Community Wildfire Discussion Focused Mostly on Taxes and Neighbors
The Grass Valley City Council held a Special Meeting on Wednesday, September 6, 2023, starting at 6:00 p.m. The meeting was held in person at City Hall in the Council Chambers, located at 125 E. Main Street, and made available via YouTube Live on The City of Grass Valley’s YouTube channel.
After the call to order, pledge, roll call, and approval of the agenda, the City Council opened the floor to public comments. There were no public comments for topics not on the agenda, so the public hearing started on the topic listed in the agenda, “Wildland Fires and the Associated Risk Management in the City of Grass Valley.” The crowd was larger than usual, which likely was “why you are all here tonight, I am sure,” Grass Valley Mayor Jan Arbuckle commented.
The agenda listed the topic for the public hearing:
“The purpose of this gathering is to discuss the risk of wildland fires and Fire Resiliency and Vegetation Management. The focus of the Town Hall meeting will be taking input from the public and answering questions related to public safety risks that Grass Valley may face due to extreme weather events and wildfires.”
“City Manager, Tim Kiser, and Fire Chief, Mark Buttron, will give a brief introduction and presentation to Council and the public. This will be followed by a public comment period where questions may be addressed.”
Fire Chief Mark Buttron then gave a presentation, which he hoped would provide a “broad basis” for the discussion. He spoke about risk as a hazard, likelihood, or vulnerability and that topography, climate, and fuel “are things we feel every day,” especially fuel, over which there is some control.
Buttron mentioned that after surveying the public, they found that community lifelines were the highest priority. The term “community lifelines” is a term used by FEMA to represent the “most fundamental services” of a community, some of which Chief Buttron listed, for example, safety and security, water systems, and transportation. He then described a “two-prong approach”: “risk mitigation” and “response.” “You can’t have one without the other,” Buttron explained.
Worries About Additional Taxes
After Chief Buttron’s presentation, the floor was opened again to the public. City Manager Tim Kiser had introduced the meeting by saying, “Tonight is not a conversation whether we are having a tax or not,” and hoped to hear from citizens what they thought were the biggest risks in the Grass Valley city limits related to wildfire.
Marianne Boll-See, a local reporter, spoke up in the meeting, mentioning that she understood from the previous City Council meeting that this was to be an open conversation about any of the topics that citizens are concerned about and were discussed at the last meeting, “including the half cent tax.” She asked the Council to clarify the agenda.
Another resident who called herself Melissa described her history with Measure E (2018). “I worked really really hard on the Measure E committee in 2016,” Melissa explained. “Now, in 2023, there’s a different narrative.” Melissa described herself as a landscape designer, and that she drives every street in this county, “incorporated and unincorporated.” She shared, “The individual homeowner is our best bet for fire resiliency in this community … It really starts with the individual homes … I find that to be very, very important.”
A resident named Cathy introduced herself, adding, “I help manage the association of realtors.” She claimed that a lot of people “were sold on Measure E helping provide funding for fire among other issues” in Grass Valley. She asked the Council to better educate the public on why they might be seeking another tax increase, and expressed a desire to know if the last tax measure was truly successful before adding on another measure. “We are questioning how and why, after all this time of reporting, the positive feedback on all your work and all your effort, to see another potential tax initiative.” She contiued, “We know that sales tax goes into the general fund,” adding that she wanted to know if the original funds went into what people hoped for. “Why aren’t we clearing the roadside vegetation?”
Mayor Jan Arbuckle asked City Manager Tim Kiser to talk to that point. Kiser said Measure E helped to hire some staff, explaining that there is more now that is administratively needed and necessary to run programs efficiently. Arbuckle also asked Kiser where the financial reporting for Measure E is located, and Kiser pointed out that the budget can be found on the website. He also shared that a dedicated Measure E page will be available on the website at a future date.
Someone in the audience asked how many positions Measure E funds, and Fire Chief Mark Buttron replied that it funds 11 staff positions. Councilmember Bob Branstrom added that his understanding was that Measure E did not have a single purpose toward only fire response. “Part of what the public wanted,” Branstrom claimed, “was for us to upgrade our fire personnel to paramedics, and that is part of the funding that Measure E is being used for… That doesn’t add additional staffing, as I understand it, to fight fires. It develops the staff we have to be better going out to somebody’s house if they get an emergency call.” Fire Chief Buttron confirmed that “some funding from Measure E has pushed into both the expanded scope EMG, the limited advanced life support, and now the advanced life support.”
