Thank you all for the opportunity to present for the Fire Safe Council. I am Will Castagna, the Board Chair of the Ojai Valley Fire Safe Council. You see up here a list of some of the folks that we work with. This is kind of our core group, and I'm going to try and move as quickly as I can because I know we're Limited on time, so I want to jump to the next slide and talk about why we're here today. We, as you all know, face extreme wildfire risks, and part of it that we don't think about often is the urban conflagration possibility.
We got lucky in the Thomas Fire. The wildfire burns in the wild. That's why they call it wildfire. Those embers fly for two to three miles from the fire front, and all of Ojai, as you'll see from the maps that will show, is in that ember zone. So we have the potential for having the same thing happen to us as happened in Paradise, as happened in the Palisades.
And that's one of the reasons that we're making our proposal. Community-led wildfire prevention measures are the proven solution. We've been at this for 25 years here in the Ojai Valley. We spent two years leading a process to create what's called a Community Wildfire Protection Plan, or CWPP. Both of those are a little bit of a mouthful. But we firmly believe that now is the time to act. I'll tell you more about the CWPP in a moment. If you could go to the next slide.
We've got a very dense urban core here on the valley floor, and as you can see from the map, ember exposure is everywhere. There's no place that isn't either in a high or extreme fire danger zone. Ojai has the distinction of ranking in the top 1% nationally for wildfire vulnerability. 94% of the valley is classified as very high fire hazard severity. Interesting fact, 90% of structural ignitions that happen, for example, on the valley floor in neighborhoods, come from embers that fly in from elsewhere.
The danger is in the homes themselves, the buildings becoming fuel that then carries the fire further into the community. Next slide, please. We have wetter-than-normal and drier-than-normal weather patterns emerging. What happens is it rains a lot, and then everything grows, and then it stops raining, and everything dies. Those flashy fuels are what create the risk and the danger.
Next slide, please. So the Eaton and Palisades conflagrations are a warning for us. What we take away from this is that prevention is really essential. What we know is that it's way more expensive to clean up 50-some-odd billion dollars of damage, not including the long-term economic damage that is happening in the Palisades. So it also creates an insurance crisis. If we're all in a very high-fire zone, we've got, you know, who's going to insure us? We've had a lot of people that have had their insurance pulled.
We are attempting to address this. We're beginning to address this. We've already had a workshop. We're planning more. We're also working on creating FireWise communities. We've already done five of those. Our proposal includes more of that activity. So we intend to address these issues. Next slide, please. So, good on you, all of you. You recognize this is an important issue, and we're here talking about it, and I'm, again, grateful for the opportunity to do so with you.
Earlier, just last month, this became a priority for the City Council. In 2020, wildfire safety was prioritized in the sense that Measure C was passed, and we began to set aside money for wildfire protection, among other things. Our city manager has identified the Fire Safe Council as a unique organization that has the ability to address these challenges, and our proposal Everything that we do, but specifically our proposal, matches the requirements that were listed in the city's list of priorities.
So there's a direct correspondence. We're addressing the issues that you have identified as issues that need to be addressed. Next slide, please. Again, it's more cost effective to prevent than to fight fires and then recover from them afterwards. So we focus on a lot of things. I'm not going to read all of these, but we've, again, we've been at this for 25 years. We've done home hardening, house out defensible space, community education. We've done neighborhood by neighborhood presentations. We've gone into schools.
We've created a collaborative so that all of the local organizations are working together to bring as much money as we can as a group with predetermined division of those funds to go to the organizations within that group. that especially focus on the aspects of the project that need to be completed. So it's a way to reduce competition for the dwindling number of dollars that are coming into the community from these kinds of projects.
We've done, you've probably seen the goats and the sheep. Right now, we're up at Villanova doing some grazing. Prescribed grazing is one of the aspects that is a lot of fun because everybody loves the baby goats. That's one of the things that we do. We're also building community resilience centers, critical locations for community to evacuate if we need to, but functional locations for other community activities.
Next slide, please. I'll point out that we spent, so we're gonna talk about the CWPP now. This is the most comprehensive wildfire analysis ever done in the Ojai Valley. This was a two-year project. The city, again, thank you very much, provided $50,000 for us to begin the process. We leveraged those funds into a $1.2 million project That we took two years to go through and invite everyone who's got any interest whatsoever in wildfire safety. We sat around the table, and we didn't just sit around the table one day and say, gee, what do you guys think we should do for wildfire safety?
Before we jump to the next slide, I want you to look at the right-hand side. The core working group for this project was every single agency and organization that we could get to cooperate with us, and it's all the key organizations that are the experts, the brain trust in our community and in our county for what we need to do to keep our city and our county safe from wildfire.
