Dear Editor,

While there were mill levy requests on my ballot which would do a lot to make our community better, the mill levy request that was missing on my ballot is the one that we need now more than ever.  In the last two months, we have lost 400,000 acres of forest to intense and fast-moving wildfires.  The loss of wildlife is uncountable.  The result is that the pristine forests that we live in are now more precious than ever and the efforts necessary to secure and protect these surviving forests should be one of our top priorities as a community along with finishing the infrastructure needed for orderly evacuations.

The critical flaw of the active Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP) is that they have no funding mechanism.  They are plans without resources so critical projects like emergency egress routes out of limited access subdivisions have never been started or finished for multiple subdivisions.  Both the East Troublesome and CalWood fires expanded at unimaginable speeds driven by high winds.  It is vital for the health and safety of all subdivisions to have multiple evacuation routes.  

The CWPP’s have explicitly identified emergency egress routes on both public and private land.  We need a mechanism to raise funds to not only erect the gates but compensate private landowners for an emergency easement during times of mandatory evacuations.  

A Forest Improvement District (FID) is a legal entity like a volunteer fire department that can fund construction of emergency egress routes or royalty payments to private property owners for emergency easements.  Emergency egress routes should take priority over forest mitigation.  The jury is still out on the effectiveness of mitigation but building and maintaining emergency egress routes is a no-brainer for the safety of all residents in an Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) area.  A FID district would need a board, budget and yearly mill levy.  It could span counties like Timberline Fire District and monies raised would be spent inside the district.  It seems like a big ask considering how tight things are with the economy and the pandemic, but it can also yield immediate benefits like possibly a better fire rating by the insurance companies.  There is also the mountain pride aspect where you acknowledge that living in the mountains is a high privilege and you will do whatever is necessary to preserve and protect it.  It is up to us, we who live in the surviving forests, to step it up so we don’t all end up living in big box apartments in Denver choking on the air.  Now is the time to create new entities to fully enact our CWPP’s so everyone living in the Red Zone is contributing to the protection and safety of their communities.  We should do this for the benefit of all of us and the forests and the wildlife.

Wes Isenhart
Black Hawk