County planner seeks Midcoast input on draft safety element covering sea-level rise, wildfire and evacuations

Katie Faulkner, a long-range planner with San Mateo County Planning & Building, told the Midcoast Community Council that the county has released a public draft update to the safety element of its general plan and is asking residents to comment. "Weve recently put out a public draft, and we are here because we are asking for feedback," Faulkner said, adding that the update expands the document beyond geotechnical, flood and fire hazards to include climate adaptation and evacuation-route analysis.

Faulkner walked the council through the updates structure: hazard profiles and mapping, goals and policies, and implementation actions that list lead departments. She said the county collaborated with eight cities under the Peninsula Resilience Planning (PREP) effort and used public sources such as the "Our Coast, Our Future" sea-level-rise layers and state guidance to set projections and hazard layers. "We are asking for comments by July 31," Faulkner said, while acknowledging the county can accept late submissions and will incorporate feedback into a revised draft before state agency review and adoption hearings.

During council and public questioning, residents and members pressed staff on how the safety element would be implemented and funded, and whether the document sufficiently addresses evacuation bottlenecks on the Midcoast. Faulkner said implementation actions are not guaranteed funding in next years budget and that some actions will depend on grants and interdepartmental coordination: "Sometimes we need a grant potentially to be able to implement something," she said. Staff and the countys emergency-management office also indicated they are developing an all-hazards evacuation framework to model scenario-specific pinch points and support prioritization of infrastructure work.

Faulkner said the county maintains an online hazard-mapping viewer and a PREP project website with outreach materials and the vulnerability assessment; she said state reviewers (California Geological Survey, OES and Cal Fire) will review the draft before planning commission and board hearings. The county encouraged residents to use keyword searches (for example, "sea level rise") in the draft to find policies and actions relevant to a particular hazard or community.