On the next slide, you'll see... Can we go to the next slide? Thank you. You'll see that this CWPP process is not a one-and-done thing. It's a lengthy process. I won't read the whole thing. You can study it. Of course, I'm sure we'll make this presentation available. But it's a lengthy process that included four community public workshops that we advertised and invited people to come, sit down with us, tell us what you think is important, let's talk about it, let's ask the experts, and together we came up with the CWPP itself and all those organizations that were listed on the other page, they signed off on it and said, yes, this is the definitive document, so now we have it. We have our roadmap. We have our instruction manual. What do we need to do to keep the Ojai Valley safe?
What do we need to do to keep the city safe? It's right there. Next slide, please. So let's talk about our proposal. Again, a lot of aspects to our proposal. There's a lot in the CWPP, and I will tell you that our proposal doesn't address everything that's in the CWPP. This is a one-year project, and obviously keeping the Valley safe is an ongoing project, as you pointed out.
So this is what we, what's in the proposal is what we feel we can get done in a year. We're doing community outreach, we're doing wildfire risk mitigation, emergency preparedness, assisting the city as requested with planning and policy, and doing some capacity building. We'll be reporting back to the City on a monthly basis and showing up here to do quarterly reports so that everybody is fully aware of what we're doing and how we're doing and which boxes we've checked and that we're doing what we said we'd be doing.
Next slide, please. So, this is really important to understand more about the Council itself. The yellow area is the Ojai area, and of course the City of Ojai is right in the middle of that. It's important to understand that we're working, and the CWPP addresses everything around this, and we're working. We have $2 million of other projects that we're currently working with. to do things called beacon boxes for firefighters that come into town that don't know our area, fuel reduction projects, prescribed grazing over at Villanova, the temporary refuge areas. All of this we're doing outside of the Yellow Zone But of direct benefit to the city. The beacon boxes actually will be within the city. Not all of them, but some of them will be in the city.
But all of these things are of direct benefit to the city at no cost. No cost whatsoever. Next slide, please. So talking about cost, what will this cost? So there's the number at the top for 483,000 is our proposal. That divides out to $36,000 a month, approximately. Check me on the math, thank you very much. This guy does math in his head, I love that. But if you do the math, you'll figure out that we're at approximately $67 per resident.
for a full year of our undivided attention on helping to keep the city of Ojai safe from wildfire. Next slide, please. So this slide is our superpower. Partnerships, relationships, cooperative arrangements with all of these organizations. These are the groups that we have partnered with over the 25 years that we've been doing this work. I can't tell you how much more powerful our organization is as a result of the creation of these partnerships. We're right now what I would consider the Swiss Army knife of wildfire safety in Ventura County, in the Ojai Valley, and certainly in the city of Ojai. Whatever needs to get done, We partner with, we don't have any chainsaws, we don't have any goats, but we know the people that do, and we bring them to the table when required for the specifics of projects that need to be done on a project by project basis.
This is our greatest strength. We're very proud of it. Next slide, please. So, a few things to think about. We know that community-led efforts are the most effective. Every grant that we've ever applied for, one of the things that they want to know right up front is, does your community support you or is this some harebrained idea that you just came up with? So they require match funding. We have to get sometimes 50%, but mostly now 100%, and sometimes even 150% match funding for the projects that we apply for. That shows the community supports what it is we're doing.
We carry sort of the long-term view and the long-term history of where we've been. We've been through six or seven different city councils. I've lost count. But we carry that institutional knowledge with us, and we feel can provide the city council with excellent advice as a result of having that long view. Do we have the money to do this? That's not our call.
Ben was kind enough to provide us with a memo that lined out how much money the city has. We just did a little math, and Mayor, check me on this, but I think we're just over 2% Of the funds, our proposal total is about 2.3% of the funding that's available at your disposal and at your discretion. And again, that's $67 per city of Ojai resident is a bargain at twice the price.
Next slide, please. So a possible path forward. Fund the proposal as written and let us get to work. That's our first choice. We've got a proposal on the table. We're ready to go. We want to get working. And we're ready, willing, and able to do so right now. In the meantime, we've heard you. There are concerns. You want to look more carefully into things. That's going to take time. And we want to get started now.
And do all that other stuff while we're already working on helping to build the wildfire safety and resiliency that this community needs. So, allocate an annual budget, decide what you want to do. We know that's important so that the Council knows and the City knows what it needs to expect in terms of ongoing expense. I'm very excited that the City is aware now, finally, and taking action to have that conversation and decide on that amount. So whatever that is, that can go to additional projects.
You'll notice that the things in our proposal are things that either we and we alone can do or things that our partners that we've already arranged to work with But there's things outside of that that you might decide are important to do. And so talk about those things, create RFPs, put them out there. We may bid on some, but we welcome anyone and everyone who wants to help create safety from wildfire in the City of Ojai.
Next slide. Thank you.
