The Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly recently approved an ordinance, through consent agenda, that would adopt the updated 2022 Kenai Peninsula Borough Community Wildfire Protection Plan. The Kenai Peninsula Borough is, and has been, vulnerable to damages from wildfire events which pose a threat to wildlife habitat, public health and safety and could result in property loss or economic hardship.
The Borough Community Wildfire Protection Plan encompasses all lands and provides recommended projects designed to reduce wildfire risk to residents, ensuring that communities live safely in this fire prone environment; and it provides guidance to fire and emergency managers, as well as agencies who manage large land holdings.
According to Brenda Ahlberg, KPB Emergency Manager, the 2022 Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) update combines the former 17 plans developed in 2006 through 2009 and encompasses all lands, including unincorporated areas, municipalities, and private land holdings.
Ahlberg said that the CWPP project purpose is to do two things:
“One is to provide mitigation project recommendations that aim to greatly reduce wildfire risk to residents. These projects include perhaps alternate ingress egress to neighborhoods as well as to reduce hazardous fuels in the area. The other key component to this plan is that the plan provides guidance to fire and emergency managers as well as to agencies who manage large land holdings.”
She speaks on the project funding:
“This project was funded through a federal passthrough program under the Western Wildlife Urban Interface grant in the fall of 2018 as a cooperative agreement with the Alaska Division of Forestry. The award is about $130,000 and it included a 50% match of which some of the spruce bark beetle funding in the amount of $50,000 also contributed to the project and we’re also tracking in-kind contributions that can be used in lieu of the cash and to date there’s about $26,000 tracked in in-kind contributions towards the project.”
The project was broadly promoted throughout the Kenai Peninsula Borough, including public venues, comprehensive meetings with individual fire departments, tribal entities, and critical infrastructure utilities and transportation agencies. Those who worked on the project participated in a review period lasting six weeks to review the working draft, and the planning commission as well as the advisory planning commissions were asked to review the working draft.
The project story map can be seen at www.kpb.us/cwpp.
