Transcription Metadata

Whisper API Version 1
Generated 2025-04-21 23:11:04 UTC
Archive URI berkeley_48852a5c-db29-45ff-801e-949af191a24c.ogg

Segment 1

Okay so I oh great so council members we had I was entertaining a motion to accept the supplemental materials by our chief Sprague and we were just waiting to have enough folks to be able to receive that and I believe we had a motion and a second.
Second.
Thank you.
So to accept the revised material from the fire department Councilmember Kesarwani? Yes.
Taplin? Yes.
And O'Keefe? Yes.
Blackaby? Yes.
Lunaparra? Yes.
Humbert? Yes.
And Mayor Ishii? Yes.
Thank you very much.
Thank you everyone.
I'm gonna pass it over the chief for the presentation.
Okay good afternoon mayor, council, members of the community.
We return here tonight after two months of collaboration with the Disaster Fire Safety Commission, many of you, and members of the community.
We want to begin with a recap of the two components of the EMBER package that we're bringing before you tonight for consideration.
Best defensible space, specifically Zone Zero, and adoption of the fire hazard severity zone maps.
The fires in Paradise, Santa Rosa, La Hena, and most recently in Los Angeles and right here in Berkeley in 1923 and 1991 they're not surprises.
Many fires occurred where fires have occurred in the past, following known topography and fueled by similar weather conditions.
Fire is a natural part of the California landscape, one we cannot eliminate, but one we can learn can and must learn to adapt to.
Through defensible space and home hardening, we can build a fire adaptive community and significantly reduce the risk to life and property.
While fire suppression remains essential, it's not alone enough.
A safer future will require all of us working together to make Berkeley more fire safe.
This photo shows burn scars a tree experienced just under every 10 years, ending around the turn of the century when we began to systematically eliminate fire from the landscape.
Climate change, fueled in part by wildfires, which contribute 28% of the carbon released into the atmosphere, has put a fine point on the issue.
While the fire problem we face today is partially a result of climate change, it's also the result of the systematic exclusion of fire from the landscape for over a hundred years.
This, along with our development into fire-prone landscapes, has led to a substantially higher amount of really dry fuel for fires to burn.
As the climate warms, it pulls more moisture from that fuel and dries it out, increasing its ignition potential.
As the rainy season continues to compress, we have tender dry fuel conditions, which are easily ignitable, that overlap with high wind events in the winter and spring that did not previously pose a risk of fire.
Because we're not going to engage in a managed retreat from fire-prone areas, we're forced, with a binary decision, to adapt or not.
Maintaining the status quo will continue to result in similar outcomes.
All these fires, and many more, took advantage of key vulnerabilities in the communities that enabled devastating fire behavior, resulting in catastrophic structure loss, injuries, and death.
These vulnerabilities are well known, scientifically supported, and field-tested in communities across the West, many with similar topography, vegetation, and climate conditions to the East Bay.
The state of California experiences about 8,000 wildfires a year.
Many of them occur under far less extreme conditions than we saw in Los Angeles.
We know that fire will inevitably impact the Berkeley Hills again, as it has approximately every 20 years, with the last major fire occurring over 30 years ago, now in 1991.
Common public engagement over the last four years has often revolved around a compromise.
Sorry, a lot over the last four months, as we've evolved this process, has often revolved around a compromise between defensible space and home hardening, allowing flexibility to improve compliance.
If I have a hardened structure, do I still need to pull my camellias? There are dozens of pathways for fire to spread through communities.
Even just one vulnerability can ignite a structure, which is highly likely to result in the ignition of numerous additional structures and the loss of an entire community.
In 1991, each home that burned was estimated to have ignited ten adjacent structures.
Doing half of the ember hardening, or defensible space required, does not translate to a 50% increase in resilience or structure survivability.
Recent independent modeling confirms the lived experience from 91.
The dark red polygons spanning the Berkeley Hills across the proposed Grizzly Peak zone show where fire is most likely to make entry into the community, and where minimal separation between structures means that one structure burning without fire department intervention will lead to rapid structure-to-structure fire spread.
Thus, every opportunity for embers to result in ignition must be addressed for this to be effective.
All residential construction has significant vulnerabilities.
Windows, vents, weep holes in stucco walls, all are necessary construction features that make zone 0 and defensible space critical.
This video is from Los Angeles, and it's why homes burn.
These embers are blown from other vegetation or other burning structures, and when any one of these lands in something that can burn or penetrates space in a home, they ignite.
Once a home is ignited, it threatens surrounding homes through both embers and heat at a scale that no fire department can match.
This is what we saw in Los Angeles, Lahaina, Santa Rosa, Boulder, and Berkeley.
We continue to lose these fights because we failed to recognize that the most abundant and driest fuel in our hills that requires intervention is, in fact, the homes themselves.
Without a change in our approach, we should expect the same results.
Fire is opportunistic.
It exploits the connections between the vegetation, homes, fences.
So I want to show a video that we've cut together from a fire that occurred in 2016 in Texas that shows this relationship.
I'll narrate it as we watch, and there's a timer in the top right that shows the progression, even though the video is cut together.
So ultimately, this was a grass fire that impacted an unmitigated community.
Nine homes were destroyed, and a number of others were damaged.
It was ignited by a lawnmower that hit some material and caused a spark.
The fire spread through this low grass that was dry.
The community had preceding number of months of drought, so fuels were dry, temperatures were high, and there was about a 10 to 20 mile an hour wind on this fire.
You can see the fire in this backyard spreading through well-maintained but dry grass.
It spreads through wood and mulch in the same way.
Fire can spread through these low fuels and ignite fences, as you see here.
Once wooden fences are ignited, they literally act as wicks, moving fire through a community.
Fence fires will ignite other vegetation in the home.
You can see here it's about to ignite via radiant heat this outbuilding, and once that outbuilding gets ignited, that's going to produce enough radiant heat to ignite the home.
This is why fences are such a big deal when we're talking about Zone Zero.
So we're going to start watching this home right in the center of the video here.
You can see the fence just ignited this outbuilding.
The outbuilding is now fully involved and radiating heat and direct flame exposure to this awning of the main structure.
You can see the fire is also traveling in the grass to the home.
Now you can see the corner of the rear of that awning on fire, and fire is going to now start to move towards the home.
We're 19 minutes in, now 23 minutes in to this fire.
The rear of that structure is now on fire, and as we see here in the final seconds of the video, the rear of that structure is now well involved.
So without Fire Department intervention, without homes having defensible space, specifically Zone Zero and being hardened, these are the types of things that we've seen for decades occurring in hundreds of fires across the western United States.
So what's the desired end state? I really like this, I'm sorry I can't move that video out of the way here, but I really like looking at this as an equation.
So if you can conceptualize our actions before, during a fire as an equation, there's three major components.
One is, what do we do ahead of the fire? This is actions we take now, which include identifying known fire pathways, prioritizing resources, and disrupting the vegetation to make it harder for the fire to spread, ensuring our Fire Department is properly staffed, equipped, trained, and most importantly creating that defensible space and hardening our homes.
Next are actions that we take when the worst fire weather is forecast, ahead of any ignition, including, and this includes, increasing staffing strategically in our Fire Department and moving as many people from the community, especially those who are more vulnerable or need more time to leave, out of the hills.
Finally, when an ignition occurs, it's key that it be detected early and that emergency officials trigger early orders to evacuate and simultaneously summon an overwhelming response from neighboring fire agencies.
The EMBR package that we presented to you in February accomplishes all these factors and they're all within our sphere of influence and control.
So this is a, this is a kind of rudimentary slide, but I think it really illustrates the problem.
This is where we are today, unmitigated community, especially on the perimeter of our city.
If a wildfire approaches the city, there are many receptive fuel beds in vegetation and homes that are going to ignite.
This is what we have seen in all the fires that I listed, Los Angeles being the most recent.
What happens is when we have a number of structures burning that outnumbers the available firefighting resources, then we create this unstoppable domino effect and these fires do not go out until the wind changes or dies down.
So it's really a matter of creating more time.
What we want to do is create a mitigated community and focus on those highest risk areas on the, on the border of our community and invest the most resources in those homes and those residents to transition as many homes as we can to be less receptive to embers and direct flame.
So when the fire approaches, we have far fewer structures that ignite and that slows things down.
We're not going to stop this fire, but we're going to slow it down, provide more time for residents to evacuate and allow us more time to accumulate enough firefighting resources into that specific area to control the fires that do ignite.
So there's a reason we believe in focused investment targeting a geographical area and we've shown this graphic before but I think it bears repeating.
This is Lahaina and that yellow circle is Kahoma Village.
That community was built in 2017 after Chapter A of, 7A of the building code went into effect.
So those homes were built with modern standards to resist wildfire and also had defensible space.
There's 205, 210 homes in that community.
In the devastation that struck Lahaina, five of the structures in that community were burned.
Only five.
So we know that this works for an individual community, but again what's equally important is the role that this community played in the rest of the fire to the north.
So where Kahoma Village was, the fire had to find an alternate pathway around to the east to get up to the northern half of Lahaina and Kahoma played a significant role in potentially stopping this fire from impacting the other half of Lahaina.
Kahoma Village again is about a quarter of a mile wide which is the average distance between Grizzly Peak Boulevard and Wildcat Canyon Road.
Here it is in close-up and then this is not a one-time event.
This is again in Botania, Chile outside of El Paraiso.
This is in a country that does not have the firefighting response of California.
When the fire reached the outskirts of this city there was no fire department at all.
However this community again is a modern community that anticipated the modern risks of building and wildfire, built with defensible space practices and home hardening, fought this fire two years before the fire ever got there and won.
So we know these tactics work.
We know they work when they're done collectively as a community and we know that that collective action has impacts on the remainder of the city.
Okay so that was our review of of the why and now we're moving into a review of our two council items.
I'm going to go through both items and then wrap up and we can go from there.
So the first item is adoption of the Cal Fire fire hazard severity zone maps and additional designation recommendations that we've made.
This map shows the identified fire hazard severity zones that from the state.
There's three zone categories very high which are the red area the red area on the map, high which is the orange area and moderate which are the yellow areas.
It's important to note that Cal Fire modeling doesn't takes into account a very limited number of factors including urban vegetation cover, blowing embers, fire history and the distance from a wildland area that poses a risk.
It's important also to note what it doesn't model.
The model is not a structure loss model.
So it's not it's not really well suited for predicting fire behavior in urban environments.
It doesn't consider key local information that's really important including how many structures are there are per acre or what is the average distance between structures in a certain area.
The year that homes were constructed or the number of homes that have undergone renovation to harden them, installing vents, gutter covers.
