Four key elements of this collaborative process appear central to fostering its progress in developing a comprehensive and coordinated fire plan: committed individuals dedicated to the effort; neighborhood-based meetings; a "borderless" planning perspective; and, an organized, well-structured process.
According to many partners involved in producing the plan, the presence of dedicated and energetic individuals provided critical stamina to complete the project. One agency participant commented that "the interest in the community and within the agencies together created that synergy that allowed this thing to go forward at the pace that it did." Two representatives from the local watershed partnership played a pivotal leadership role and served as project coordinators. In addition to these two individuals, a project team was formed composed of representatives from local fire districts, the Oregon Department of Forestry, BLM, Forest Service, and a few community representatives - this team met monthly and provided guidance to the coordinators throughout the project.
The success of the National Fire Plan depends on meaningful involvement from communities and private landowners and that is exactly what occurred in this project. One agency team member described how the plan incorporated the views and interests of communities in the valley, "one of the neat little innovations [of this plan] is that the partnership set up and ran community neighborhood meetings so that everybody in a drainage, for example, got together one night and talked about their values for their neighborhood and some of the suggestions for how they would like to see their area treated for some of the [fire] risks." The meetings doubled as visioning and planning sessions where community members discussed their hopes for the watershed but also rolled up their sleeves and drew ideas on maps.
These neighborhood-based meetings helped planners understand the values and interests of community members across many diverse neighborhoods. One agency representative remarked that this form of community involvement "really helped to pull together community interest and also to give more of a coordinated idea of where everybody had some agreement on what needs to be done." Moreover, these public-input sessions greatly increased public awareness about fire management and motivated people to begin to implement some of the plan's recommended strategies. Indeed, according to one agency official, "as a result of the planning going behind the community fire plan, the fire chief said he probably would have lost about a dozen homes on a fire we just had here this summer because they would not have had the clearing and the fuels treatment around them that allowed him to go in and defend those homes…people were aware, and as a result of that they did that work and it paid big dividends."
Another key to success was participants' willingness to look at the watershed as a unified landscape and to consider broad management strategies that could be applied across private and public lands. One leading participant in the process noted that the process of integrative decision-making began when the parties took out a map of the watershed and said, "let's take the property lines off this map and let's look at this 500,000 acres as if we owned the entire region. Now that we are not titling around with jurisdictions, what would we do?"
The decision to do "borderless" planning allowed the parties to see the valley in its entirety, similar to how a wildfire might view it, rather than as a number of discrete planning units. The project team began the planning process discussing their overall philosophy to fire management, and in particular identifying priorities for fire protection. Next, they turned to maps of the watershed that had layers of information about historical fire starts, current fire hazard ratings, and communities at risk or areas with highly endangered species. Still borderless, they added layers to their map, including roads (which both help and hinder fire) and contour lines to gauge steepness and elevation. By overlaying layers of maps, the team identified nineteen Strategic Planning Areas (SPAs) - planning units that could be used to organize and prioritize site-specific fire management strategies. For each SPA, the team looked at areas where fuel reduction treatments had already taken place or were not necessary such as brush fields that had been thinned by homeowners or a wide river or road that could protect a neighborhood from wildfire. This approach allowed the team to identify high-risk areas such as residential communities that required immediate attention as compared to areas where they had more time to act. By focusing on each SPA, the team created a list of strategies for fuel reduction tailored by locality. These strategic lists incorporated an area's unique physical characteristics, the presence of human communities and species of concern, as well as past fire histories and management practices.
