Nancy Durham of the borough’s Emergency Operations Department and Tom Marsh, the plan contractor, briefed the assembly on the Fairbanks North Star Borough Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) update on June 17.

Marsh said the plan’s core objective is to improve life safety for residents and responders and to identify scientifically grounded Wildland‑Urban Interface (WUI) communities and mitigation projects that make grant applications more competitive. “Core to the CWPP is the scientific analysis,” Marsh told the assembly, describing use of LANDFIRE and U.S. Forest Service modeling tools to map fuels, fire behavior and probability.

The CWPP organizes the main plan into a 69‑page document with appendices: community‑level summaries (appendices A‑1 through A‑4), homeowner guidance on home ignition zones (appendix B), technical modeling details (appendix C), and a consolidated table of mitigation projects (appendix D). Marsh and Durham demonstrated an interactive mapping platform that links each recommended mitigation project to a status, implementing agency, priority ranking and suggested renewal interval.

Both presenters and assembly members emphasized that the highest, immediate priority is homeowner actions to reduce structural ignitability and improve defensible space — clearing combustible material 0–5 feet from structures and reducing fuels 5–30 feet away — because embers and ignitable building materials drive home losses in wind‑driven fires. Marsh said landscape‑scale work — road right‑of‑way treatments, transmission‑line vegetation management, water‑supply points and large fuel breaks — is also necessary but expensive, and the plan’s project tables are intended to be used directly in grant applications.

The presenters said the borough constrained the CWPP project to meet a narrow state deadline for grant rotation; that compressed schedule limited some in‑person outreach and spurred the plan team to create regional one‑page summaries that can be updated frequently. Several assembly members asked for additional outreach in outlying community centers — Salcha Senior Center, North Pole Library, Two Rivers Community Center and others — to improve local buy‑in. Durham said she and staff would look for opportunities to hold more meetings before the end‑of‑month deadlines tied to forestry grant cycles.

The presentation also reviewed the methodology: LANDFIRE vegetation data, IFTDSS fire behavior tools and local field visits used to define relative risk rankings (ICHR ratings) for borough communities. Marsh cautioned the ratings are comparative within the borough — intended for prioritizing local mitigation — and should not be used for insurance rating purposes.

Marsh and Durham said the plan had been through public comment and that the planning and trails advisory commissions and borough staff recommend adoption; the CWPP was placed on the assembly agenda for consideration but had not yet been adopted. Assemblymembers thanked staff and the contractor for the work and pressed for reach‑out events in specific communities before the plan is finalized to support future mitigation funding and on‑the‑ground projects.