None of that is considered and finally the modeling doesn't consider the number of people in the area and the capacity of the roadway to support a major evacuation.
I forgot to mention the three categories have specific requirements that are required by state state law.
So very high any areas is very high we have to adopt no smaller than that footprint.
We can expand it we cannot shrink it and we cannot change the regulations that are applied by the state in those areas.
So very high red zone is required to comply with defensible space and is required new construction is required to comply with chapter 7a.
New construction not existing construction there this is not a retroactive.
The orange area high is only required to for new construction to apply comply with chapter 7a.
Other than that there's no requirements and in the moderate zone there are no requirements.
So what's the history of this process in in Berkeley? This has been going on since the 91 fire.
Our mayor at the time or Mayor Bates was the one who championed this legislation at the state establishing the fire hazard severity zones.
Since 1991 we have adopted a much larger area than the state requires as shown in the large orange polygon on the map.
That area was all very high so we brought the very high all the way down to essentially MLK in the north.
So I've overlaid what the current 2025 CAL FIRE recommendation identified areas are over what our area used to be and is today.
As we reviewed the CAL FIRE maps we looked at modifications that we wanted to make and it's important to think about what we were considering when we're making this recommendation.
One is fire history.
As I've talked about fire is repetitive, follows known topography, pushed by predictable wind conditions.
As you can see on the map there's a number of fires that have impacted the East Bay Hills over the last hundred years and they're all generally in the same areas following the and then we did fire pathway mapping so you can see those pathways generally align with fires that have occurred.
We looked at such structure separation distance and structure density in the hills both of which are in the highest risk categories as determined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology which means that homes are really close together generally in the hills.
There's limited retrofitting to meet chapter 7a we know this via our 9,000 inspections that we do every year and there's only about 50 homes that have been built since the new chapter 7a building standards went into effect in 2008.
There's also very limited east-west evacuation routes which are going to constrain evacuation and when we're looking at where to designate these boundaries we also looked at pulling the boundaries to strategic north-south streets that are wide and in a firefighting operation would naturally be used by incident commanders to position resources and create a kind of line of where we take a stand to try to slow or stop the fire.
So all that has led us to a recommendation as we have every time that these Cal Fire maps has come out that we designate a larger area than Cal Fire recommended because of these local conditions.
So what you see here are three things.
The red area is the identified very high fire hazard severity zone that Cal Fire that we must adopt from Cal Fire.
The orange area at the bottom is the current very high fire hazard severity zone the city adopts adopted and has been enforcing.
The pink area in between is what we're proposing to you tonight which is to downgrade that very high fire hazard severity zone for the rest of the hills outside of what we have to adopt from the state to from very high to high.
We're also proposing to shrink it from what it was previously and this is based on all those factors that that I just mentioned.
The one piece also is that the panoramic hill is currently in the very high fire hazard severity zone as you can see by the orange and we're recommending to keep it but shrink that area as well.
So the second half of what we are proposing tonight by law the city has to adopt the California Fire Code as a minimum.
The city's permitted to make amendments to the state code that are more restrictive than what exists in state language and the document in the agenda packet are all of those local amendments with changes to the amendments that we are discussing tonight.
The majority of this document is existing language and areas that are underlying indicate local challenges or sorry local changes.
The recommendations to amend the code uniformly and consistently apply the best available evidence that we have to minimize wildfire loss.
They're drawn from the same body of evidence that is being considered by the state.
The vast majority of the proposed changes are within the first five feet of a structure where the highest reduction of risk of loss is possible when coupled with home hardening.
What would be allowed in the first five feet of a structure would be small plants in non combustible containers that could be moved on high fire danger days as well as mature trees which when well maintained are far less likely to succumb or contribute to wildfire than other smaller vegetation.
However what would not be allowed is other in-ground vegetation, climbing vines, combustible mulch, no new wooden or combustible fences, and where existing fences contact a structure those sections would either need to be removed or replaced with non combustible sections, other combustible items, or tree limbs that extend into this zone.
Deviating from these recommended changes will significantly reduce protection and uncouple our requirements from that of the State Board of Forestry and California Department of Insurance, whereas adopting these recommendations would provide neighborhood-wide continuity that studies have shown would reduce the rate of loss and the cost to insure.
The city will initially focus on the highest on the areas with the highest risk where ember cast from vegetation along fire pathways is likely and should be prioritized for home hardening and defensible space education, incentives, and enforcement.
This allows us to leverage our resources to provide the best possible outcome for the highest risk area, a strategy that benefits the remaining city as well as the slide from Coahoma Village highlighted.
We don't know how long it will take to achieve this level of protection and we should note that the state's implementation of zone zero which by law will take will affect all of the very high fire hazard severity zone will take effect in 2029.
Immediately following approval the department would pivot to public notification and support to help residents understand the new law and connect them with resources to get the work done.
The inspection process in 2026 would provide an additional layer of accountability, notification, and if needed enforcement.
We should note however that actual enforcement is and would continue to be a last resort.
In fact the vast majority of violations are resolved before this step.
Once we've achieved community level mitigations at scale we would return to council for additional direction on where to invest next.
From where we stand today this would be the next logical progression of community investment.
It may be triggered either by general success in phase one or it may be mandated by the state before we get there on our own in 2029.
In the future the fire department will seek approval from City Council to bring additional areas of the high fire hazard severity zone into compliance with defensible space requirements until all of this zone is included.
We should note that all of this area is currently under defensible space requirements and this proposal would take one step back while we focus on phase one and then reintroduce the standard to most of the same area potentially prioritizing the yellow, green, and purple areas to the right.
Over the last several months we've engaged in a substantial amount of outreach and have been available at present at every requested gathering.
We participated in two council meetings Disaster and Fire Safety Commission meeting, six community meetings presented at the regional wildfire coalition meeting, conducted two online community surveys, met weekly with impacted council members and their staff, and we've also gotten the word out through the Berkeley side, Berkeley Scanner, New York Times, Bloomberg News, and the City of Berkeley email and web messaging.
I want to close by acknowledging the team here before you and on Zoom, Assistant Chief Colin Arnold, Fire Marshal Drew White, Office of Emergency Services Program Manager Sarah Lana, and many others who have helped bring this proposal to where it is tonight.
I want to acknowledge that getting here has been a community effort and the work will need to continue to be a community effort.
There are many people have been involved way before EMBER became a thing and and since, including Firewise communities, fire safe councils, neighboring fire departments, many more.
We're doing what I believe Berkeley is good at, recognizing a clear and present challenge, analyzing data, best practices, and making decisions that will get us ahead of the curve.
Just like we did following the balcony collapse that claimed the lives of seven people and seriously injured another six, Berkeley implemented the Exterior Elevated Inspection Program, E3, which influenced the state several years later to adopt state legislation.
We know what needs to happen here.
The science is clear.
Importantly, firefighters have experienced wildfires impacting communities that are not prepared, causing massive destruction, injuries, deaths, massive acute and long-term environmental impacts.
Our sense is that after Los Angeles, people in our community were impacted significantly in profound ways and are interested in action.
This is going to require work.
It would be much easier for us to wait for the state to enact these laws, but in good conscience, as a third-generation resident who loves this community, and as your fire chief, I can't wait for another four fire seasons to go by while we wait for the state's Zone Zero law to take effect.
I want to share the background behind the sign that you..
I want to share the background behind the sign that's on this slide, which is framed in my office downtown.
I was 11 years old when the 1991 fire came through in the hills.
At that time, my family lived on Hillcrest Road, just adjacent to the 24 Freeway.
When we were ordered to evacuate, I helped my mom bring what ended up being a completely random assortment of things into our car, and we spent the next several days watching the fire from my uncle's house in El Cerrito.
When we returned, a number of our neighbors had lost their homes.
I recall vividly how upended their lives were in the moment and for years to come, and I remember spending days digging through the ash with them, looking for one unburnt photo, one unburnt memory.
That memory is indelibly in my head, and this sign was posted on the door of one of our neighbors, whose home was still standing but massively damaged, and I've kept it all these years.
So tonight, I'm here both as a resident and as your fire chief proposing what I firmly believe is the right path forward that we need to take.
Just like an earthquake, this is not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.
And from my perspective, that's not scary, that's empowering.
It puts us in a position of control.
We can make a choice today that would otherwise be a choice that would be made for us in the future.
I appreciate your time.
Thanks for the opportunity to present these recommendations.
I look forward to both your questions, comments, and as well those from the neighbors and the public here tonight.
Thank you very much.
Thank you all so much for the presentation and for sharing your very personal story.
I want to start us actually with public comment, if that's okay, because I know we'll have lots of things to say ourselves.
So if folks would like to make public comment, if you could come up please.
And clerk, if you could give us a sense, I think we're gonna have just one minute per person since there are so many folks here to speak this evening.
And if you have not yet been to a City Council meeting, first of all, welcome.
And second of all, just so you know, I am a stickler for time.
So once you've reached your minute mark, you can finish your sentence and then I'm gonna cut you off, okay? Thank you all so much.
Go ahead, please approach.
And of course, you can yield time to other speakers and up to a maximum of four minutes for any one speaker.
Hi, I'm Ruth Aaron Krantz.
Oh, come on up to the podium here, there's a mic.
Yes, thank you.
Yes, I'm Ruth Aaron Krantz.
I'm a resident and our city is, I want to speak to Zone Zero.
Our city is not alone in making policy for clearing combustibles five feet from homes.
Governor Newsom is requiring CAL FIRE to adopt zero to five foot clearances for vegetation around structures.
FIREWISE, the National Fire Protection Association, recommends for fire protection in their program.
And the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety requires a zero to five clearance for their wildlife prepared home designated program.
Do we want to hold on to our insurance? We do.
Michael Gonnard, director of Berkeley Fire Research Lab at UC Berkeley, says.

Segment 2

Wildlife Science is Clear, Removing Combustible Material from the Five Feet Around a House is among the most important mitigation actions a fire homeowner can do.
Thank you.
Thanks for your comment.
Come on up.
You don't have to wait for me to call you.
And just make sure you're speaking into the mic that you're close enough.
All right.
Good afternoon.
My name is Rhonda Gruszka.
I speak for the plants.
I've also been providing a venue for conversation on Nextdoor app for numerous Brooklyns who had little to no idea what the EMBER proposal would mean for their homes and neighborhoods.
And thanks to FireWise group members like Michael, Michelle, Theody, I am taking it upon myself to speak for the renters like me, who also care and will be impacted if the places we live and our neighborhoods experience a devastating fire.
Some proponents of EMBER do not acknowledge that the opponents of the proposal want exactly the same thing.
