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City outlines wildfire resilience implementation plan, homeowner grants and prescribed-fire pilot for fall 2025
Summary
City staff presented a consolidated wildfire resilience implementation plan (RIP) that bundles the CWPP and other plans into an action portfolio; staff also previewed targeted homeowner grants, a RAP pilot reopening in June, and a fall 2025 pilot to implement a unit of the Flatiron Vista prescribed‑fire plan.
City staff presented a citywide Wildfire Resilience Implementation Plan (RIP) to the Open Space Board of Trustees, describing a portfolio approach that consolidates the Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) and roughly two dozen other city plans into about 166 discrete projects organized into 18 "action areas." Staff described the RIP as an umbrella for prioritizing, sequencing and costing wildfire-related work across departments.
Brian Anacker, OSMP senior manager for science and climate resilience, outlined governance and committees structured around the three national cohesive strategies: fire-adapted communities, resilient landscapes and wildfire response, with crosscutting committees for communications and budget. Anacker said the portfolio includes completed work, active projects and works-in-progress and that the action-area framing (for example: homeowner grants, building codes, mechanical fuels reduction, prescribed fire, cross-boundary coordination, biomass utilization, evacuation) will allow executive leadership to set priorities and report progress more clearly.
Chief David Lowery and Chief Brian Oliver of Boulder Fire Rescue, and Paul Denison, OSMP's Wildland Fire senior program manager, described specific initiatives: Boulder Fire Rescue's detailed home assessment (DHA) program has produced roughly 600 assessments since late 2023 and provides homeowners with downloadable, prioritized recommendations for property hardening. The Wildfire Resiliency Assistance Program (a city finance-managed pilot that began Sept. 2024) distributed about $50,000 in the pilot and will reopen in June 2025 with revised rules: households in the designated Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) will be eligible for up to $2,000 (applications may be made multiple times up to the cap), and homeowner associations will be eligible for grants up to $10,000.
On prescribed fire, Paul Denison and Chief Oliver described a focused pilot: staff aim to implement at least one unit of the Flatiron Vista burn plan in fall 2025 to learn capacity gaps and operational needs. The Flatiron Vista plan covers roughly 1,800 acres on OSMP land and is divided into multiple units; staff targeted one unit that is predominantly grassland and bounded by control features (3'to—300+ acres depending on operational decisions) as an achievable initial objective. Denison emphasized that prescribed fire is a collaborative, time- and resource-intensive activity that relies on Boulder Fire Rescue's burn-boss qualifications and on coordinated planning with grazing tenants and ecological staff.
Chief Brian Oliver outlined response capacity improvements: Boulder Fire Rescue has about 130 uniformed personnel with a 24/7 minimum on-duty staffing level (25 on duty at a time) and a cadre of six wildfire operations specialists. The department described equipment inventory (multiple engine types, urban-interface pumpers, type 6 rigs including one currently owned by OSMP) and operational changes including indices-based dispatching and closest-unit dispatching to increase surge capacity across jurisdictions. Oliver said regional incident-management team agreements and the Colorado mutual-aid system are in use to scale response when incidents exceed local capacity.
Board members asked about smoke-notification timelines, protections for smoke-sensitive residents, how action areas are prioritized and how the RIP will be represented to the public. Staff said state smoke-permit minimum notification is 24 hours but that staff aim for broader outreach 7'to—0 days in advance and typically attempt 48'to—3'hour notice for prescribed burns; staff also maintain a registry of smoke-sensitive residents to whom they send direct notices. Staff outlined next steps: an additional focus on ignition prevention in July, a fall '25 operational push to implement priority actions and an early-2026 public progress-evaluation and story-map rollout that will display metrics, maps and multimedia documenting progress and investments.
