have way better maps. They’re not going to just take the state’s word on the maps.”

Perhaps not. But the timing, in Cassidy’s case, is curious.

Regardless, the state, as State Forester Mukumoto conceded, needs to spend more time collecting information about the efforts many property owners already made to protect their homes.

That will yield maps that not only are more accurate, which will help target the areas most in need of improvement, but also reduce the unintended but potentially expensive effects of this otherwise worthwhile endeavor.

— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor