George Rebane

I witnessed a bizarre Board of Supervisors meeting this afternoon to consider and adopt the new Safety Element of the county’s General Plan that may be passed off as the county’s new fire plan.  But then, I was the only one who thought it was bizarre.  Not to string you along, the Supes wound up approving the draft Safety Element as wordsmithed during the meeting (more here).  The whole gathering demonstrated again that, even with well-meaning people in charge, government is an institution whose involvement in your life you want to minimize.  And the most effective method of doing that is to give them as little money as possible, because it takes money for them to mess with you.

To understand the current go-around about wildfire safety, you have to go back a couple of years when we had what can now be labeled as the ‘Old NC Fire Plan’.  BTW, it was confirmed again today that government, at the levels of the electeds and staff, are not big fans of clarity.  Some wags explain this by saying that clearing up confusions is one of the few things that gives purpose and meaning to what goes on under these mighty “domes of knowledge” (inappropriately borrowed from Supervisor Ted Owens since the Rood Center has no dome).  No one in government seems to understand or want to give definite labels to specific notions, documents, processes, etc so that they can be talked about without confusion.  Going to law school also removes the clarification gene from your body, and replaces it with the billable hours gene.

So the Old NC Fire Plan (Old NCFP) gave up most of its provisions (things you had to do) to the current revision of the Safety Element of the General Plan (SEGP).  And our Supes made sure that the old NCFP had its teeth pulled and claws trimmed before becoming part of the SEGP.  So far so good.  Then it turned out that no one really understood what was going to replace the old NCFP, if anything.  The situation is confusing enough to point out the need for, of all things, an “Educational Document” wherein staff would attempt to clarify what was in the adopted SEGP.  This itself was cause for a little humor because some in the Rood Center had maintained that the SEGP documents were already clear enough and needed no clarification.  So the next thing coming out of Steve DeCamp’s CDA shop will be the unneeded Educational Document to clarify the already clear.  My hand scrawled figure tries to make a picture of this sequence of paperwork.

The question that now remains is ‘Is there going to be a new Nevada County Fire Plan (New NCFP) to replace the old NCFP?’   This is not an idle question because insurance companies keep a sharp eye out for such documents when deciding on the insurability of property owners, and there already exist other special fire safe plans for certain regions of our county that refer to a NCFP.  And finally, the Supes themselves want to avoid the vacuum created by removing the old NCFP and replacing it with nothing.

So at various times during this afernoon’s public hearing all of the Supes referred to the SEGP as the new NCFP.  Yet, speaking with DEA Director Steve DeCamp before the meeting, I was told that 1) the SEGP is not the new NCFP, 2) the Educational Document per se will not be the new NCFP, and 3) staff has no current direction from the BoS to write a new NCFP.  Talking to folks leaving the meeting indicated that there was a continuing confusion as to whether we now have a new NCFP or not.  Most certainly anyone reading the SEGP documents would not mistake them for any kind of an executable fire plan.

When I brought this confusion up during public testimony, I didn’t get the sense from any of the Supes that they really understood what was going on in the collective mind of their constituents – I didn’t hear anyone say, ‘Sumbich, you know he’s right, we really don’t have a new NCFP, and we seem to go on casually calling the SEGP a “fire plan”.  This could continue the confusion.’  Well, actually Supervisor John Spencer did pick up on that during Board discussion of public input.  But, again here’s government for you, he admitted that, from the Board’s comments, the SEGP might be construed as also being the new NCFP.  So he crossed that bridge by saying that we should all think of the SEGP as having written under its title “Nevada County Fire Plan in small print”, honest.  Problem solved.

It was clear that the BoS wants to get on to bigger and better things.  The SEGP has now been beaten to death, and its cadaver will have a few touch ups of powder and lip rouge before being consigned to its rightful place in NC General Plan mausoleum.

But lest you take a deep sigh of relief, be forewarned.  Just because the county will not currently enforce any of the “recommendations” of the SEGP, it doesn’t mean that other agencies of state (and feds?) won’t come on your land and cite you for non-compliance of THEIR mandates.  You’re just shooting craps that they won’t have enough money to search diligently enough to find you.  And, of course, there’s no guarantee that the current SEGP recommendations will not worm their way into future county ordnances under a new BoS, thereby following a tried and true way of making sure that you have more rules to follow.

And by the way, Supervisor Ted Owens assured me that there is no way that the county can pull together into a single summary document all of these different agency mandates for wildfire safety.  He said that such mandates change too rapidly in inscrutable ways for the county to provide that service.  So, dear neighbor, to assess your risk of non-compliance, go hire a lawyer and/or pour yourself a stiff one. 

And finally, someone on the Board suggested with a straight face that, if you called, they would send a government inspector to your property who would advise you on his/her opinion of compliance.  Yep, right after pounding my toe with a hammer, see me rush to my phone to order up a government inspector to come to my land.  It could be worse, in Topanga (Los Angeles County) the inspector showed up annually whether you liked it or not, and told you exactly what your fire safe problems were.  And if you didn’t correct them, a county team would show up, do the work for you, and send you a very large bill, thank you.   

So friends, there you have it – another day which altered and illuminated our times, and I was there.