COPE Advocacy and Policy Issues
Supervisor Gore calls for a Campaign to Pre-Defeat Fires
In the last Board of Supervisor's meeting they discussed the PGE money. They had received a good amount of input from the community and from folks like you!
Here is his email and some tidbits below:
The discussion began with a staff presentation recapping the damages from the October 2017 fires, the $149.3 million litigation settlement with PG&E, and the board’s previous allocation of $26.8 million in September to stabilize the County.
Also summarized was community feedback about how to invest the funds, gathered from about 2,000 community members through surveys and emails following a robust outreach campaign. Feedback indicated top priorities included road repair, vegetation management, public safety, housing, and community preparedness/warning systems. This feedback aligned well with the Recovery & Resilience Framework, the County’s long-term vision and approach for how the County will recover from the October 2017 wildfires.
“The grunt work or what I would call the trench work, trench warfare, of resilience is really in vegetation management; it’s in community preparedness; it’s in home hardening. It’s in all of these deeper level things that go far beyond alert warning systems, far beyond the number of firefighters who can respond, far beyond how well we forecast and how we do evacuations,” he advised.
Community members, including wildfire survivors who pointed out that this funding is only available because their homes were destroyed, implored the board to invest in resiliency.
He made a formal motion to authorize a minimum of $25 million for vegetation management for fire prevention, $10 million to replace destroyed workforce housing, and $34.2 million for roads damaged during the wildfires.
The board decided to revisit the minimum allocation for roads at a future meeting when staff comes back with project proposals with specific dollar amounts.
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