Good News: Funding released for wildfire mitigation within West Bear Project
Type: General
Solution Areas: Land-use & Restoration Tribal & Indigenous
As you may have seen from our recent notifications, we’re excited to share that Lomakatsi has been able to access previously obligated funding through our cooperative agreement with the US Fish & Wildlife Service Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program that had been frozen. This very important funding to protect communities and ecosystem services comes through the Department of Interior (DOI) Office of Wildland Fire.
As a result, over the past couple weeks we’ve been able to resume controlled pile burning on private and municipal lands within the West Bear All-Lands Restoration Project and the Jacksonville Community Wildfire Protection Project (which is part of West Bear). While we lost a month of our pile burning window due to the funding review, we’re working hard to safely burn piles from our previous ecological fuels reduction treatments on 900 acres across 45 private parcels within these project areas before wildfire season.
This week, Lomakatsi’s prescribed fire management team, crew members, and contracted forestry services providers are conducting controlled pile burning within the city limits of Jacksonville, at the Jacksonville Woodlands, and adjacent private properties. We’ll be working throughout the Jacksonville area and at other strategic sites in the wildland urban interface of Talent and Phoenix over the coming weeks, as conditions allow. Here are some photos from the past few days.
We appreciate our congressional representatives from both sides of the aisle and DOI Office of Wildland Fire leadership working with Lomakatsi and partners from fire-prone communities across the country to release hazardous fuels reduction funds.
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