November 20, 2020

The Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) has released a draft update to the Fire Hazard Planning Technical Advisory (Fire Hazard Planning TA) for public comment. The draft update has been prepared in response to Senate Bill 901 (Dodd, 2018) and Assembly Bill 2911 (Friedman, 2018), which called for OPR to update the Fire Hazard Planning TA to include specific land use strategies to reduce fire risk to buildings, infrastructure, and communities.

CSAC is preparing draft comments regarding this update and respectfully requests feedback from counties.If interested, please review the draft update and submit comments to Nick Cronenwett at ncronenwett@counties.org by COB December 11^th. We appreciate your thoughts and comments. If you have any questions please email Catherine Freeman (cfreeman@counties.org) and Nick Cronenwett (ncronenwett@counties.org)

If you would like to receive future notices regarding this Technical Advisory or other emails from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR), please sign up for the General Announcements “e-list” on OPR’s website here:   https://opr.ca.gov/e-lists.html

Background & Public Comment Information:

The technical advisory is meant to assist cities and counties as they revise their general plans and provides guidance on:

• Outreach and engagement to promote more robust and collaborative wildfire solutions; 
• Conducting comprehensive wildfire hazard and risk assessments; 
• Aligning and integrating these assessments across a variety of plans; and, 
• Developing general plan policies and programs that reduce risk for existing and future communities. 

OPR staff will hosted a webinar on November 18, 2020 to present the draft Fire Hazard Planning TA and answer questions. This webinar should be archived on OPR’s YouTube channel. OPR staff may host additional webinars during and after the public review process. OPR has a public comments deadline on this update of December 18^th. CSAC aims to submit comments prior to the December 18^th deadline.

The final Fire Hazard Planning TA is expected to be released in early 2021. Once finalized, the updated Fire Hazard Planning TA will supersede the initial version published in 2015.