Santa Clara County may form its first prescribed burn association pending state grant
The Santa Clara County FireSafe Council is waiting on approval of a state $400,000 grant to set up a South Bay Prescribed Burn Association.
Prescribed fire is the intentional and conditional use of fire on a landscape, according to a definition provided by a Stanford University report published in August on prescribed fires on the West Coast. It has several benefits, including preventing high-intensity wildfires by reducing tinder, restoring habitats and watersheds and supporting carbon and forest resilience. Prescribed burn associations are local groups of private prescribed fire practitioners who help conduct burns on each other’s lands, the report said. There are already 27 prescribed burn associations in California, according to Stanford’s report.
“This will be a big leap forward to build out our Forest Health program by bringing (prescribed) fire into Santa Clara County to create more resilient ecosystems and reduce wildfire risk and burn severity throughout the county,” FireSafe Council CEO Seth Schalet said in an email announcing the grant.
The practice has long been associated with cultural burnings, where Native American tribes or other practitioners intentionally burn an area for cultural reasons, like ceremonial activities or to support biodiversity. Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, was one of the main authors of the report and said trees in Saratoga showed evidence of burns every seven to 10 years before the area was colonized by settlers in the mid-1800s.
Schalet acknowledged the cultural burning programs of the Ohlone, Tamien and Amah Mutsun tribes and said that the Saratoga-based Firesafe Council would be working with local indigenous tribes as they continue their forest health treatments and integrate beneficial fire practices throughout West Santa Clara County.
Wara said that it was “kind of weird” that Santa Clara County didn’t have a prescribed fire association already and applauded Schalet’s efforts to establish one. He said the county’s land ownership structure is complicated because a lot of the land that’s considered at high risk of wildfire is on private property, adding that this complicated structure “is not really what agencies are great at dealing with.”
According to Schalet’s Sept. 18 presentation to the board of the California State Coastal Conservancy, which would award the grant, there are about 143,000 acres with potential for prescribed fire application in West Santa Clara County. A little over 44,000 acres are public lands, but more than 99,000 acres are private property, stretching across hillsides from Palo Alto to Los Gatos to Gilroy.
The grant money would be used to conduct workshops, classes and training programs and a series of small, prescribed burns on Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District lands to persuade both private and public landowners to use prescribed burns. The FireSafe Council worked with their partners, including Midpen, to identify areas that could benefit from prescribed burns and sought approval through the California Environmental Quality Act. They are building off previous projects that were funded through grants from Cal Fire to prepare the land for prescribed burns.
Lilly Allen, project manager for the conservancy’s wildfire resiliency program, said those grants “paved the way to bringing good fire back onto the landscape.”
“There will be opportunities to go out and do trainings and participate in a prescribed fire and learn,” Wara said. “And I think it’s a way for normal people to understand a lot more about wildfire and prescribed fire and learn how to protect themselves and their community. And that’s great; that’s so empowering.”
Cal Fire does prescribed burns on large swaths of land; for example, 165 acres were burned in Calero County Park last October. Homeowners can add prescribed burns on their properties to Cal Fire’s list of projects, but Wara said it could take a long time to get to them.
“Ultimately, Cal Fire is resource-constrained because they have to go fight fires. They’re not the only way,” Wara said. “We need so much improvement in how we manage fire that it can’t be that the firefighters are the only people doing the work. What a prescribed burn association is about is returning to a world in which landowners use fire as a tool on their lands.”
Marin, Sonoma and Santa Cruz counties already have prescribed burn associations or some community-based burning efforts, according to a map in California’s Strategic Plan for Expanding the Use of Beneficial Fire from March 2022, which was created by the state Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. Napa County also has a prescribed fire association, and there are prescribed fire councils for both the Bay Area and Northern California.
Wara’s report compared different prescribed burn associations and related policies in Washington, Oregon, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, Idaho and Colorado in order to provide a conceptual framework and to “inspire people to copy each other.”
He warned of several challenges that could impact the formation and success of a prescribed burn association, like figuring out the liability of conducting burns on private lands, navigating permitting processes and making sure that there’s a trained workforce in this field to reduce casualties. He also acknowledged that some residents may think that chipping is already a valid form of fuel reduction, but said prescribed burns is a cheaper and less laborious alternative.