Effective public policy to protect human lives and structures in the case of a fire.
But we care about even more.
We care about the environment and fixes that may have unintended consequences that will lead to more intense weather events.
It's not a case of implementing EMBER as opposed to doing nothing at all.
As the adage goes, we want to work smarter, not harder.
Thank you.
Thank you for your time.
Good afternoon.
My name's Eric Weaver.
I've lived on Creston Road for 31 years.
I'm a gardener.
I'm not too happy about what EMBER means for my garden, but I accept it and I've already begun the work.
Our neighborhood is extremely well organized.
We have 108 houses in our FireWise sector.
We have 98 people signed up.
On March 23rd, we had a meeting of 60 people.
All 60 voted unanimously to support the EMBER proposal.
We're working with Zaytuna College, who's done excellent work on their property.
There is a tendency in the local blogs to try to make this a hills versus flats issue, but I would like to point out that in the 1923 Berkeley fire, the fire burned from Euclid down to Shattuck.
So eliminating fire in this neighborhood benefits the whole city.
We need the city resources to help what we're already doing on our own.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Eric's wife, Sarah Sanderson.
I've been organizing on my neighborhood for 25 years for emergency preparedness.
We're ready to stay in an earthquake for five days.
We've got neighbors who know each other and we know who's there.
We know who's elderly.
We know what kind of income everybody has.
We know, but we're not pulling that out.
We're doing the work for everyone and we're doing it together and we're doing it respectfully.
And we're starting now.
Smokey the bear said it best only we can only each one of us and we want to do our bit.
We are here and we are ready and starting and we are already helping our low income people and helping people who don't have the resources or ability.
So, we just hope you'll take this forward because it's our community that we love and we're a part of Berkeley and we're a part of, you know, we want to be here after the fire.
Thank you.
Hello, all hello, council members and she, my name is Isabella.
I am a senior at UC Berkeley and I will be speaking.
I, I live in your zone for I have a couple of points as to why I don't believe this proposal is terribly workable for the residents that live there.
I will say it is too harsh on homeowners.
The proposed new rules could require hundreds of homeowners to make major changes, such as removing trees, flowers, vines, et cetera, without any sort of funding or financial help from the city, which, in my opinion, just doesn't seem to not only does it not really help the community in terms of financial stuff, but recovery from that with a lot of elderly we have in the area will make that tough.
This will make us all but uninsurable insurance for homes with skyrocket, which could drive our long term residents out of the area.
We are not the problem, but are asked to be the solution.
Thank you.
Our comment and recurrent cause.
I'm sorry.
Your your time is up.
Thank you.
I am seven sixty wildcat Canyon.
I am the urban wildlife interface.
Lola Bolin.
I am very happy about what you're doing.
I think it makes complete sense.
I live next door to fifty eucalyptus trees across the street are over one hundred eucalyptus trees.
They are not properly managed and they cannot be properly managed because even if all of the leaves are removed on one day, all you need is one strong wind and the entire area is covered with flammable vegetative debris.
So, I urge you to not allow any homeowner who has more than two eucalyptus trees to sell their property in this new zone without first removing the trees because it makes it impossible to protect the land with one strong wind of vegetative property will become vegetation, flammable cover.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is Gina.
I live in district six.
I'm addressing the issue of the five foot defensible space.
I think it's a bit draconian to expect people to rip out existing vegetation.
That does not pose a fire hazard on their property.
You could have somebody with a succulent garden that they've tended for years and years and years, and it's not going to make a difference.
The study that was cited that I've that I've read by two fire ecologists state that the most important things really are the hardening in houses.
It's eaves, it's then screens, multi pane windows and active firefighting is one of the most important things.
The other issue then is our winding streets.
And the fact that we don't have access, we don't, we don't allow for access for firefighters to get into the streets in the eastern part of the Berkeley hills and that's going to create a lot of a lot of problems.
So, that needs to be mitigated.
And I would also agree with the eucalyptus and creating fire breaks at Tilden Park.
I'd like to see some coordination with East Bay.
Sorry, your time's up.
Thank you.
Council members, Steve Tracy also a third generation resident.
Till then, is our first line of defense.
Till then park.
Cut the trees.
Page 136 of your agenda packet.
John Hitchin, a 27 year veteran, managing trees.
That's his opinion.
27 years.
Cut the trees in Tilden.
What's Berkeley doing with these other agencies? I haven't heard anything.
Coordinate with the other agencies.
Step through, clear the cars.
Assistant Chief Arnold, structure protection is not part of the equation.
If somebody's still up there, get up there, get the cars out.
The engine has to get there.
The people have to get out.
Get the cars out of there.
No zone zero.
Lush green gardens aren't the problem here.
Take your time guys.
Do it right.
Thank you.
Good evening.
My name is Janice Thomas.
I live on panoramic kill and I am 5 foot 2.
And that means that this is a good estimate of zone 0.
Okay, so I'm a really practical person, and so I'm thinking about how I'm going to continue living where I live and continue where I live and be able to implement zone 0.
So I thought, okay, I live on a hill.
Not everybody on panoramic kill has health is on a slope.
Many are though I want to heal.
And so, 5 feet of concrete around the perimeter of the house.
I'm going to have flooding in the winter downhill effects on my neighbor.
That's not going to work.
Okay.
Okay, I didn't think dirt.
Okay.
I got to remove all the vegetation.
I'll have dirt.
And so then I think there's foundational foundation problems from erosion.
And then the 3rd option, I guess, is rocks and even rocks.
I want to know, do they retain water? The gravel all of that.
That's all I have.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Good afternoon.
My name is Nancy Gillette and I'm a retired for a service research scientist and a board member of the Berkeley fire safe council as such.
I know we are incredibly lucky that our Berkeley fire department is at the leading edge of wildfire mitigation efforts.
I wish that all East Bay cities were so lucky.
The Berkeley fire department's carefully designed amber proposal should be a model for all East Bay local jurisdictions.
That would make a difference.
It's clear to me as a forestry professional that the amber approach is supported by the best available science and is supported by all major wildfire nonprofits and state and local fire officials.
I urge the city council to support amber an extraordinary opportunity to avoid another Altadena or Lahaina here in the East Bay.
Thank you.
Hello, I'm Susan Nunez and I'm a member of the working group of the Tamil Pai as far wise community.
I'm here to speak in support of the amber plan.
I recognize that the devil's always in the details.
And so I commend our fire department for addressing so many of them in this plan.
I just want to say briefly I'm from Hawaii.
I've lived here for over 30 years.
And it's really difficult to express how us feel about the loss of historic Lahaina.
Everything is gone.
Schools, museums, churches, community, gone.
Hula dedicated to some of the structures that will never be there.
Just the structures are gone that we dance to on a windy day, a fallen power pole started a grass fire in minutes.
It ignited hundreds of homes and so sorry, your time is up unless someone's got a minute for you.
She's got a minute for you.
You can continue on.
Thank you.
I could tell you were sort of in the middle.
I just wanted to end by saying that that it's spread in minutes from a grass fire once the homes caught fire.
And what the ember plan is doing is trying to help us not have a structure by structure fire in the hills that could burn to the sea.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I have to bring it down.
Hi, my name is Michel Twitty.
I'm a resident of the proposed zone for I'm one of many organizers of firewise groups on the ridge.
One right now of seven certified groups.
Of course, I'm in support of ember, but I want to express that we're not waiting for ember.
We want the help from ember, but we have already started doing our work on April 12th Saturday.
There were 100 volunteers on the hillside.
We cooked 132 meals.
We had 158 tools.
We worked with two different universities, Diablo Valley and UC Berkeley.
We work in collaboration with the city of Berkeley.
We had, I think, about 70 students.
We cleared about 300 linear yards, 250 to 300 linear yards of Grizzly Peak Boulevard.
And we removed, I estimate, about 300 cubic yards of debris.
It took three full trucks of the city of Berkeley.
BFD chipper program to take this out.
So we're not waiting for ember, but we can't do it on our own.
And you have to help us.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hello, my name is Greg Murphy, and I serve as chair of the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission.
But I'm speaking to you today as a resident in the Berkeley Hills on a property that had been burned to the ground in 1923 and has been rebuilt.
Recently, I did some home hardening and I have more to go, but I strongly urge the council to support both measures before you today.
And I for the residents, I understand the pain and the cost and the desire to not have to take out vegetation, to not have to do some of these measures.
But the alternatives are if you don't take them out under control, they'll be taken out under a forest fire.
And I would urge the council to continue to find resources in the department.
And I know the commission will try to find resources to help homeowners because this will be a heavy lift for us all.
But if not us, if not us, who? Thank you.
Hi there.
My name is Dan Lieberman.
I actually sent you all a letter yesterday.
My home is not in the hills.
My home is not in a dense area.
My home is not in an area that's ever had a fire, but we are labeled, even though the state that was as moderate as a high severity fire zone by the local fire department.
I do not agree that we don't meet any of the standards that would require us to be in the zone.
We're currently in phase three.
I just hope that what you do in the most severe areas is fine.
But I think the map still needs some refinement on the I'll call the outlying areas.
And that's what I request.
Oh, also, the ordinance has some conflicts between the maps and what it says in the ordinance.
It says both sides of the street on a lot of things, but in the maps are on one side of the street.
So, I just point that out.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Richard Leiden.
I live at 574 Vistamont.
While I generally support home hardening and appreciate the spirit of the Ember proposal, so I have a number of questions about the details of their implementation.
I'm very puzzled, for example, as to how you deal with the numerous properties that don't have five feet of space to the property line on all sides.
Is there an answer there? Well, should I continue? Yeah, please continue because you don't want to lose your time.
I've also seen studies that cast doubt on the efficacy of five feet of defensible space compared to other home hardening measures.
And I've seen studies as well that cast doubt on the value of removing relatively non-flammable vegetation adjacent to, for example, cedar shingle walls that are highly flammable in themselves.
Is there going..
My time is up.
Okay.
Thank you.
Hello.
I'm a lifelong Berkeley Hills resident and live on Panoramic.
My son is at Cal Fire and is a smoke jumper.
He's in the helicopter crew.
And one thing that I know to be true is that the climate is changing, so it's bad now.
It's only going to get worse.
I'm here to support Chief.
I love my plants, but I love my home more.
I will miss my redwood fences, but I would miss my neighborhood more.
And I care about people and don't want to lose my friends.
And I think that five feet of vegetation clearance is a pretty reasonable approach, and it's easy to do.
And I think it's the first step, but I would argue we should do much, much, much more.
Because if you literally drive around Berkeley, I think the whole city is in danger of going up in smoke on a windy, hot day.
