The Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority is charged with clearing flammable material from roadsides and forests, a job that involves cumbersome regulations in the coastal zone, where even pulling weeds can require a coastal permit.
To streamline the process, the agency is seeking state approval of a regulatory framework whose name conjures roads and bridges rather than forests: a public works plan, or P.W.P.
Marin Wildfire staff presented their draft plan at the Dance Palace last week, describing it as a broad approach to wildfire mitigation and a tool for promoting forest health and resiliency.
“What we want to do is help encourage any fires that do burn to burn in a healthy way,” said Mark Brown, the agency’s executive officer.
If approved, the P.W.P. would allow the agency to apply for just one coastal permit to cover projects over the next decade. Individual projects would still undergo reviews required by the California Environmental Quality Act, but the process would be expedited.
The agency must obtain the approval of the California Coastal Commission before it implements the P.W.P.
Future projects under the plan will be designed to reduce fire intensity along evacuation routes. In neighborhoods adjacent to forests, grasslands and chapparal, fuel breaks will slow and channel the movement of fire.
“We’re not relying on these fuel breaks to put the fires out,” Mr. Brown said. “We’re relying on them to modify fire behavior and give our residents time to evacuate and our firefighters a chance to put the fire out.”
The area addressed by the P.W.P. encompasses 44,000 acres, stretching from Tomales to Muir Beach. The plan focuses projects in narrow sections of Inverness, Bolinas, Stinson Beach, Point Reyes Station, Marshall and Muir Beach.
The P.W.P. would allow fire agencies to employ four techniques for clearing aging and high-risk areas: power tools, hand tools, herbicides and controlled burns. Officials say they have no intention of clear-cutting forests or spraying herbicides, which would only be applied by hand to the stumps and roots of invasive plants.
Virtually everyone in attendance at last Tuesday’s meeting approved of some aspects of the plan, including loans to homeowners to finance home hardening measures. But most people who stood up to comment sharply criticized the prospect of using herbicides, power tools or controlled burns.
“I’m really concerned about using herbicides in the forests. That just horrifies me, that whole idea,” said Karin Lease.
Ken Levin said the public needs more information about how Marin Wildfire will select the locations for its projects, which will be devised in close collaboration with local fire departments.
“I think that we need to know more about how these specific acreages are going to be chosen and why, and I have concerns about clearcutting and using herbicides,” he said. “I also question the basic premise that protecting human habitat is more important than protecting natural habitat.”
Marin Wildfire’s approach is predicated on a simple theory: Sometimes you have to cut and burn a forest to save it.
For thousands of years, West Marin landscapes were managed by cycles of natural fire and routine ignition by Coast Miwok. But over the last century, as the region was developed, fires were suppressed and the forest floor became littered with dead trees, fallen branches and dense underbrush.
Under an emergency order signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in June, fire prevention projects in the coastal zone will be exempt from CEQA requirements and coastal commission review until the end of the year. The move gave Marin an opportunity to expedite a handful of fuel-break projects before the adoption of the P.W.P.
Marin Wildfire will direct $500,000 to West Marin fuel breaks, one involving eucalyptus trees at risk of falling on Bolinas roads and others in Inverness and Stinson Beach.
The P.W.P. will complement additional projects planned by California State Parks, which has a public works plan of its own intended to rehabilitate the bishop pine forests in Tomales Bay State Park.
That plan has been challenged by two groups, the Tomales Bay Forest Keepers and the California Chaparral Institute. Jack Gescheidt, a San Rafael resident who leads the Forest Keepers, spoke out against the draft P.W.P. at last week’s meeting, where he played an A.I. version of a song from “The Sound of Music,” updated with lyrics of his own. “Doe, a deer, a female deer,” sang a voice sounding very much like Julie Andrews. “Their chainsaws kill like guns.”
Anne Crealock, the wildfire authority’s planning and programming manager, stressed that the agency had devised its plan in close consultation with scientists, arborists and others with extensive background in forest management and wildfire mitigation. “We have consulted with a lot of experts with a lot of different areas of expertise,” she said.