Santa Barbara County Fire Chief Garrett Huff recently signed a Good Neighbor Agreement with the U.S. Forest Service, which allows the agencies to coordinate on fuel reduction for wildfire prevention.

It will allow County Fire crews to clear vegetation and do other work on federal land and get reimbursed if the USFS is not available to do the work with its own crews, according to the agreement. 

Santa Barbara County has huge areas of federal fire responsibility, including Los Padres National Forest and Vandenberg Space Force Base. Then there are state responsibility areas, which County Fire is responsible for, and local responsibility areas, which Santa Maria, Lompoc, Santa Barbara, Montecito and Carpinteria-Summerland fire agencies manage. 

Several “large and historic fires” have started in federal lands, including Los Padres National Forest, and moved into county and local fire agency jurisdiction, noted Huff and Fire Marshal Fred Tan in a report to the Board of Supervisors.

Good Neighbor Agreements “have not been widely used due to environmental or policy challenges,” according to the county. However, in the last two years, the U.S. Forest Service and CalFire negotiated Good Neighbor Agreement language to use for California fire agencies. 

No specific projects are included in Santa Barbara County’s agreement, but it “serves as an important step forward and precedent between the USFS, the state and local agencies in recognizing fire moves easily across borders,” according to Huff and Tan’s report.

The agreement includes $26,000 in federal funding for County Fire to be reimbursed for fuel reduction work on federal land. 

This is different from the mutual aid agreements that allow fire agencies to respond to fires outside their own jurisdiction and be reimbursed for that work. It’s common to see fire trucks from all over California and the western United States on local roads during major wildfires. 

Another effort to work across jurisdictional boundaries is the centralized fire and medical dispatch system. As of 2025, fire and medical 9-1-1 calls are handled by one dispatch center, and the closest available unit to an incident is the one that responds. 

That “borderless dispatch” system and Regional Fire Communications Center were a major initiative advocated by local fire chiefs, including Huff’s county fire chief predecessor Mark Hartwig.