RIVIERAS — The Lake County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday adopted four resolutions of intention to create fire safety benefit zones in the Rivieras area.
Ballots will be mailed to property owners in Clear Lake Riviera, Buckingham, Riviera West, and Riviera Heights asking for their vote to establish zones of benefit that would cull funding from the property owners themselves to pay for hazardous vegetation abatement and fire risk reduction efforts, with special attention to roadways, as this newspaper has reported. These efforts would be limited to the locales wherein the paying property owners live.
It will take a simple majority of votes cast to approve the one-time assessment and lead to the creation of the zones of benefit.
District 5 Supervisor Rob Brown has estimated that, should all four zones of benefit be voted in by the property owners, about $500,000 would be raised from the $100–$300 per-property fees to fund abatements. All properties in the designated zones would be assessed by fire officials and county personnel, and abatements would be carried out based on severity of risk.
Brown estimated on Tuesday that between 50 and 100 of the highest-risk properties would be abated initially.
A loan of $100,000 from the county general fund would be made should any of the zones be created, and will be shared between them, to be repaid after assessment funding is raised from property owners.
Brown has been developing the project since mid-2018. In November, Brown held a public meeting in Clear Lake Riviera to raise public awareness. Earlier this month, Brown explained the proposal to the other county supervisors at a board meeting.
Brown reiterated Tuesday that the zones of benefit would protect the safety of residents in high fire-risk parts of Lake County. “We have four areas that are densely populated, that have been identified as (having) a tremendous fuel load, and high risk for wildfires in upcoming years. In order to avoid that, we’ve come up with this program that will allow people to vote on whether or not they want to assess themselves in those individual areas.”
Clear Lake Riviera resident and former homeowner’s association president Tom Nixon spoke in support of the board’s action Tuesday, saying Brown’s proposal could become “a blueprint for how we can get things done in this county.”
Nixon noted that he believed residents would be willing to pay the assessment fee because “people are scared to death” of wildfire.
District 1 Supervisor Moke Simon was in sole opposition to the board’s resolution. Simon argued Tuesday that the recently-created Fire Risk Reduction Authority, a Joint Powers Authority spearheaded by former District 3 Supervisor Jim Steele, would be a preferable way to tackle the issue of wildfire prevention.
“It’s too bad we got two things going along the same path here,” Simon said. He referred to the FRRA, of which he is a board member, as “the road map” to answering countywide questions about disaster prevention.
District 2 Supervisor Bruno Sabatier supported Brown’s proposal and voted with the majority on Tuesday, saying that the long term benefits of fuel load reduction in the areas concerned would outweigh the initial cost of implementing the program.
Property owners will have until March 26, 2019 to return their ballots to the county.At 9:30 a.m. on that date, the board of supervisors will hold a public hearing on the matter where last-minute ballots will be received and all ballots will be counted.
