The USFS Community Wildfire Defense Grant Program helps communities and tribes reduce their wildfire risk and become more fire-resilient. The program prioritizes its grant funding to low-income communities in high or very-high wildfire hazard potential areas, or those that have been affected by a severe wildfire that has increased its wildfire risk.
The program’s two goals are to develop and/or revise Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPPs) and to implement projects from said plans. The program also helps communities restore and maintain landscapes, create fire-adapted communities, and improve wildfire response.
Eligible at-risk communities include:
Local governments representing communities at risk of wildfires
Native American/ Indigenous Tribes
Non-profit organizations that assist at-risk communities
State forestry agencies
Alaska Native Corporations
Interested applicants can read details at grants.gov and find instructions in the “notices of funding opportunities” to apply. Applications are accepted until 11:59 p.m. ET on October 31. To apply, follow the instructions online or search for the grant opportunity number specific for your notice (USDA-FS-2023-CWDG-TRIBES, USDA-FS-2023-CWDG-CWSF, USDA-FS-2023-CWDG-NEMW, USDA-FS-2023-CWDG-SGSF).
The maximum amount of funding that a community can receive is $250,000 for creating or updating CWPPs and $10 million for a project described in a community’s CWPP that is less than 10 years old.
Applicants are highly encouraged to coordinate with their state forestry agency in proposal development. Forest Service staff are also available to assist with coordination, can provide liaison support for Tribes, and can assist with application submission if needed.
A virtual information session is scheduled for October 25 from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. ET and you can register [HERE].
The USDA recently selected 100 applicants for funding, including applicants across seven tribes and 22 states. Every applicant selected was in a high or very high wildfire hazard potential area, and 86 percent of applicants met the definition of an “underserved community.”
The Colorado State Forest Service is requesting applications for the Forest Restoration and Wildfire Risk Mitigation Grant Program. The CSFS estimates that $7.5 million will be available for the 2023-24 grant cycle. The program assists with funding community-level actions in three major areas:
reducing wildfire risk to people, property, and infrastructure in the interface
promoting forest health and the use of woody material for forest products and energy
encouraging forest restoration projects
Colorado State Forest Service
As outlined in the Steamboat Pilot, there are two main types of qualifying projects for funding:
Fuels and Forest Health Projects — must reduce risk of damage to property, infrastructure, water supplies, or other high-value assets from wildfire, or limit the likelihood of wildfires spreading into populated areas. Projects must promote forest health through sciene-based forestry practices that restore ecosystem functions, structures, and species composition.
Capacity Building Projects — must increase community capacity by providing the community with resources and staffing necessary for forest restoration and wildfire risk mitigation projects.
The following individuals, organizations, or entities may apply:
Local community groups such as homeowner, neighborhood, or property associations located within or close to the wildland/urban interface.
Local government entities including counties, municipalities, fire protection districts, and other special districts in or near the interface.
Public or private utilities, including water providers, with infrastructure or land ownership in areas with high risk of catastrophic wildfires.
Nonprofit groups that promote hazardous fuels reduction projects or that engage in firefighting or fire management.
Applicants must demonstrate an ability to match 50 percent of the total project cost. Matching contributions can be cash, in-kind, or a combination of both, and may be in the form of private, local government, state or federal support for the project.
Contact your local field office for details. More information is available at CSFS.colostate.edu/grants or (970)879-0475. Applications are due in mid-October and awards will be announced in April.
A Douglas County non-profit will receive $9 million in prevention grant funding, the second highest award in the state of Oregon. The U.S. Forest Service awarded $9,151,505 through its Community Wildfire Defense Grant program (CWDG) to the Douglas Electric Cooperative, according to a KEZI News report. The non-profit electric utility serves 11,000 meters in a 2,500-square-mile territory that includes Douglas, Coos, and Lane counties in western Oregon.
In Grant County, the town of John Day received two grants, including the state’s largest award of $9,907,344 earmarked for Grant County’s evacuation corridor and fuels management, Forest Service officials said. (This is the same Grant County that arrested a burn boss on a USFS prescribed fire last fall.) The Blue Mountain Eagle reported that Prairie Wood Products also was awarded a $1 million grant as part of an effort to strengthen the wood products economy and promote sustainable forest management. Through the Wood Products Infrastructure Assistance grant program, the Forest Service is providing funding to wood processing facilities to improve, establish, retrofit, or expand facilities that purchase and process byproducts from ecosystem restoration projects on federal or tribal lands.
