Firing up protection

S.F. Land Use Department to build wildfire threat mitigation into city code

On a weekday in early December, members of the nonprofit Forest Stewards Guild worked with Porfirio Chavarria, a wildland-urban interface specialist with the Santa Fe Fire Department, to tag trees for removal in the 1000 E. Hyde Park Road HOA.

The neighborhood of 23 homes sits on 13 acres of land fairly heavily wooded with piñon and juniper, homeowners association president Patrick Carr said. Following the guild’s efforts, some of those would be removed to better protect the neighborhood from wildfire.

It’s something the neighborhood has tried to be proactive about, Carr said, especially after witnessing the devastating Los Angeles fires in January: “It can be pretty scary.”

The HOA was also inspired after reading a February article in The New Mexican about work another Santa Fe HOA off of Old Taos Highway was doing to better protect itself against fire risk with the help of the city of Santa Fe and the Forest Stewards Guild.

“We’re basically following the general guidelines they followed,” Carr said, including thinning out trees across the landscape to reduce the chance of wildfires spreading.

Like much of the east side of town, the neighborhood sits in the wildland-urban interface, where development and open, vegetated land begin to overlap.

The city’s fire department is part of the effort to better protect residents in the fire-prone area, but the Land Use Department is also involved in the initiative through upcoming efforts to build fire protections into city code.

Land Use Director Heather Lamboy said regulations about the wildland-urban interface will be part of Phase 2 of the code update, which is currently underway after the City Council adopted the Phase 1 update last month.

The land use and fire departments hosted a half-day summit Tuesday morning at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, where staff shared information about work ongoing and upcoming at the city regarding wildfire prevention and land use policy.

The city is currently in the

process of updating its land use code and general plan for the first time in decades. Unlike Phase 1 of the update, which was completed as one massive repeal-and-replace ordinance of the 600-page-plus document, Phase 2 will be broken into smaller chunks, Lamboy said in a recent interview.

One of the first sections explored will be fire mitigation changes.

“Right now we have a map, but it’s just very generic,” Lamboy said. “We don’t have building standards like how can you harden your house against fire risk.”

Lamboy said the changes will involve further opportunities for community engagement and partnership with the Historic District Review Board, which has jurisdiction over many buildings on the northeast side.

“It’s not just landscaping, but … something like a garage, providing screening of those vents so that embers can’t get in,” she said. “And then some of the standards regarding roofing, especially on a flat roof, there are technologies now that prevent embers just catching fire right away.”

She noted the city has an advantage due to the preponderance of adobe and stucco as building materials, which tend to be more fire-resistant.

Phase 1 of the land use code was a significant undertaking that took much longer than initially anticipated to be complete. Lamboy said future changes will be broken out into more individual updates that can be processed more quickly.

Lamboy said she feels that’s particularly important for wildfire protection measures: “Getting those safety measures in, I think, is something that is responsible to do.”

The city will have some outside help. In August, it entered into an agreement with Montana-based nonprofit Headwaters Economics, which selected Santa Fe as one of the participants in its Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire program.

The program, which comes at no charge to the city, includes “wildfire risk assessments, land use planning recommendations, stakeholder engagement support, and customized research tailored to Santa Fe’s specific needs,” according to documents in the agreement.

The partnership will continue until early summer.

Several employees from Headwaters Economics participated remotely in the Tuesday event, including Doug Green, who manages the Community Planning Assistance for Wildfire program.

“Wildfire is interesting because it’s really the only natural disaster where what you do or what your neighbor does directly impacts your level of risk,” Green said during a question-and-answer session with participants, which included a number of people in the city’s building community.

Green said that across the country, Headwaters is seeing that a more communitywide approach has more impact than individual homeowners or builders working to protect properties in siloes.

“It’s always been ‘Let’s look at the individual parcel,’ ” he said. “We now are realizing this is really a communitywide problem, and we can protect parts of communities by designing in a real, strategic way.”