So thanks so much.
Thank you.
Hi there.
I'm Sybil Hatch and my property borders against Wildcat Canyon Road.
I, like so many of my neighbors, are 100 percent in favor of Ember, so thank you.
I'm doing everything I can to reduce fire risk on my own property and therefore reduce fire risk for my neighbors and their lives.
So I really urge you to move forward with Ember, and thank you, Fire Department, for pushing this forward.
We really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Good afternoon.
My name is Steve Robey.
Thank you for allowing me to make comments today supporting the Berkeley Fire Department's Ember proposal.
I'm a long-term Berkeley homeowner living on Wildcat Canyon Road, and I've done a lot of research while following the Ember proposal, including reading about the science behind it.
As a scientist, my wife and I support the BFT's Ember proposal and hope it is passed and approved as written.
Indeed, we have spent much of the past year preparing for the inevitable next wildfire near our home by creating a zone zero and home hardening.
In fact, we're so proud of our work, you may find an article published in last Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle about the work we've done useful, including a short video of my wife and I.
The science behind Ember is very good.
It makes sense, and we actually started this process a year ago in January due to a series of unrelated events.
I'm running out of time, but basically, we lost a fence and had to replace it.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Good afternoon.
Dara Scherr.
I'm a homeowner on Grizzly Peak, been there 30-plus years, strongly support the Ember proposal.
It is much more likely we will lose our insurance, as many of our neighbors have, if there's a fire, or if we don't do hardening than if we have a few plants that we're very sad to see them go.
It's hard to take out our camellias, but we don't want our house to burn down.
And creating a five-foot defensible space is actually one of the cheapest ways to do fire hardening.
It's certainly much cheaper than replacing all the siding or replacing all the windows.
So we're doing all the things that we can afford to do in the short run while considering a longer approach.
But I was here for the fire in the Oakland Hills.
I've watched what happened in L.A.
and Hawaii and in Northern California, and we have to take this step in order to protect our homes and our communities and the lives of the people I care about.
So thank you.
Thank you.
Afternoon.
I'm Chuck Murphy.
I grew up right up by Tilden Park in Zone Zero.
I agree with much of the EMBER proposals.
I've lived most of my academic life at a great research university, 40 years.
But I have two concerns.
In the area of defensible space, when you look at the literature, there's a big debate, how much, what use.
And furthermore, no one really can tell you what the percent yield is, how much we're getting for what we're putting into it.
Clearly, hardening of houses, roofs, soffits and so forth has a better yield, but this is not a precise science.
Also, the comment about eucalyptus trees, there are so many of them up there.
All right.
Some of this seems like a Band-Aid when we look at those.
But my bigger concern is simply the cost.
The cost is going to be heavy for people on pensions and Social Security.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is David Edwardson.
I live on Creston Road in Berkeley in the house that I was born and raised in 56 years ago.
This policy would give major financial stress on me that we're a single-income household and I make $27 an hour.
Two years ago, I reached into my retirement fund and pulled out $20,000 to build a new fence.
And if this passes, I'm going to have to chop half of that down and try to come up with money to replace it with chain link or whatever.
Also, my house is a very hardened house.
It's made out of plaster.
I've got double-paned windows with aluminum frames.
I've got composite shingle roof.
And I'm wondering why there's no exception or different set of rules for people that live in hardened houses like that.
Also, I spent almost $1,000 on three trees that are about four and a half feet from neighbor's property.
Thank you.
Henry DeNiro, I'm the president of the Berkeley Fire Safe Council.
Based on all the science and dozens of videos from L.A., it is clear that given our density, vegetation, terrain, and weather, we must go to widespread defensible space and home hardening.
While we also clean up and thin the highly hazardous eucalyptus groves in and east of the city, no one or two of these alternatives will ultimately protect us.
We must ultimately do them all.
AMBER is a strong step in moving forward, and we must prepare for further action as California and the insurance industry will require.
A fire in Tilden Park could destroy as many homes as both L.A.
fires and kill many more people.
The regrets of losing our favorite plants, myself included, would be far outweighed by such a catastrophe.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, Mayor, council members, amazing firefighters.
My name is Allison Banks, and I live on Grizzly Peak in District 6, Station 7 Territory.
And I'm here to urge you to vote yes on the AMBER initiative.
I came to Berkeley right after college in 1992.
Ten years ago, I finally bought my dream house in the hills.
It's the place I want to grow old in and, yeah, someday die in.
But lately, I lie awake at night wondering if it won't be age or stairs that get me, but fire.
I see the eucalyptus out my window.
I see the narrow car-parked roads.
And I hear my adult-aged children begging me to move, telling me it's not safe to stay.
And that breaks my heart.
I love my home.
I love my community.
I'd tear up my camellia, my rhododendron, anything to protect it, because if fire comes, they'll be gone anyway.
So please vote yes on the AMBER initiative.
Let's act now.
Thank you.
George Perez-Velez, 20-year resident of the Berkeley Hills.
A binary solution is not defined by accept or not accept.
That's a zero-zone proposition.
850 to 1,000 homes impacted.
Possible cost to homeowners could range between a lower estimate of $2 million to $10 million, depending on the amount of clearing and work.
Where's the impact study addressing the financial impact to homeowners? What's the mitigation plan to defray costs, especially to fixed-income, elderly, and retired homeowners? If you insist on moving forward with this policy, you must create a mitigation fund, create a list of VETA landscape tree service contractors with pricing to avoid price gouging, assign an inspector per home to ensure homeowners do not over- or underestimate the necessary compliance, prioritize the under-grounding of utility lines in all the hillside zones to eliminate hazardous conditions.
To do this without some of these stipulations will surely open you up to causal litigation, gas ordinance, and, by the way, fire does jump five feet.
Thank you.
Hi, my name is Allison Kidder, and I'm the resident leader of City of Berkeley's First Firewise community.
And my husband, Doug, and I have been – we live in the Berkeley Hills, and we have been working very hard to harden our home and most recently establish and successfully establish our Zone Zero.
The only thing we need to do left is the deck and the gates.
At any rate, I just wanted to support this measure or this – encourage you to vote yes and adopt these – thank you – these standards.
And I think it's important, as the person said before, my mantra, I'm an avid gardener.
As the person said before, I'd rather have my house and not my plants.
And you can have a really good pollinator garden without Zone Zero.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Michael Cullen.
I live on Buena Vista Way in North Berkeley.
I want to commend the council and the fire chief and his staff for the work you've been doing on the proposal, but I would like to say that in my reading of a lot of the studies, it seems there's much more evidence on home hardening, that that is really one of the priorities we need to follow, that not one size fits all for the EMBER proposal for the defensible space, and also that in terms of humidity and retention of beauty and of the kinds of things that Berkeley is really known for, I think we're going to be tearing up our own environments and possibly creating more unintended consequences.
And the data just seems to be much clearer on the home hardening.
I also feel like the notion that the cost has not been considered, there can be inequities in promulgating a proposal like this, and I don't know that that is the solution we need.
Thank you.
Hello, everyone.
My name is Murray Rao-Hermone.
I live on Park Hills Road, close to the golf course in Zone Zero.
I've been living in this house for the last 16 years.
My kids grew up there, and I want to keep it.
I support the EMBER's program, but with some reservations.
I urge the council to think about two things that have already been said.
One is the subtleties between flammable plants.
I took out the grasses and the junipers, but when the full inspection of the fire marshal came by, he said, those are great camellias.
Those are water-retaining, flowering plants.
So I think it's really important that we replace a lot of the flammable plants and plant things that are less flammable, for one thing.
Secondly, it's going to be a big cost to take out a wooden fence that you just built or a deck, and not all of us have Prop 13 taxes, like $2,000 a year.
Some of us have to pay a lot of property taxes.
So please invest in the cost so that we can cover these important changes, and then we can all do it and get it done together.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi.
Thank you to the council and the mayor and to the fire department representatives here.
While I appreciate the good intentions of Ember, I've come to speak about some reservations I have.
My name is Carol Simpson.
I'm a homeowner on Creston Road, and I'm a fifth-generation Californian, third-generation Berkeleyan.
So I remember the 1991 fire.
I've seen a lot.
However, I'm concerned that Ember and this discussion in general has left two elephants in the room unaddressed, PG&E's refusal or reluctance, slowness in undergrounding more power lines in the hills, and the presence of the danger of fire in Pilden Park.
I don't think that we as a neighborhood or zone should be held responsible and have the burden of those two unaddressed.

Segment 3

Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Hi, I'm Alistair Sinclair.
Could you put the mic a little higher, please? Thank you.
Devon Grizzly Peak, I have done for about 30 years.
I feel that the EMBA proposal is well-intentioned, but I'd like to urge the Council to vote against it.
So, for many reasons that have already been mentioned, and the scientific evidence is at best inconclusive and not sufficient to justify such a massive ordinance without further investigation.
The costs are absolutely massive, as we've heard, just about every fence and hedge would have to come down between properties on the hills.
The project places an unfair burden on a relatively small section of the Berkeley population for protecting the rest of the city.
The directives of the proposal are orthogonal to a lot of the directives coming from insurance companies, so people in the hills are facing a double whammy from insurance on one end and the fire department on the other.
Finally, the one-size-fits-all nature of the ordinance, I feel, doesn't leave any room for common sense.
We've heard about different plants and site-specific innovations.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi, thank you for this opportunity.
My name is Lisa.
I'm a homeowner just west of Grizzly Peak.
I'm so grateful to the fire department.
Thank you, guys.
Thank you.
That said, I'm also a scientist.
I've read deeply the various citations.
The science is not settled.
It's an evolving matter.
In fact, the Los Angeles fires were in recent memory.
We have not yet learned the lessons from that fire.
It's evolving and contradictory, I should say, the science.
My home is hardened and is always wet because it's surrounded by redwoods.
Thank goodness.
So this is, again, the one-size-fits-all aspect of the policy of the Zone Zero, I think, should be changed.
And is Zone Zero what we should do first? How about enforcing fire truck safe passage? Get those cars out the way.
How do you guys get up there? Sorry, your time is up, actually.
Thank you.
Thanks for your comment.
Hello, my name is Gen Track, and I have probably flooded all of your emails with my support for EMBER in the past.
And I'm here just to say, I really don't want us to delay any longer.
So, yes, I agree we should underground more of the power lines in our neighborhood.
We should take more effort to reduce fuel in Tilden Park.
But we should also do what we can within our neighborhood.
And so I have done everything that I can in my home.
I have hardened it.
And now I'm going to remove my favorite plants that I have tended for 24 years.
That is how long I have lived there.
And that is because I do not want my neighbor to burn down.