The Forest Service’s CWDG program invests a total of $23.5 million to assist communities, and often partners with The Nature Conservancy. “In 60 years of working with wildland fire, The Nature Conservancy has learned that successful wildfire adaptation efforts are inevitably grounded in communities,” said Marek Smith, director of TNC’s North America Fire program. “The Community Wildfire Defense Grant program provides an important opportunity to deliver needed resources to communities that are doing the challenging work of living sustainably with wildfire.”
The 2021 Bootleg Fire on the Chiloquin Ranger District of the Fremont-Winema National Forest. South Central Oregon Fire Management Partnership photo
Some of the 100 funded projects — including the Chiloquin Wildfire Risk Reduction and Education project in Oregon — are led by TNC or its partners.
“We’re grateful for support of TNC-involved projects, and we’re deeply grateful to see a broad slate of funded projects that are diverse in terms of scope, communities represented, and geography,” said Smith. “A better future with wildland fire requires that outmoded ideas and approaches are transformed by the vision and experience of diverse communities.”
Forest Service officials said the CWDG program funding is made possible through the federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, part of which prioritized low-income communities at risk of a wildfire hazard. An additional round of funding will be announced later this year.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has recently awarded millions of dollars through their Disaster Mitigation Grant program.
Boulder County, Colorado
Boulder County will receive a $1.2 million Pre-Disaster Mitigation Grant for two wildfire mitigation actions. The first is to create defensible space for approximately 500 properties. The second is hazardous fuels reduction in an area of about 160 acres that will provide further protection on 27 properties where defensible space creation was previously completed.
Homeowner efforts to create defensible space will not just be a one-time effort. They will join the county’s wildfire mitigation program, Wildfire Partners, to support continued maintenance of defensible space over the long-term and conduct comprehensive mitigation efforts to effectively reduce wildfire risk in a community that has been severely affected by wildfire.
FEMA is providing 75 percent of the project costs, a total of $1,215,630. Funding is provided through FEMA’s Pre-Disaster Mitigation Grant Program, which is designed to assist states, U.S. territories, federally-recognized tribes, and local communities in implementing a sustained pre-disaster natural hazard mitigation program. The goal is to reduce overall risk to the population and structures from future hazard events, while also reducing reliance on federal funding in future disasters.
Ashland, Oregon
The city of Ashland, Oregon will receive a $3 million Pre-Disaster Mitigation Grant to create wildfire defensible space around 1,100 homes and to replace 23 wood shake roofs with ignition-resistant roof material.
The City of Ashland in Oregon’s Jackson County is in a high wildfire risk zone. In the fall of 2020, neighboring communities of Talent and Phoenix were devastated by the Almeda Fire, which burned 2,977 acres and destroyed over 2,300 structures.
This mitigation project will help protect structures from wildfires and will help homes in the Ashland area comply with recommended local best practices for wildfire risk reduction. Replacing wood shake roofs and providing defensible space to structures reduces the risk of wildfire spread and diminishes the likelihood of wildfires starting from embers. Once these highly flammable roofs are replaced, these types of roofs will no longer be allowed in Ashland.
The City is contributing a $1 million cost-share, making the total value of this grant $4 million.
The project includes hiring a project manager, preliminary assessments of identified homes, surveys for vegetation removal, scheduling and training of pre-approved contractors, removal of vegetation, and reconstruction of roofs.
Rolling Hills, California
A $1.1 million grant is going to the Los Angeles community of Rolling Hills. The funds will replace overhead power lines and poles with nearly 2,000 feet of underground cables and relocate transformers to an area with less wildfire risk. The Los Angeles Fire Department identified the area as a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone, the highest designation with the greatest fire risk.
The $1.5 million project includes a $1.1 million grant from FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP), with the remaining $381,000 from non-federal sources.
Our take
As we wrote last September, grants to mitigate wildfire risk and improve community resiliency is a worthwhile investment:
Provide grants to homeowners that are in areas with high risk from wildland fires. Pay a portion of the costs of improvements or retrofits to structures and the nearby vegetation to make the property more fire resistant. This could include the cost of removing some of the trees in order to have the crowns at least 18 feet apart if they are within 30 feet of the structures — many homeowners can’t afford the cost of complete tree removal.