Several people present at the meeting showed opposition to the idea of an additional tax increase, questioning if past tax increases have been used responsibly.
Gil Mathew of the Economic Resource Council gave a comment, saying, “All citizens have a high degree of interest in ensuring that our city and our county have the adequate funds to do the kind of service that we expect out of them,” also saying, “every time you raise the taxes, there’s a consequence to that. We going to lose business out of the community.”
Other residents gave multiple examples of the City being the worst offenders of clearing dry fuels from its own properties. Matthew Coulter gave a comment via Zoom, claiming, “things have not been adhered to that they said would be done. Measure E - that needs an audit. That was presented to the people as having paramedics on the fire trucks, which we don’t have. Yesterday, I think it was, we ran out of ambulances three times in three hours in the morning yesterday. And so it really helps to have paramedics on the fire trucks.”
Coulter went on to claim that government agencies are dealing with vegetation cleanup in irresponsible ways, saying, “On Bennett Street… there’s piles of green waste that’s been in people’s yards for over a year, two years, even three years. The County-owned house there, … it is the most run-down and dilapidated house with green waste for years, I mean five, six years, piled in the yard.”
Coulter also explained, “We have regulations in place to deal with all these subjects, yet no one seems to want to lift a finger to do it. City-owned properties by the City of Grass Valley are gross offenders on this subject of green waste. I’ll bring up Nevada Union High School as a good example: they’ve been throwing their green waste off their back hill toward Sierra College Road and the old folks’ home back there, for years. So there’s just this massive, massive pile that’s going to take a very large piece of equipment to remove that pile of dry green waste that’s been piled back there for years and years.”
Another member of the public proposed the idea that instead of another ballot measure, the City could re-allocate the funding for parks in Measure E to the fire departments. “How many soccer fields do guys my age use? Not a whole lot. Except to fly our model airplanes on.” A Council member replied with a smile, “so I’ll direct the pickleball lobby to you,” and another Council member added, “they are quite forceful.“ Mayor Arbuckle replied, “adding the parks to Measure E came out of having the conversation with the community and that overwhelmingly was what they wanted [as] part of Measure E.” Kiser added that the soccer season just started and they had about 1,000 kids playing last weekend.
The Impact of Neighbors
One local resident, Susan Rogers, introduced herself and requested that the city provide proactive inspections for vegetation code compliance. “The coalition of firewise communities encourages people to talk to their neighbors before filing a complaint, in the city or the county, and I know that that works in neighborhoods where there’s good connections between neighbors, but there’s neighborhoods like mine where there’s a lot of economic diversity, differences between people who’ve lived there forever and people who are newer, and just reasons why people are not as connected.”
Another Grass Valley resident introduced herself as Lily Marie Mora, and said, “some of our neighbors are older, so they’re not going to be able to clean up their properties, and some of the neighbors don’t have the funds, or they don’t have a trailer to haul the stuff to the dump,” she explained. She proposed the idea of “encouraging the neighborhoods to get together a little bit more, even though they’re diverse in many ways. … I think it’s going to come down to teams of volunteers helping some of these neighbors.” Neighbors can help neighbors, which would “open the dialogue.” She mentioned that her nephew bought a trailer and several neighbors used it to fill up and help each other clean their properties.
One Eskaton resident spoke about how he had developed a chainsaw that cuts brush well. He offered his chainsaws to volunteers who would be willing and able to use them to help neighbors remove green waste from their yards.
City Manager Tim Kiser explained, “just walk around the neighborhood and see how many trees are overhanging homes.” He added, “That’s probably beyond the point of removing a bush… it is a very expensive task to remove a tree.”
Mayor Jan Arbuckle added that the population tends to be elderly “and they don’t have the resources to take out that tree that may be, should be, removed,” and noted that it can cost several thousand dollars. She continued, “If you’re looking at somebody that’s on a fixed income, that’s just not doable. So I think that that’s something that we also need to consider, the fact of the demographic of our city, and not just our city, but western Nevada County as a whole. We are an older population. And so how do we work with our seniors?”
Rogers responded to the Mayor’s and other resident’s points, saying, “even if their neighbors talk to them, they still don’t do it for a variety of reasons - maybe they’re too old or they don’t have money - but it’s still an extreme fire danger, and so the coalition has found in the firewise communities that if somebody in a uniform shows up, it makes a huge difference.”
City Councilmembers ended the evening with thanks to members of the community for showing up to share their thoughts.