I want my neighbors to be safe.
I want them to have a home to return to.
And so I urge you not to delay any further.
Certainly, as we learn new things, we can evolve the standards.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Good afternoon.
My name is David Johnson.
I live in Zone 4, right next to all sorts of potential problems.
I don't want to make a recommendation one way or the other, but I do want to point out that the vast majority of the conversation today has been about the importance of the power lines.
The vast majority of the conversation today has been about defensible space.
But home hardening is a much bigger, much more expensive, much more complicated, and much more likely to produce pushback.
I'm not quite sure what's in the proposal about home hardening, but I ask the Council to consider very carefully, if there isn't much in it about home hardening, to do something about it.
And secondly, to inform us about the best science in terms of home hardening and so on, because I think that's really crucial.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Just a reminder to everyone to turn off your phones, please.
Oh, okay.
Good afternoon.
My name is Mie Goishi.
I'm a 40-plus year resident of Berkeley and want to express my very strong support of the EMBER proposal.
We live slightly outside of Zone Zero, but really appreciate the work of the fire department staff and others in the city, because we want our city to be safe and protected.
And we really feel that the science supports the EMBER proposal, so I just want to speak in strong support, but also to thank the staff for all of the hard work that the proposal represents.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Are there any other in-person comments? If not, we will move online.
Okay.
If you're on the Zoom as an attendee, please raise your hand to provide public comment.
If you're online, just so you know, we are doing one-minute comments.
Yes, one minute per speaker.
We currently have five speakers with raised hands.
First speaker is Chris Cullender.
Good afternoon.
My name is Chris Cullender.
I'm a retired UCSF faculty member, and I'm currently the FireWise Area Coordinator for Alameda County, except for the cities of Oakland and Berkeley.
I'm also a member of the Berkeley Fire Safe Council, but I'm speaking for myself today.
I've lived in Berkeley for over 40 years and was here for the Tunnel Fire in 1991.
I've attended the Zone Zero workshops by the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, as well as presentations about EMBER by Chief Sprague and Assistant Chief Arnold of the Berkeley Fire Department and Council Member Brent Blackaby.
I've also read the articles in the Berkeley Scanner and the Berkeley side about EMBER and the EMBER proposal itself, and I'm convinced that's the way to go.
Putting in Zone Zero will be saddening and expensive, but it's clearly necessary to reduce the risk of losing our homes and endangering the properties around us.
The more people who do this, the further Berkeley moves toward becoming fire safe.
I urge the City Council to support EMBER.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, next speaker is Rick.
Rick, you should be able to unmute.
Rick, are you there? We might need to circle back.
Okay, next, Nancy Rader.
Good afternoon.
My name is Nancy Rader.
I'm a resident of District 6 and a member of the Berkeley Fire Safe Council.
I strongly support the Fire Department's EMBER proposal, including its eventual extension further down the hill to where I live.
At my house, we began working to create a Zone Zero after the devastating Tubbs Fire in 2017, when the enormous risk of climate-driven wildfires became undeniable.
I took down a climbing rose bush against my house that was a Mother's Day gift and replaced it with colorful Talavera ceramics.
I put some plants on rollers, relocated other plants, and put down colorful pebbles.
Outside of Zone Zero, I have a fire-resistant native plant garden that attracts bees and butterflies.
This all gives me peace of mind that should a wildfire occur, my house has some chance of surviving, and the cost over a couple of years was quite reasonable.
But this is a collective project.
We all have to act to reduce the risk that our homes will catch fire and catch our neighbors' homes on fire.
The EMBER proposal is the start of that collective effort, and I urge you to adopt it to help protect the entire city.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, we can try Rick one more time.
Rick, you should be able to unmute.
Last call for Rick.
All right, we'll go to Cheryl Davila, former council member.
Thank you.
I understand all of this is great for the Hills to implement these standards, but what about the flats? There's not much defensible space when you're putting two or three units with driveways that drive right up to the building, in between the building and the fence.
I understand why defensible space is maybe more heavily needed in the Hills, but it's also needed in the flats.
And then we also have all these other things that are like bare, and other companies, who knows what's in there that's flammable, highly toxic.
Thank you.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you.
Okay, next is Charles Scotthorn.
Thank you very much.
I hope you can hear me.
My name is Charles Scotthorn.
I live in Creston Road.
I'm a retired professor of natural hazards mitigation.
I work with fire departments from LA to Vancouver, and I'm a researcher at Berkeley.
I very strongly support the proposal.
The cost is generally very reasonable, although since it benefits the entire city, some cost support for the residents who have to take this action should be considered.
The point that a former speaker made about Tilden Park and PG&E are very important.
Tilden Park is really the source of the problem, and we need to get them to do something about it.
The comments about the fact that the research is unclear is the same argument that's always used by the tobacco industry, nuclear power, and others against something that's clearly beneficial.
So, I don't think that is a very strong argument.
And lastly, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
EMBER is a very, very good proposal.
Thanks for your comment.
Next is Susie Bailey.
My name is Susan Bailey.
I live on Muir Way, which is in a dip at the top of the hill, so that the wind that comes from the north roars down our street, slams against the upstairs bedroom.
It is very, very scary, and I don't think that people below have any idea just how very scary and very hard the wind is, and it will blow EMBERs all over the place.
I'm totally in favor of EMBER.
I do hope you will pass it.
And I think it is worth whatever we have to do in order to make our house even safer.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Next is Kelly Hammergren.
I live in the flats, and I just want to say thank you to the fire department and everyone who came.
I don't know how your email boxes look, but counting tonight, my tabulation is it's about two to one voting for the EMBER program.
So, thank you for all.
Thank you everyone who is in support of the program.
That's it.
Thanks.
Okay.
And next is Gio.
Gio, you should be able to unmute.
Thank you.
I live on Creston Road in a very high fire zone.
And while I very much support the EMBER concept, I oppose a part of the current proposal.
The proposed amendment to the fire code in section 19.48 for enforcement actions by the city is flatly unjust and makes criminals out of Berkeley residents who simply can't afford to make all the required changes to their homes in a three year period.
My neighbors include many seniors who live just on social security.
My neighbors and I should not face hefty fines, liens on our homes, and worst of all, arrest and misdemeanor citations for failing to make the larger number of required changes in three years.
And that's particularly with no definitive help to pay for the home changes and no streamlined processes for permits needed for home hardening modifications that we otherwise would want to make.
Please vote no on the enforcement provisions.
There are a lot better solutions.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, next is Mary Pat.
Hi, my name is Mary Pat Farrell.
I'm a longtime resident of Creston Road and fairly actively involved in the Firewise community up there now.
I just want to express very strong support for the EMBER proposal.
I think that the science is very sound.
If anything, I think it's not enough.
I know that some of the science says it should be seven feet or whatever, but whether it's sufficient is questionable.
Whether it's necessary is not.
I think we have to do something.
And this is a great start and I want to thank all the Fire Department for coming forward with this great proposal.
Thank all the Firewise communities on the ridge who are supportive.
And really, we've begun our journey at our house.
It's painful, but again, necessary.
So thank you.
Thank you.
We just have four more speakers.
We have Theo Gordon is next.
Theo.
Hello, council members.
Thank you for taking the time for this issue.
My name is Theo Gordon.
I'm the Disaster and Fire Safety Commission Vice Chair.
And we have voted in support of this measure.
And so I wanted to reiterate that support.
This is a measured and science-based approach.
And honestly, it sucks.
And it's hard and it's going to really take a lot of work from the community, but it's absolutely necessary.
So again, I wanted to ask you to vote in favor of the proposal.
I also wanted to thank the Fire Department for this proposal.
And what, in my personal opinion, is that I'm glad to see that the department is shrinking the west side of the old very high fire zone boundary to be seen as more evidence-based.
And I think that shows the balance that the Fire Department staff has tried to hit with crafting this legislation.
I also want to say that the first thing I did when I moved to Berkeley was I built a beautiful redwood garden bed right next to my house.
And then I found out about all the risks of that.
And I'm not in the high fire zone, but I'm still going to move it.
That's my responsibility to my community.
And it's all of our responsibility.
Thank you.
Thanks, Theo.
Next is Andrew.
Good afternoon, council members and members of the Fire Department.
Thank you, obviously, for holding this meeting.
It's unfortunate it wasn't held at a time that would allow for people who are still sort of working in person to appear in person.
Without echoing too much of the commentary by others, I stand firmly in opposition to the passing of EMBER as written.
Fundamentally, that's for two reasons.
One, I recognize the short-term terror that we all must experience both in the face of the Santa Rosa fires previously, and then in the Palisades fires most recently.
But I think that looking at this short-term myopic response is really much to the detriment of the grander project, which I think has two primary components that need remedy.
The first, as mentioned, PG&E.
These power lines need to be put underground.
And the second is, I'm sitting here at my house in Grizzly Peak, or below Grizzly Peak, excuse me, on Queens Road, and I can count while I'm sitting here 42 eucalyptus trees.
The failure to subsidize the removal of these explosive trees is a total failure on the part of public policy.
Your time is up.
I'm sorry.
Thank you for your comment.
Next is Cheryl Drinkwater.
Hi.
My name is Cheryl Drinkwater, and I'm an architect in Berkeley and on the board of Diablo Fire Safe Council, and I support the Berkeley Fire Department's work and the EMBER proposal.
I encourage residents to talk to your neighbors about forming a firewise group so that you can help each other take action.
Homes will always need to be maintained.
Protect your asset.
You can work to find grants and programs to assist in taking action.
This is a dynamic time, and there will be many opportunities as we move forward.
And I encourage you to vote yes, City Council, and to visit the Diablo Fire Safe Council website to learn more.
Thank you.
We have one more speaker, Gary C.
Oh, and we have a few more pop up.
Oh, Gary C.
Okay.
Here, sorry about that.
The reason I'm speaking now, I support EMBER.
I sent about a month ago an email to the City Council.
The reason, but I haven't heard anything today about one other issue that deals with implementation, and that is having enough resources to perform this work.
As somebody who lives in the hills and elsewhere in Berkeley, it's hard to find enough people to do this.
There were problems getting people with the gutter work and that kind of stuff.
It's hard to believe that this could be done in a very quick fashion.
So I want to just mention that so everybody could hear it, because it is going to be an issue in the future.
If you're going to cite people, you have to give them enough time or provide resources or help getting the people to do this work.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you.
Next is Matthew Katsaros.
Hey, council members.
This is Matt.
I'm a resident of Panoramic Hill.
And I'm loosely in support of what you're talking about, but I think I just want to echo what others have said, which is when we're talking about California wildfires.