But the limited amount of Federal taxpayer funds available must be distributed where they can get the most bang for the buck and assist a significant number of residents.
Rolling Hills is a gated community of private roads on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles where the median household income is $239,375 and the poverty rate is 1.6%. The project will reduce wildfire ignitions along 2,000 feet of power lines.
Boulder County has a median household income of $83,019 and a poverty rate of 10.7%. Their grant will mitigate hazards on 527 properties.
Ashland, Oregan has a median income of $56,315 and a poverty rate of 18.4%. More than 1,100 homes will be affected by the project.
Putting 2,000 feet of power lines underground in Rolling Hills could reduce the chance of poorly designed or maintained electrical lines starting fires. But a case could be made that the project should not rank high enough nationwide to prevent other grants from being approved that would have a much greater beneficial effect on larger numbers of people with far less disposable income. In this affluent Los Angeles community improvements on the electrical lines, in this case, should be funded by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
There is probably more than one resident in Rolling Hills who could write a check for the project then go into the backyard and finish their game of tennis.
This week first responders can begin applying for $100 million in funding for the Fiscal Year 2020 Assistance to Firefighters Grant – COVID-19 Supplemental Program (AFG-S) to help provide personal protective equipment to firefighters and first responders who are managing emergencies during the Coronavirus pandemic.
FEMA will begin accepting AFG-S applications at 8 a.m. ET on Tuesday April 28, 2020. The application period will close at 5 p.m. ET on Friday, May 15, 2020, so start planning your application now by reviewing the information below. These tools were produced to help potential applicants begin to plan their AFG-S applications ahead of the application period. These documents can be viewed on the AFGP website at FY 2020 AFG-S COVID-19 Guidance Documents or can be downloaded to your computer.
Cost Share Calculator. This calculator will help you understand and determine your organization’s cost share for AFG-S grants.
If you have questions about the technical assistance tools listed above, call or e-mail the AFG Grants Help Desk at 1-866-274-0960; or firegrants@fema.dhs.gov . The AFG Help Desk is open Monday – Friday, 8 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Eastern Time.
Over 300 senior level firefighters spent four days this week holed up in a large meeting room west of Washington, DC. They were helping the Federal Emergency Management Agency review thousands of applications received from fire departments and EMS organizations for the Assistance to Firefighters Grants (AFG) and Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response Grants (SAFER).
Approximately 15,000 to 20,000 applications for AFG funding alone were submitted electronically. They were all reviewed and graded by computers using criteria developed by FEMA. Then the ones that made it through the basic screening were all printed and given to the firefighters for peer review. The computerized technical review and the peer review each make up half of the final score.
The 300 firefighters reviewing the AFG grants were organized into groups of six people at each table, and were given packets of six applications at a time. Every application was reviewed by three evaluators who read the 20 to 35 page document and then wrote by hand their analysis, addressing four categories on a 2-page form. If the scores among the three evaluators varied too much, they had to discuss it, and either change their scores to come closer into alignment, or write a statement on the scoring form saying it was discussed and no changes were made. Every table of firefighters reviewed 36 to 60 applications each day.
The firefighters reviewing the SAFER grants may have had a different procedure.
The SAFER grants may have all been reviewed, but the firefighters handling the AFG grants worked from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. for four days, Monday through Thursday, and at the end of the day on Thursday there was still a large pile of AFG applications pending. The FEMA personnel asked for volunteers to work further into Thursday night, and may have even asked some to volunteer Friday morning before they had to get on the shuttle to the airport. It is unlikely that all of the applications got reviewed, and FEMA will have to come up with a plan to finish them, possibly bringing another group of firefighters to Washington.
This year, fiscal 2012, Congress provided $675 million for firefighter assistance, including $337.5 million for AFG and $337.5 million for SAFER. Started in 2001, the fire grant program reached a high in 2009 when it had $985 million to distribute, but the amount appropriated has been declining since then.
FEMA personnel at the grant review meeting estimated that there was enough money available to fund approximately 10 percent of the applications this year, so most departments are going to be disappointed. FEMA hopes to begin rolling out grant notifications to the lucky few in September, if they can get the rest of them reviewed soon.
