The Nederland Community came together on Thursday, September 1, 2022, to take the first steps towards rewriting the Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP). Three graduate students from CU-Boulder’s new Masters of the Environment department facilitated the workshop. Kirin Riddell, Sarah Jensen and Ellie Prain were joined by Maya MacHamer and Erin Fried from the Boulder Watershed Collective (BWC).

Participants at the workshop represented the larger community that consider Nederland as their “home” town and recognize the CWPP will affect a much larger area than is contained within town limits. The town’s newly elected mayor, Billy Giblin, and members of the Nederland town board as well as DDA attended, joined by educators from Wild Bear, residential property owners, renters, and commercial property owners.

The grad students have been interviewing residents of Nederland and other adjacent areas during the summer to create two scenarios. The first scenario is the “reimagined future” where everything needed for funding is available, there is time for the community to work on projects, and the focus is on action items. The second scenario is the “projected future” if everything just keeps on going as is and this focus is on concerns. Results from the interviews identified five areas that needed to be addressed to move from the projected future to the reimagined. These were: 1. Collective community action 2. Home mitigation and defensible space 3. Ecosystem health 4. Land management 5. Safe and effective fire response.

The group attending Thursday night’s workshop were first asked to identify and write up on the corresponding topic board what they felt would be the indicator that this key dimension has been achieved in Nederland. The indicator with the most responses was the targeted number of acres/properties had been successfully mitigated for Collective Community Action to be successful. Adequate funding being available was the number one indicator that Home Mitigation and Defensible Space targets had been reached. To maintain Ecosystem Health, it was felt the best indicator would be quality wildlife habitat and connectivity (corridors for movement) were protected and achieved. Land management would be achieved by the indicator of Recreation and Fire prevention education and enforcement was in place. NFPD having the funding they need to make a successful response was the number one indicator for Safe and Effective Fire Response.

The next assignment for the group was to add to the topic boards what they felt were the opportunities/ obstacles for reaching these indicator goals. Some of these opportunities/ obstacles expressed were: 1. Keep it on a community level (including outlying from Nederland), 2. Engage younger people, 3. Provide egress for Big Springs 4. Organize the HOAs.

Maya MacHamer and Erin Fried of BWC are working according to their mission to update the CWPP and these concerns expressed by the Nederland community follow this mission. The BWC’s mission is to cultivate partnerships, promote community stewardship, and revitalize social and ecological systems in the Boulder Creek watershed and beyond. Currently, MacHamer states, “We are doing a lot of work around wildfire resilience and working with local communities to help determine what the priorities are then working to achieve those goals. Those goals are often around forestry work, home hardening, evacuation planning and building community capacity to scale up on wildfire resilience programs at the local level.”

The Nederland workshop expressed similar priorities. This project with the CU students provides a very well- defined starting point in addressing wildfire resilience and revising the current CWPP.

The next step in the process will be a meeting with the Nederland Youth Advisory Board at the end of September.