I don't understand how we're not talking about bringing these power lines underground.
It is the one thing that seems to be starting every single one of these wildfires.
And so as we talk about all these residents trying to do their part to harden our homes, all of us are very much in support of bringing these power lines underground.
And so I'd like to hear people talk a little bit about what the plan is for that.
Thank you.
If you're on the Zoom on a telephone line, you would press star 9 to raise your hand.
We have one more speaker here.
Jessamine Heiss.
Hi, everyone.
I work for a fire safe council in a neighboring county, and I understand everyone's complaints and concerns.
And I also need to echo support for the Ember Initiative and remind people that California has experienced wildfire before PG&E and before the invasive species like eucalyptus came to our land.
And we have to learn to adapt to wildfire.
So I just wanted to make sure that was said, because fire's not going away no matter if we underground all the lines or do all the sort of home hardening.
We're still going to have fire that we're going to have to live with.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Okay, that's the last online commenter.
Okay, thank you very much.
We're going to start now with council comments and questions with Council Member Blackaby.
Great.
Thank you, Madam Mayor.
Before I have got some remarks, and before I do, I didn't know if Chief, maybe if you want to respond to any of the comments, just give you an opportunity to answer a few of the questions if you had anything you wanted to say in response to what we just heard.
And I've got a few questions and then some remarks.
Sure, thank you.
I'll try to hit some of the biggest ones.
Insurance costs, insurance skyrocketing, the ability to not be in the fare plan and have a normal insurance that properly provides coverage for the home.
What we're proposing is in alignment with California Department of Insurance.
It's in alignment with IBHS, the nonprofit that's funded largely by the insurance company, insurance industry.
So if anything, what we're doing now is completely out of alignment.
So we issue a certification of compliance.
And in reality, that does not match, does not align with the insurers or CDI, California Department of Insurance.
So this will hopefully lower insurance rates and create neighborhoods that are mitigated that are more attractive for insurance companies to return to the market.
Financial help, cost of doing the work.
Through the pilot program that we did, we know the average cost of performing defensible space work on a property out to 100 feet is $2,900 per parcel.
That's removal only.
So we have that data.
That's for parcels in the hills between Wildcat Canyon and Grizzly Peak.
We have a $1 million Cal Fire grant that's going towards this purpose.
We're going to be applying for additional grants.
We've got funds through Measure FF to subsidize this work for residents that qualify.
Income, over 65, and physical limitations, capacity to do the work are the three ways to qualify.
Uke removal, Tilden Park, the last speaker hit the nail on the head.
Those are absolutely worthwhile.
We tried to get $50 million in Measure L for undergrounding.
Measure L did not pass.
It's an expensive endeavor.
UC has made it more difficult.
Are ignitions caused from power lines? Absolutely.
Do we want to underground them? Absolutely.
Do we have control over that? No.
Even when we do that, we know that California is a fire-dependent landscape.
Before we were here, fire moved through this landscape every five to seven years.
Grass fires can do the same damage, as you saw in the video from Texas, as a fire with taller vegetation.
So we removed the ukes.
We should do that.
Get the fuel out of the hills.
We can underground.
We should do that.
Fires are still going to ignite, and grass fires can still transition into urban configurations.
The map ordinance conflict, we fixed that in the supplemental.
The map is not official.
It's a reference only, but it does now follow the parcel lines on the west side of the streets.
Adjacent homes providing defensible space when there's not five feet of space on a parcel.
There's a provision in the fire code that allows us to direct residents to create defensible space in recognition of structures on adjacent parcels.
Fire does not care about city boundaries, doesn't care about parcel lines, so that makes total sense.
Fences.
Fences are a huge issue, as you saw in the video.
They are a primary spreader of fire in neighborhoods from home to home, but we recognize there's a huge cost associated with this.
Existing fences that are within five feet running parallel to homes are not going to be required to be taken out.
We still recommend it because it is a primary threat, not required to be taken out, but you cannot build new fences within five feet that are parallel to a structure.
Fences are gates that connect to a home.
Those do need to be replaced just the first five feet.
You can remove it, and that brings you into compliance, or you can replace it.
Removing cars so fire trucks can get through.
Absolutely, that's another component of the Ember proposal that we're coming back to you, the Council, with in probably May.
Maybe it's odd for a fire chief to say this.
Firefighting resources are important, but they are just a piece of this puzzle.
If we don't do this work, no amount of firefighting resources are going to stop these fires.
Los Angeles has one of the biggest, densest accumulation of fire departments in the area.
Fire engines, firefighters, and look what happened there.
It's not about how many firefighters there are.
That's a piece of the puzzle.
It's not the only answer.
Home hardening in Ember, it is a component of the Ember proposal that is not here today.
We still need to do more research.
There's a lot of challenges about enforcing things retroactively in the building code.
It's very expensive.
There's no state money or federal money available for that, so we need to take a measured approach.
We know, though, that retrofitting vents, screening gutters, and some other very low-cost, basic home hardening measures can make a big difference.
So we are incentivizing those, providing materials to do that work, and we'll be pursuing grants and other initiatives to support homeowners when we do bring a proposal forward.
I think that covers it.
Yeah, thanks.
And one other one, just because we've heard it, and we've heard it in a lot of e-mails, but this question about no vegetation versus what about the succulents, what about the camellias.
I'd love for you just to kind of respond to that and why it's so important to sort of have that five feet of clearance.
Yeah, the five feet of clearance is based on primarily lab testing and experimentation.
There are no mitigated communities that have undertaken what we're proposing today that have been affected by fire, so there's no post-incident analysis.
There would be with home hardening.
There's several reasons why those plants are not allowed in the five feet.
While they require – they do require maintenance to maintain their resistive qualities.
They can grow beyond their original size.
They drop dead material.
That material ignites when exposed to embers.
This is also true of plants like succulents that have higher water content.
They can trap blown leaves and needles, especially in high-wind events.
This occurred in 1923 and 1991.
The insurance industry standard, which is important to mention, the IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home, which one of the public comments revolved around, does not allow plants of any species in Zone 0.
So to the chief's point, if we're going to be consistent with the California Department of Insurance and that designation, it's important to maintain with that.
The present draft of the California Board of Forestry Regulations are very likely not to include exceptions for fire-resistive plant species.
Great.
Thank you.
Well, let me – I prepared some remarks, and I felt like since you guys brought slides, I needed to bring a few slides.
So let me share a couple of things just to help kind of guide the discussion here.
And first, let me just say I'd like to thank everyone who came today to share and participate in this discussion, in particular to Chief Sprague, to Assistant Chief Arnold, Fire Marshal White, the whole fire department, and everyone who has worked so hard for many months to pull together this truly comprehensive plan.
Thank you so much for your leadership.
This truly was a BFD in all respects.
To my predecessor, Council Member Susan Wengraf, who's been a champion for wildfire safety for many years.
She's not here today, although I'm sure she's watching online.
She helped us get to this point today.
We can't thank her enough.
And I'm just taking the baton and continuing the race, as many of us are here on the council.
But it was really her in conjunction with the department that's gotten us to this point.
We appreciate that.
And then to everyone who spoke today, no matter what side of this you're on in person or on Zoom and sent some of the dozens, if not hundreds of emails that we've all received.
Thank you.
I can tell you that I read every email.
My office and I are still responding to many of them.
But I really do appreciate the engagement as we deliberate today because it's truly been Berkeley at its best.
So now just to kind of walk through some comments, if I can advance this here.
We know this is a big ask and it's been said before.
It's been said many times tonight.
Clearing five feet of defensible space around your home, investing in home hardening a little bit or a lot, working, collaborating with your neighbors, pushing us out of our comfort zones and what we do in sort of our normal day to day activity.
Doing this across a thousand homes to start and maybe several thousand homes over the years ahead.
It is a big ask.
But the wildfire risk to Berkeley also presents a big existential threat to our community.
We have to face it.
We can't avoid it.
And we can't solve it with a small partial solution.

Segment 4

Which leads me to the next point.
And again, we've heard some of this as well.
It's going to require big collective action to meet the moment.
And I'm confident that we can, because Berkeley does do big things.
As my colleague, Councilmember O'Keefe often says, Berkeley punches above its weight.
We lead the way.
And this is just one more opportunity to provide that leadership.
In many respects, this is also the answer to the collective helplessness we all feel after we see wildfires that affect communities just like ours all across the state.
This is something we can do.
It's the single biggest and perhaps only effective thing that we can do to take control.
And we know the state's coming down with these requirements anyway in a matter of years.
And look, as a council member that represents this district, I'm not comfortable rolling the dice on five more years of risk before we do something.
It's time to act.
So let's act now together.
As Michelle and other people have mentioned, this is a photo that you're seeing up here.
This is from the past weekend.
More than 100 volunteers that came out to join with neighbors on Creston Road and Grizzly Peak Boulevard to cut down and haul out 300 cubic yards of debris in areas that were previously overgrown with brush and dangerous vegetation.
This is organized by a local firewise community taking the initiative to protect their neighborhood on their own.
And I want to thank Michelle and Eric and Sarah and everyone who organized this effort.
This is just one of many examples of the kind of work that we're going to need together to do together.
Change is hard.
It's going to take time.
We know we're not going to solve this in a week, a month or even a year, but we have to get started.
The hardest part of doing just about anything is taking the first step.
And this is the first step.
And that's what we're being asked to do today.
Then it's up to all of us to keep going over the years ahead to follow through and deliver on the promise of wildfire resiliency that we're making here today, that we're pledging to each other today.
This is just the beginning and we've got a lot of work to do.
That's why from here on out, my whole focus is going to shift to how do we make it easier? And we've heard a lot of questions, concerns, and they're all valid about how we do that.
The number one is around financing funding incentives.
The chief already mentioned we have secured a one million dollar Cal Fire grant.
We know that the state passed prop four last fall and with promises of tens of millions of dollars of wildfire resilience funding, we need to access more of that funding.
We're looking at low interest loans.
We're looking at are there some sort of tax credit, even a tight budget environment and city manager doesn't want to hear me say this, but are there other tax credits? Are there other vehicles that we can pursue that help reduce the burden just a little bit again? Passing the policy is one thing making it happen and implementing it is quite another.
And I am completely on board a hundred percent that financing is a big part of that.
And so we need to address that beyond that education communication through mail online person to person door to door implementation workshops trainings.
I mean, there's so many things in the sort of change management that we need to do here to bring people along and show people the path we've already got some great model homes and yards.
People have already done zone zero in district six, showing people what's possible.
This doesn't have to be something that's scary or ugly.
Right? And there are already people that have done this work and can show us the way.
I think this is all a part of that work.
