*Photo by Adrian Tamblin of the Permit Sonoma Communications Division*

A federal grant for large-scale fuels reduction and home hardening in Brooktrails has been canceled, along with the entire program that funded it, as part of the government’s cost-cutting efforts. The Building Resilient Communities and Infrastructure, or BRIC fund, was a FEMA grant that was supposed to “promote climate adaptation and resilience” in the face of “growing hazards associated with climate change,” according to the Cal OES website. Mendocino County was expecting close to $50 million which would have gone to retrofit 750 homes with ignition-resistant construction materials, hire crews to reduce fuels on about 1,500 acres, reduce invasive plants, and put grazing animals to work on another 300 acres, all in and around the Brooktrails area. County leaders and residents are now looking for other ways to fund the improvements, which they think would have provided a significant boost to fire safety and workforce development.

“It was a key grant that was finally orienting money the way we think is most important,” said Scot Cratty, Executive Director of the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council. “The most vulnerable thing in a wildfire is our homes. So if we make them resilient to wildfire, that’s the most effective way to save lives and structures.”

Fire awareness has long been a part of life for residents of Brooktrails, who mounted an exemplary evacuation in 2022 during the Oak Fire. Brian Ferri-Taylor says when he moved into the neighborhood in 1981, one of the first things he heard was that “if a fire ever crowns in Brooktrails, we’re all toast.” He received some sense of security back then, along with a map detailing eight evacuation routes. All was well until 2017, when wind-driven flames raged for weeks in Mendocino and Sonoma counties. At that point, a major discovery was made about the Brooktrails evacuation maps: “There’s only one way out,” Ferri-Taylor reported. “So 2017 was a real slap upside the head wakeup call.”

Since then, Brooktrails has approved an annual assessment to maintain the FirCo Road and Willits Creek Trail, a couple of private routes that emergency vehicles can use to get into the neighborhood and respond to a disaster. In that event, both lanes of Sherwood Road would be available to residents trying to escape.

“Brooktrails is one of the top thirteen most dangerous communities in the state,” according to Third District Supervisor John Haschak. He said county staff has been working on the “landscape level” grant for several years. The county recently received approval for $3.5 million for the planning phase of the grant. “Since we received the first phase, we expected to receive the second and third phases, because that’s how these programs work,” Haschak reasoned. But earlier this month, FEMA sent out a press release headlined, “FEMA Ends Wasteful, Politicized Grant Program, Returning Agency to Core Mission of Helping Americans Recovering from Natural Disasters.” An update on April 21 stated that, “As the program is concluding, the Fiscal Year 2024 BRIC funding opportunity is cancelled, no applications submitted will be reviewed and no funds will be awarded.” Funds that have not been distributed will be returned to the Disaster Relief Fund or the U.S. Treasury, and only recipients whose projects have started construction will be able to “expend all associated funds.”

Haschak says the county has already spent some of the money it received, and he doesn’t know if it will be reimbursed. The county also spent about $50,000 on consultants to write the grant. “The consequences are that we won’t have that extra safety that we were counting on, because of the high risk nature of this area,” he said. Also, “There was going to be an economic development part to it, because we were going to have to have people come in and do the retrofitting of these houses. That is a skill set in itself…and the fuel reduction on the landscape level was going to be big.”

Cratty says the grant would have gone a long way towards developing a workforce that knows what it takes to make homes more resistant to fire. “A lot of little things,” he enumerated: “just changing out the vents we have, enclosing decks and steps, creating a five-feet clearance around the homes. Caulking and flashing, and replacing wooden fence segments that are right next to the home . Those things are all fairly inexpensive and doable and increase our safety a lot, and we don’t have a workforce that knows how to do them, currently.” In addition to injecting millions of dollars’ worth of work into Brooktrails, Cratty believes the grant would have paid for local workers to get trained on skills that will continue to be in high demand as state regulations about fire safety and building codes tighten up, insurance demands get more strenuous, and homeowners seek contractors who can do the work efficiently and are also savvy about the requirements of working on grant-funded projects so they can help people retrofit their homes. The loss of this grant, he predicted, “is going to deprive us of an economic development step that we really need to get the whole county ready.”

Haschak says the county has received money for the research phase of a state grant to build a proper paved road in Brooktrails leading to the highway. Ferri-Taylor, the Brooktrails resident, said the community is pursuing small-scale safety projects, including expanding an emergency alert system and maintaining vegetation along Sherwood Road. Residents are all in on Mendocino County Fire Safe Council chipper days. The Brooktrails Fire Department is holding a flea market on June 28, where educational materials about the importance of fire safety will be available to residents. But “there’s $50 million worth of work and local job creation and training that’s, we’re going to have to find another way,” he said. “I don’t know what that is yet.”

Instead of getting $50 million in structural improvements and economic development to prevent disaster, Brooktrails is holding a Fire Department flea market, just to keep getting by.

For more information about how you can make your neighborhood more resilient to wildfire or start a neighborhood Fire Safe Council or Fire wise Community, visit the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council at www.firesafemendocino.org.