Some Santa Barbara residents may have received a second ballot in their mailbox this spring.
Rather than voting on elected officials, residents in certain coastal neighborhoods are being asked to approve a wildfire suppression assessment in two high fire hazard areas, labeled as coastal and coastal interior neighborhoods.
If approved, property owners in the new assessment would pay a yearly rate of $122.95 per single-family home, which would increase each year based on the consumer price index (CPI), not to exceed 4%.
It would pay for homeowners to get three free home evaluations a year, roadside vegetation clearing, and free vegetation chipping from the Santa Barbara City Fire Department.
The fire department recently held a community meeting to discuss the proposal with property owners in Elings Park.
Ryan DiGuilio, city fire marshal, said the goal is to do more preventive work instead of scrambling when the next big fire happens.
“We’re seeing that fires don’t care what the calendar says anymore,” DiGuilio said. “There is no more fire season. We just live in fire country.”
These types of assessments already exist in foothill neighborhoods after being approved by property owners in 2006.
The proposed assessment covers neighborhoods around open spaces such as Elings Park, the Douglas Family Preserve, Honda Valley Park and Hilda McIntyre Ray Park.
Dan McCarter attended the recent community meeting and took issue with the fact that only property owners in the coastal neighborhoods are paying for wildfire prevention efforts that benefit everyone.
“I believe that this should be a city problem, that we should take it on as a city,” McCarter said, “because the entire city benefits if there’s a fire anywhere, or not a fire anywhere, that’s a great benefit for everybody.”
Fire Chief Chris Mailes said they see this as triage, to target areas they know are a high fire hazard.
“I would love to have 150 personnel and have the entire city designated as a high fire hazard area and have people out trimming every single tree in the city on a daily basis,” Mailes said. “The reality is we can’t do that, so we are triaging target hazard areas — areas that we, with common sense and intelligence, are saying, ‘There’s going to be a problem.’”
There are some residents who are in favor of the proposed assessment and the fire prevention work.
One such resident is Lee Heller, who lives near Elings Park and is a member of the Calle Community Neighborhood Association, which is an informal neighborhood group that started to address the fire risk posed by the park.
“I’m all in favor, because it is really clear that these traditionally sort of urban coastal areas that felt like they weren’t at risk of fire, that that’s changed under climate change,” Heller said. “We know that fire risk is no longer confined to the hillsides.”
Heller also shared that it can be hard to get neighbors interested in spending time and money on reducing fire fuels.
“Conversely, if you pay the city $100 to $125 a year and that collects into a decent-sized pot and goes to an agency who’s already doing that work, that’s all you have to do, and then the city will do it, and they’ll do it in the areas where the need is,” Heller said.
Rates would vary depending on the property use and size. For example, a single-family home on a 1-acre or smaller property would pay a rate of $122.95 and multi-family unit properties would pay $39.53 per unit.
These types of benefit assessment stem from Proposition 218, which passed in 1996 and allows assessments to be created to fund the cost of providing services, improvements, and maintenance for property improvement.
Ballots will be due on June 30, the same day the Santa Barbara City Council will have a public hearing on the issue. During the hearing, property owners can provide testimony on the proposed assessment and turn in ballots if they had not yet been mailed in.
After public testimony, the ballots will be counted, and if the majority of ballots are in favor of the proposed assessment, the City Council will approve the assessment.