And certainly the volunteer mobilizations like we saw in Creston last weekend.
Another thing that we've heard and that is important to me is the sense that again, none of us are in this alone.
Right? We know that collective action is what's required here.
We've got to mobilize in all of city and all of region response to this problem because it's complicated.
And while we're doing our part, it is one of many parts that needs to be done as we've talked about.
So, just to talk a little bit about right, all of the regional partners here that have a piece of this.
And again, we've talked about this from Berkeley lab through certainly the park district in Tilden Park, PG&E, UC Berkeley and all the land they maintain.
The fire safe council, which is doing great work here in the city, East Bay mud.
All of these regional partners have an important role to play.
They've all pledged and are already doing work, but can they do more? Absolutely.
Should they do more? Absolutely.
Right.
And that's our responsibility as elected officials is to kind of keep everyone's feet to the fire.
No pun intended, but everyone's got to do their part.
We need to reduce and remove more eucalyptus.
Absolutely.
Right.
So all these things are important.
I'll also say that we've got great partners, elected officials at the state levels.
What is the federal level? Just a few weeks ago, that's Chief Sprague driving a bus.
He was a really good driver, but we navigated and with the mayor, we took assembly member Wicks around this whole area, talked to her about what we're planning with Ember.
Some of the challenges also about concerns about adding more housing density in the hills.
We're very up front with these sorts of issues.
Senator Arreguin is in the middle.
The very first thing he called out in his inauguration, swearing in remarks was the fact that wildfire funding, wildfire resiliency was an important priority for him.
And we're going to make that make sure that's true.
We're already having conversations about things that we're asking the state to do.
He sits on the Public Safety Committee and, you know, asking around how do we hold PG&E more accountable, do more undergrounding is an important ask.
I'll also just note that Senator Schiff's first bill that he introduced with a Republican senator from Montana is a federal tax credit for hardening homes, right? Lots of people are working on this.
We have lots of great partners.
And again, it's up to us to coordinate and keep pushing because they're part of this solution as well.
A little bit more just on this sort of combining of home hardening defensible space.
This, you know, these are a few examples of some homes already in the hills.
Some examples, I'm not going to tell, some of these people will remember, will recognize these homes because it might be theirs, people here in the audience.
But again, you can blend and do this work in the landscape of the hills.
Lots of great vegetation that we can maintain while also doing the five feet of defensible space around the home.
We can do it.
Right? And in the process, it gives our firefighters the best chance to hold the line.
A lot of what we're doing here is, you know, slowing the fire, preventing an ember storm from igniting into a structure, structure conflagration, and just giving the fire department and our colleagues time to hold the line.
We can do it.
I think there's been some misconception from some about what that five feet of defensible space is for.
I've heard some people raise a concern that, hey, look, in a wall of flames that comes over the ridge and heads to my house, what I do in that five foot of space doesn't matter.
And, you know, that's probably true if the wall of flames is coming over the house.
But what we're talking about here is how do we prevent the ember storm from metastasizing? Right? How do we stop the embers that are going to be flying out of Tilden Park from igniting the homes that are all along that border? And that's really where the defensible space and the home hardening come into play.
And so I just think that's an important mental model for folks is thinking about what and why we're doing this.
And it's because we don't want that structure to structure conflagration to start in the first place.
Once we get to that point, we're in a world of hurt.
You know, our firefighters could handle maybe two or three homes on fire, right? If we do all this defensible space work and sort of limit kind of our exposure, but it's going to be well nigh impossible to handle two or three hundred homes that are on fire.
And that's what we're doing here.
We're trying to impede that progress of ember storm metastasizing into a structure to structure conflict.
A couple last things, and then I'll wrap up.
You know, I just want to say I've heard and we've heard tonight really a number of very real concerns, and I honor them.
These feelings are real.
These emotions are real.
The investment of time and effort that people have made their properties is real.
So I honor that.
But we also know that we've got to figure out how to kind of move through those concerns and actually make progress.
You know, people who are being asked to rip out their beautiful 50 year old wisteria plants, right? It's painful, but the science shows that these are the kinds of steps we need to defend that five feet of space and stop that ember storm from igniting structures.
You know, we've heard concerns and valid concerns about cost income limitations on the ability to finance this, as we mentioned, 100%.
Like, we need to address that.
That's that's what we're going to have to be doing in the next three, six months is solving that problem to make the implementation more possible.
And that's going to be my attention.
My primary focus on the council over the next six months is how do we make the financing possible? Because again, doing this and helping homeowners finance is good for them.
It's good for the neighborhood, but it's also a public good for all of Berkeley, right? This is something about protecting those neighborhoods, but it's protecting the city and we owe it to everyone to make sure we get the financing right.
The chief mentioned and talked a little bit about insurance before that people are concerned that by calling out the maps in this way, identifying the zone in this way that we're going to make insurance more expensive or difficult to get.
And I would just say, respectfully, I think the opposite is true that the fact is people are already losing their insurance in the hills.
People are already facing significant premium increases in the hills and doing nothing is not going to address that problem.
What we're doing is working to ease that burden over time.
So again, I am concerned about insurance.
We've been talking to folks in the insurance commissioner's office.
We need to close the loop to make it more real that if you do this work, you should be guaranteed insurance, or you should get discounts and we need to make sure that that happens as well on the policy side.
On the evacuation front, many, many concerns about evacuation.
I'm pleased that the council passed our safe passages item a few weeks ago, which is increasing the number of red curbs, increasing the number of no parking zones and increasing enforcement, especially during red flag days.
We know evacuation is important, but I also know that as the chief and assistant chief have told us, pre evacuation should be our primary strategy on those extreme weather days.
Even if we were to open up all the streets, even if we were to maximize the ingress and egress, it's possible on those streets.
We still have more people in the hills than we can safely evacuate in a matter of minutes.
So, pre evacuation is still important part of the strategy.
Undergrounding, eucalyptus removals, again, 100%, we should do all that, but I just ask people this question.
What if we undergrounded every power line? And what if we removed every eucalyptus tree and a fire still started in the park? What do we do? That's to me why EMBR is so important.
We need to act along all of these different dimensions.
We need to prevent the likelihood that fire starts.
And if, and when a fire starts, we need to make sure that we're maximum defensive position to contain it by all the work that we're doing around the homes.
So I think again, I think all of these pieces work together.
We can't put our eggs in any one basket or another.
We need to do all of these things to maximize the chances of success.
One last thing that I hear is people who are concerned that this is going to fundamentally change the character of the nature of living here.
And again, I understand, but I don't think it has to.
It's why we're most focused on that first five feet around your home, and then encouraging neighbors to continue cultivating the beautiful, well-maintained landscapes and gardens beyond that five foot of distance.
The main area of concern is that five feet and stopping an EMBR storm from igniting a home.
If we do this work, it's going to allow all of us to wake up in the morning on some of those August days and be just a little less afraid about what might be coming in fire weather.
Because we're building a fire safe Berkeley together that allows us to continue living in this beautiful place in a more resilient, balanced and sustainable way that defends against the wildfire threat.
So, in closing, let me just say I'm proud to support EMBR.
I'm proud of all the work that has gone into the proposal.
I'm not excited or thrilled that we have to do it, but I'm convinced that it's necessary.
It's important and it's going to make a difference.
I trust the fire department and the experts that they've worked with to construct a comprehensive plan to make us more wildfire resilient.
These are smart folks as we've seen today.
They're data driven.
And as we learn more, and as the science evolves, I am confident they'll be guided by that and we can continue to improve this plan.
I'm sure that what we're starting with is not perfect.
We'll have to continue to make updates as we learn more, but waiting for the perfect plan is not an option.
We can't afford to do nothing and certainly not on my watch here on the council.
I don't want to be the shoulder that residents cry on after we've lost our neighborhoods in a wildfire.
I want to be part of the leadership in this city that kept Berkeley on the path to wildfire resilience.
So that's why I'm proud to support Ember today.
And while I know many of my colleagues will speak, I'd like to make a motion to adopt the staff recommendation from the agenda to pass both items one and two on the on the fire map, as well as to adopt the amendments to the Berkeley Fire Code.
Thank you.
Yeah, thank you.
Council Member Lunapara.
Thank you so much and that was a tough act to follow, but I have a couple of questions.
First, thank you so much for all the work that you've put into this.
And I'm also really excited to support it.
I have a couple questions first about Piedmont Avenue for an item one.
It says it's under very high fire severity zone for Piedmont Avenue from Bancroft to Dwight Way, but then it's also identified as a high fire severity zone in this updated from from Stadium Roadway to Dwight Way.
So I'm just curious about that repetition.
Yeah, correct.
It's a little confusing.
So the high area is identified from that very western boundary and then there are areas of very high within the high.
So the definition of high in the fire code actually says all areas of this zone, excluding panoramic and grizzly peak mitigation zones.
That makes sense.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Thank you.
And in terms of zone zero, that includes the other side of the west side of the street on Piedmont as well as the east side.
Correct.
Okay.
Thank you.
And then my final question is on those blocks west of grizzly peak.
And I'm just curious about what the outreach will be to those areas.
I know that a lot of a lot of the people that live there are living in and in large houses and are organized kind of nontraditionally and so I'm curious what the outreach will be to those Greek life houses and co-op houses and high density apartments, which are different from the rest of the zone zero you're talking about in and around Piedmont yeah, Piedmont and this area.
I'm not sure that that's a question for me to answer, but I'm curious if this is one of the things we're going to do really quickly if this passes is consolidate all our resources from providing support and inspection of 9000 homes to about 850.
So much more individualized support neighborhood support support to the Greek community community.
That's the plan I think will be much better position to help people figure out what to do.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Council member.
We are now going to council member Humber and for the folks who are entering just so, you know, we are still in our special meeting.
We've not started our regular meeting.
And if you could just please turn off your phones and and reduce your conversations to a minimum so we can finish up here.
Thank you.
Thank you, madam mayor and thank you.
Council members who spoke before me.
I want to profoundly thank our fire department for all the work that you've accomplished on these items and and I also want to acknowledge the years long work that former council member when graph has has has done on these issues.
She's been a, she's been a hero and I think that council member Blackaby is a worthy successor to her.
I know it's been a high urgency and at times fraught process to bring this forward, but it's extremely important, important and timely work.
And we're lucky to have a fire department that is conscientious and proactive.
I mean, this is just an incredible example of that.
I understand that a lot of people are concerned about the costs and impacts associated with these beefed up requirements, but the cost and impact of wildfire would be, you know, multiple times far more catastrophic as we saw in Los Angeles fires can move with scary and extraordinary speed and destructiveness and can even spread into areas that were thought to be lower risk.
