Colorado counties take control of wildfire protection as DOGE slices federal funding

In years when Colorado’s wildfire seasons are predicted to be bad, just looking at the USDA’s Wildfire Risk to Communities website can be terrifying, depending on where you live. 

If it’s Boulder County, your risk of experiencing a wildfire is 96% higher than anywhere else in the United States.

If you live in Larimer County, your risk is 94% higher.  

Routt County’s risk is significantly lower, at 75%, but that’s still cause for worry. 

And Chaffee County’s risk is “just” 71% greater. 

But that was enough to get Chaffee County, home of Buena Vista and Salida, the Arkansas River and the Collegiate Peaks, on a fast track to controlling its own wildfire destiny. 

Several years ago, they created a plan that included spatial modeling of their forested land and learned that by treating roughly 5% of those public and private acres, they could reduce the risk of their community burning by around half. So says Cindy Williams, executive director of Envision Chaffee County, which formed in 2016 and facilitated the work.

There’s a lot more to the Community Wildfire Protection Plan, which is laid out in Envision’s Enduring Healthy Landscapes literature. It says the goal is to reduce wildfire potential on 30,000 acres by 2030 through targeted tree thinning, prescribed fire, more thinning to clean up slash and a patch-clearing method used in the piñon-juniper forest prevalent in the region called mastication. 

Since 2020, more than 12,000 acres have been treated and planning and fundraising is in place to double that number. And other communities are taking note, including Gunnison and Lake counties, both of which Williams said are “mimicking” Chaffee’s program. 

They’re not the only ones taking control of their wildfire future, either. On April 1, Gov. Jared Polis and the Colorado State Forest Service announced $7.04 million in wildfire mitigation grants to 37 projects in 26 counties. 

But even the cheery press release announcing them said the funds aren’t nearly enough. 

For the 2024-25 round of funding, the state forest service received 95 eligible applications requesting nearly $25 million. Since $7.04 million was available for this round of grants, 58 projects totaling nearly $15.4 million could not be funded. And of the 37 awarded projects, the state could only partially fund six of them, leaving about $2.5 million in unfunded projects. 

Chaffee received funding for a fuels reduction project on Browns Creek and Clear Creek Reservoir. But it’s likely they would have been OK without the money. Williams said they’ve raised $36 million “to get after” wildfire mitigation treatments, “and we’re doing it. We’re advancing our goals.”  

The 25 other counties that received grants are stepping up to protect the assets and values that mean most to them. But Chaffee County’s success may be a road map they should follow.  

It starts with asking questions

The first thing Envision Chaffee County did was ask residents what they most wanted protected from wildfire and post-wildfire flooding. 

Eighty-four percent of respondents said they had “no concern” about land management activities such as thinning trees, and they listed what they wanted protected. 

“They included the lives of our firefighters, of course, and the lives of our community, as well as water assets, critical infrastructure, homes, outdoor recreation assets and wildlife habitat,” Williams said.  

Envision then gave the input to the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute at Colorado State University. Scientists there produced a Composite Wildfire Risk map, using spatial modeling. Williams explains this as “a method of creating simplified representations of complex data, which combines information on where things the community highly values are located, along with forest type, the probability of wildfire and its likely intensity across the landscape, and the cost to treat to reduce risk.”

“What it identified is that if we treat the right 5% of our landscape, we can reduce risk to the things we most want to protect by about half, by doing big, integrated, interconnected mitigation,” she added. So far, the breakdown is 70% public property and 30% private. “And we’re working to treat those acres on whatever, whoever’s land they cross.”

Brett Wolk, assistant director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute, said other counties are following suit. 

The institute worked with Lake County to help support its effort to complete its own Community Wildfire Protection Plan, and they’re working with Gunnison County, which is nearing completion on its plan, he said. 

“Many other counties, agencies, utilities, forest collaborative groups, and others have requested our help with aligning spatial wildfire planning science and community values similar to the efforts in Chaffee County,” he added. “Lake County and Gunnison County are most directly analogous to Chaffee. But we’ve provided various levels of analysis and support to others.” 

On Nov. 19, Chaffee County officially adopted an updated land use code that requires defensible space as well as fire-resilient building materials to help the community get more prepared for fires. They also provide a service, coordinated between the county, the fire protection districts and the state forest service, that helps landowners in the highest-risk areas know what trees and shrubs to cut on their properties, and then chips the material or carts it away — free of charge — to a big tub grinder in the county landfill. 

About 1,500 property owners have participated in the program, which is helping make all of the homes in the area safer and more resilient to wildfire and the homeowners more prepared, Williams said.  

Wildfire bang for buck  

Williams said Chaffee’s Forest Health Council is tasked with leading strategies outlined in the Community Wildfire Protection Plan, and that the council is a group of about 50 different partners. 

They’ve met at least once a quarter for around the last seven years, she said, and the council plans wildfire mitigation collectively so each project and program is more effective than it could have been if done independently. 

So far, the county has treated 12,223 acres. Another 14,265 are in the pipeline. And nine countywide Firewise USA sites, defined as any community that collaborates with their local wildfire expert to identify and prioritize actions to reduce ignition risk to homes, have been established. 

As for raising that $36 million, Williams said “it’s a complex tapestry of all sorts of different funding sources. I would say about $5 million of that comes from a ballot measure Chaffee County voters passed that funds action to support healthy forest, waters and wildlife.” 

The rest is a mix of government funds, including the money they received from the Colorado State Forest Service and a $5.7 million federal grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service. One grant for $70,000 was pulled during Trump’s federal DOGE cuts. But power and water providers are supporting treatments too, Williams said, especially when they’re adjacent to some of their assets. “So since our funding is from so many different sources, I think it’s pretty resilient,” she added.

Are they worried about the fire season ahead, which meteorologists and fire officials are predicting will be in the “normal” range everywhere except southern Colorado where they’re expecting drought conditions to develop or persist, leading to below-average precipitation probability and higher fire danger? 

As far as implementing their wildfire plan and continuing to work on the treatments they’re doing now, “it appears we’re in good shape,” Williams said. 

But the specter of more Trump administration cuts, including to the Forest Service and federal agency staff, hangs over them like it does for most Colorado communities. 

“We’re concerned about the ability of the federal agencies to do emergency response, essentially, if there is a wildfire in Colorado,” Williams said. “You know, to make sure they have the supervisory capacity on the aircraft and all of that to respond. We don’t have any special knowledge there. We just… we wonder… with all the cuts that are going on at the Forest Service, if and how they’ll be as able to respond as they have in the past.”