Custer County votes to apply for state disaster‑mitigation grant to fund fuels reduction

The Custer County Board of Commissioners voted Aug. 19 to authorize staff to apply for the Colorado Natural Disaster Mitigation Enterprise Grant and related community wildfire defense funds.

John (first-name presenter) described the county strategy: concentrate fuels-reduction work on the home‑ignition zone and full‑property treatments for properties adjacent to evacuation routes to modify fire behavior at scale. "The enterprise grant ... is up to 900,000 and we're going to push push the limit on that," he said.

Using figures discussed in the presentation, John noted a prior state estimate of roughly $16,667 per residential property for full-property mitigation and said Custer County had about 463 homes in the referenced dataset; applying those numbers produced a multi‑million‑dollar need for county‑wide mitigation, which the grant would not fully cover. He and staff explained there is no local match for the state enterprise grant and that a 10% administrative overhead would be available to the county to manage projects.

Timeline and next steps discussed in the meeting: the state application deadline for the smaller, state grant is at the end of the month with awards likely in October; the federal program (larger, competitive fund) may open in October and could take until late 2027 or early 2028 before agreements and funds are executed. Commissioners moved, seconded and voted to submit the application and pursue available mitigation funding; staff will coordinate grant administration and may use recovery‑management contractors to administer multiple grants.