The way Lane County handles wildfire mitigation is based on five University students’ work.
Julie Baxter, Morgan Ellis, Sam Fox, Kate Lenzser and Jessica Nunley won an award this month for their contribution to Lane County’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan, a collaborative project between state government departments and private groups to create a plan to reduce the risk of wildfire.
The Partners for DisasterResistance and Resilience: Oregon Showcase State, which is a 2000 initiative of former Gov. John Kitzhaber to create unifiedframeworks for communities to use when responding to natural hazards and disasters, awarded the team Feb. 6 at a ceremony in Salem.
The students were part of the Community Planning Workshop in the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management, and their main task involved community outreach. The team gathered data on public perception and opinion about fire risks.
The students conducted surveys of more than 1,500 landowners in Lane County who live within forest zones, and they interviewed about 30 technical experts in forestry, government and private industry. They also organized a workshop at the University in April 2005 where 75 stakeholders came together to discuss land management, fire risk and mitigation and current regional fire policies.
“The different types of expertise and perspectives among the stakeholders at the table helped us to build a much stronger plan with greater levels of commitment from those involved,” said Julie Baxter, project manager of the team.
The team submitted its findings to the project’s steering committee. The committee then used the information to make policy recommendations.
“Their work gave it legitimacy,” Lane County Land Management Division planner Keir Miller said. “Any plan produced has to have a public outreach component … The students talked to people and knew what they were talking about so they could ask the right questions.” Kate Lenzser, the only undergraduate student on the team, said communication and collaboration were key to capturing the array of stakeholder perspectives.
“I also learned the importance of the process of planning: The way in which you achieve your goals is just as important as actually achieving the goals themselves,” Lenzser said.
“Particularly for natural hazard risk reduction projects, the process of developing the plan can be paramount to how successful the plan is in reality.”
The wildfire protection plan created from the project was adopted last June by the Lane County Board of Commissioners, according to Andre LeDuc, state coordinator for The Partners for Disaster Resistance and Resilience. The plan created 21 action items that identified concrete steps to reduce fire hazard, like fuel reduction projects that replace invasive blackberry bushes with native plants that are more fire resistant. Responsibility for the various items falls to different agencies within the county and state, LeDuc said.
Oregon has more than 41 million acres of forest land susceptible to wildfires, according to the Oregon State Natural Hazards Mitigation Plan. In Lane County, 90 percent of its 2.9 million acres is forestlands, and the prevalence of wildland-urban interface – where human development mixes with forests – is growing, according to the CWPP.
The federal government’s Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 called for more collaboration betweengovernmental agencies and private entities – like logging companies, land developers and conservationists – to create community wildfire
response strategies adapted to local conditions. CWPPs grew out of this legislation and have been created by communities across the nation.
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