Orinda residents surveyed in 2020 said that wildfire prevention was their #1 priority and then taxed themselves $4 million a year so the city could provide this serve because "their" fire department, MOFD, was not (even though it was receiving $4 million a year in Orinda property taxes in excess of what it was spending for service to Orinda).

 

Four years later, after collecting over $12 million in sales tax revenues, the city still is not providing wildfire prevention services, claiming it is the private property owners' responsibility to maintain their own properties.

 

Virtually all of Orinda is, and all of the wildfire risk is on, private property.  So why did the city advertise the 20-year, one percent Measure R sales tax as substantially a wildfire prevention tax if it had no intent on using it to prevent wildfires?

 

Because, when the tax was proposed, the city had no wildfire prevention plan and had no idea of what would be required to provide one.  And four years later, the "plan" that was developed has turned out to be ineffective, at least according to many indications.

 

The indications of how the "plan" is lacking include:

• The city's major fire insurer, State Farm, has cancelled 55% of is fire insurance policies in Orinda due to excessive risk and no other insurer, other than the state's insurer-of-last-resort, the FAIR Plan, is willing to step in.  This cancellation rate is higher than any other community in the Bay Area.

• An evaluation of three (out of 100 in Orinda) firesheds by a wildfire fuel mitigation specialist showed that after three years of efforts by the city to get owners to mitigate fire fuel risk on their properties, there was still $350,000 of work to be done to make them fire "safe".  Expanding this to all 100 firesheds (as identified by wildfire prevention expert Dr. John Radke), means that there is still $12 million of work to be done in Orinda.

• A simple "step back and look at the landscape" says we are living in a forest of our own design, not what was here 100 years ago, including many fire-dangerous species such as pines and eucalyptus.  The fuel load is extreme, meaning the fire risk is extreme.

 

But can the government (the City plus MOFD) do anything, considering the problem is on private property?

 

Of course.  Paved vehicular access is provided to these private properties via a network of 93 miles of publicly maintained roads the private properties have given the city easement to, and there are another 30 miles the owners are willing to turn over to the city.  There is a similar sanitary sewer network, traversing the private properties, also publicly maintained.  Publicly funded infrastructure on private property benefitting the private property owners who, in the aggregate, are "the public", is one of the responsibilities of government, providing for the common good.

 

An example of how the government could mitigate wildfire risk and then maintain the mitigation can be demonstrated for one fireshed.  This is the fireshed that runs from Valley View Dr. up to Crestview Dr.  it runs across 42 properties and, if it was left untended and left to burn under extreme conditions (high winds and temperatures plus low humidity), it would threaten an additional 7 properties plus ignite adjacent downwind firesheds as it burned uncontrolled due the intensity of the fire made possible by excess vegetation.