We saw that also up in Santa Rosa a few years ago, and the conditions are too extreme.
And I think Santa Rosa was an example of these rolling sort of ember fires.
If the conditions are too extreme, certain traditional attack methods will not be available as much as we worry about the effect.
These regulations will have on our homes and neighborhoods.
The effect of the fire again would be long lasting and much worse.
And we can't any longer.
Unfortunately, assume we'll receive any federal assistance after a disaster with construction costs and tariffs what they are now.
Rebuilding could be and will be, I think, really expensive and drawn out.
It's imperative that we take steps, these steps now to prevent fires and keep them from spreading.
That said, I understand neighbors concerns as well.
We don't want to be wholesale, removing mature, healthy trees if we can possibly avoid it, avoid it.
Although that particular problem trees like eucalyptus and Monterey pines need to go no matter what, but our fire department has worked hard to ensure those new regulations.
These new regulations help make our current trees safer while not requiring their automatic removal.
I think this is a reasonable approach, and I trust the fire department to exercise their professional judgments as they inspect properties and offer remediation directives.
All this said, this is just the first step in what will be a long process of inspections and vegetation management efforts and home hardening.
And it will be very important that we hear from both residents and the fire department as we move forward through this process over the next couple of years to understand what is working, what what isn't, what needs to be improved.
We know we have many people in the fire zones who are house rich and cash poor.
I've seen that, you know, walking around the hills, just looking at the homes.
So I also fully support finding ways to offer financial assistance or low or no interest loans to homeowners who can't afford to remove vegetation on their own overall.
I think we need to move forward by giving the fire department the direction and tools that they need to begin what will likely be a year's long process.
So, once again, a huge thank you to Chief Sprague, Chief Arnold and everyone at the department who worked tirelessly on this effort.
I'm deeply grateful to you.
Thank you.
Thank you, council member.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Expressed for this.
I think it, it's, it says so just so I love Berkeley so much.
I think I say that every meeting, but I do.
And I'm really feeling it right now.
I'm just, I'm so proud of us.
I'm so proud of everyone.
Who's just willing to sacrifice for the greater good.
Even the people who are against it.
Everybody was rooted in a place of caring for their community.
And I just, I feel that so strongly.
And I really just wanted to name that.
And I just want to thank everyone who's been a part of this.
And I just want to thank everyone who's been a part of this.
And I just want to thank everyone who's been a part of this.
And also I want to thank in advance.
The people in the high fire zone who are going to be subject to this because, you know, I live down the hill from from that and also that my childhood home is actually just in the shadow of the high fire zone east of grizzly peak.
And so, I just want to thank everyone who was there.
And it showed that that one truly fire safe community almost almost protected everyone to the north of it.
And so it's really not just about protecting those homes.
It's about protecting our entire city.
And I want to express so much gratitude for the people who are who are going to have to sacrifice and going to have to do this work.
And I just want to thank everyone who's been a part of this.
And I just want to thank everyone who's been a part of this.
And I just want to thank everyone who's been a part of this.
Lastly, I really want to thank the chiefs and the whole fire department for all your hard work and advocacy in this great presentation, you know, chief said earlier that, you know, they don't have the resources to fight a fire of a certain magnitude.
And I want everyone to appreciate that what they're doing right now is fighting this fire.
That's exactly what they're doing.
And so I just, I want to thank you.
You're doing your jobs.
You're doing it excellently as always.
And we're just I'm so grateful to have such a wonderful fire department who cares so much for our community.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Council member.
Council member.
Thank you.
First, just wanted to ask just two questions.
Everything else was crystal clear.
And all of my other questions were answered.
There was a member of the public that asked about unusual conditions, such as steep slopes and how that may or may not impact the five foot setback requirement.
I wanted to ask that as well as another member of the public who wrote in and also spoke in person asking about, I guess, their home is on a part of the map that appears to be different from some of the higher fire zone conditions.
So, I think that question is just how, how much flexibility will there continue to be in the maps for further refinement to the 1st question in terms of plant spacing or what can be included in the 5 foot zone? The 5 foot zone applies universally to irregardless of the slope.
So, if I feed out from the house, the regulations are, as chief Arnold explained in terms of out to 100 feet, Cal fire, the state does provide space that's different depending on what the slope is.
So spacing between trees spacing between shrubs changes generally increases as the slope increases.
So that involves pruning and thinning trees.
But that's existing language that's at the state level, which we have already adopted and have to adopt as a minimum.
Did that answer the 1st question? Yes, thank you.
Okay.
And I'm not clear on the 2nd question.
How much refinement might there be in in the maps post approval for these 1 off condition? Uh, we're talking about the phasing as to the risk.
The phasing is very conceptual.
So, we spent most of our time focused on the grizzly peak and panoramic mitigation zones and I agree there's a lot more work that needs to be done as we consider bringing additional phases moving down the hill to council with 1 exception.
The area that's defined as very high identified as very high hazard by the state is inflexible.
We have to adopt that as a minimum.
Other than that, local discretion applies.
Thank you.
And then I, um, uh, all very tough facts to follow and as a flat lander, I will try to be as brief as I can.
Um, I, I think I made some of these comments at the, uh, initial meeting we had on on the question.
Um, I come from a background of 13 years, uh, in nuclear safety oversight.
I have seen some pretty scary fire progression sequences.
And what, um, when I met and my staff met with the fire chief, um, and the chief, um, the fire protect progression sequence, you showed me, um, was 1 of the scariest things I've ever seen in my life.
Um, I had a, um, I had a, I had a grad school classmate who was, um, deeply impacted by the aftermath of the Lahaina fire.
Um, I just came back from a local elected officials conference where 1 of the speakers, um, was, uh, elected official in the Altadena Pasadena area who lost his home.
Um, not that long ago, um, I traveled to the town of paradise to try to, um, support their local economy.
Uh, they're certainly rebuilding, but for many, that is a paradise that will irreparably, irretrievably be lost.
Um, this past week, um, including yesterday, we had a very, um, unfortunate situation, um, in my district involving 2 fires.
Um, and I thank the fire department for the, uh, lightning quick response.
I, I would, the 1st 1, uh, happened last week and was 2 blocks away from where I live.
And so I was just walking, um, out when I just happened to see the lightning quick response.
I think there were 5 trucks.
There may have been 7.
Um, um, and that is how, um, we were able to, I mean, the, the fire department was able to stop that fire before it progressed into something much scarier.
But what we're talking about with the potential for these kinds of situations in zone 0, um, if you have 5 to 7 fire engines dealing with, uh.
Multiple homes that are involved, there are just not enough fire trucks in Berkeley, let alone the region, um, to address that.
For all these reasons, I strongly, strongly support this item.
And I would like to thank, uh, certainly the, uh, the entire Berkeley fire department as well as, um, my colleagues, uh, council members, Wacoby, O'Keefe, Humbert, um, and all, uh, uh, possible on this issue in our heads.
CPU, I think your audio on out.

Segment 5

Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees A whole new list of scholars Meeting of the Board of Trustees A whole new list of scholars Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board Of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Meeting of the Board of Trustees Yes, this is Scott.
I just want to make sure you know we can hear you.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you, Scott.
Okay.
And where are we going? Okay.
Yes.
First, early, very early.
Ceremonial.
Okay.
I'm sorry.
Thank you.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
I apologize for interrupting your conversations, and I really apologize for this super long break.
I apologize for interrupting your conversations, and I really apologize for this super long break.
We are not working today, so we're going to finish this special meeting with the owl over here.
And we just are finishing Councilmember Trager's comments.
I have some brief comments.
I don't know if anybody else does, and then we're going to take a vote, and then we're going to try again to reset our system.
I really apologize, and thank you so much to our clerk for trying to.
Okay.
Thank you.
So, are we going to just yell if that's the plan? Okay, we're going to use our outside voices.
Okay, go ahead.
Yes, yes.
Okay.
Where was I? Since former Councilmember Wainquist is now joining us in person, I wanted to just extend a round of applause for leadership.
Thank you, Councilmember Wainquist.
Thank you.
I just wanted to thank the fire chief, assistant fire chief, and fire marshal for your presentation and all the work that has gone into this.
I also just want to echo what some of my colleagues have said about being really inspired by the willingness of members of our community to do their part to keep our entire city safe.
And I'm in full support of this proposal and ready to vote.
Thank you.
Okay.
Any other comments from council members? Okay, so I have to hear you.
I'm sorry.
Our mics are not working right now, so I'm going to speak as loudly as I can.
Actually, I'm going to stand.
So, I want to thank Chief Sprague and also Chief Arnold for all of your work on these items and just everybody else on your team for doing this work.
I'm so impressed by how much has gone into this, how much thought, how much research.
And I know this work has been going on for a really long time, so I want to make sure that folks understand that.
Even though the impetus for having this special meeting was this January fire in Los Angeles, it doesn't mean that this work hasn't been going on for a very long time.
I also want to thank Councilmember Weingraf for beginning this conversation and, of course, Councilmember Blackley for your leadership on this topic and your work to engage the community.
I know you've held many community meetings.
Thank you so much to all the folks who gave comments.
I acknowledge that some of these comments and stories are really personal, so I just want to thank you all for your vulnerability and for sharing.
I'm super proud of our community for organizing and being community-minded in your advocacy.
I know that this work is very challenging, and I really want to acknowledge that, for some of you, this has been kind of painful.
Let's see.
And I want to just say, yes, and.
So this is, you know, it's yes to Zone Zero and home parking and collaborations with neighbor agencies and cities and parking enforcement and early evacuation and underground power lines.
I really hear folks and their concerns about what this means for them, especially for our residents that are older, disabled and low income.
I just want to make sure you know that we are all paying attention to that.
We care about that issue, all of us.
And, you know, I'm committed to helping our community members find funding as well.
And many others have said this as well to support the work that needs to be done.
Clarifying that measure is not the recent infrastructure one that got passed, but a previous fire one and commit.
I'm also really committed to helping to organize volunteers to help those in need.
This is something that my office is really excited to work on.
So I want to thank you all so much.
And with that, I know we've got a motion on the floor.
We've already had a second.
So I'm going to have to take the role.
Yes.
And just to clarify the motion, this is items one and two, as they are in the supplemental items that were accepted tonight.
Correct.
Correct.
Okay.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Okay.
We're all agreed on this meeting is adjourned.
And again, I'm so sorry, folks, for those of you that are waiting for our regular meeting will be our time to fix the situation with our mics so that folks online can hear us and we can be accessible in our meetings.
So, please continue to be patient.
I know some of you are going to proclamations.
I really appreciate appreciate you waiting.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well,.