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Committee approves charter edits to prioritize Firewise communities and expand membership
Summary
Portola Valley's Wildfire Preparedness Committee voted to add language encouraging the formation and maintenance of Firewise communities, remove a duty to coordinate evacuation (leaving evacuation work to the EPC), and increase membership from five to seven to ease quorum issues; members discussed logistics for subcommittees and next steps to present changes to Town Council.
The Portola Valley Wildfire Preparedness Committee approved a set of modest charter changes designed to emphasize community mitigation and make the committee easier to staff.
Chair (speaker 1) proposed adding language to the charter to "explicitly say that we are going to encourage the formation [and] maintenance of Firewise Communities in town," removing a later duty that directed the wildfire committee to coordinate evacuation with the Emergency Preparedness Committee (EPC), and increasing the committee's membership from five to seven to reduce recurring quorum problems.
The chair said the intent of removing the evacuation coordination duty was to keep the wildfire committee focused on mitigation: "If the wildfire committee focuses on evacuation, then I don't think it's the best message because what we really want people to focus on is doing mitigation," the chair said. Committee members discussed how subcommittees are formed under current rules and noted that creating subcommittees still requires majority approval under the existing charter language.
A committee member (speaker 2) moved to approve the changes and another member seconded the motion. The committee took a show-of-hands vote; the transcript records no dissent when the chair moved on to the next agenda item.
Next steps: the committee will present the updated charter language as part of its Town Council update. The chair and members discussed recruiting additional Firewise block captains and forming implementation plans for increasing Firewise coverage townwide.
