 Thank Director Teyes. Excuse me. Really like to thank Director Teyes and her team. They really deserve all the credit for putting this together. This was Magali's brainchild and she came to me and said we'd be interested in partnering and we were eager to do so. So some of the reason as to why we are doing this with all this community has been through. And really the fires are a common uniting bond. And it creates a bond of resiliency, strength, and unfortunately trauma. We collectively have shown that as a resilient community, we've shown the world what a resilient community looks like, and how that strength unites us. I truly believe that has been evidenced over the past four years that we are stronger together. That's not only the fire department, the employees of the fire department, it's the employees of the city and it's the community as a whole. We've really created this bond and this strength about us and we want to move forward together in strengthening that. So in this series, we've designed this series to talk about where we have been where we are going, how to heal personally and as a community. And how to be more prepared and control the elements of what we can control. The other nature as we all know has the ultimate say so anything that we can do holistically as a group to prepare will benefit all members of the community and make us all stronger. Our first session tonight recognizes the importance of acknowledging our local history of wildfires and applying those lessons learned to enhance resiliency. For some of us, we look at the history of the fire is only going back to 2017. For others it goes back to 1964 and we have the Hanley fire, which impacted almost the exact same footprint as the tubs fire. However, what we must be aware of is that the wildfire history of snow and county goes back centuries, long before commercial infrastructure highways, and the impact of the human footprint were so pervasive in the region. In the context and application, we will turn to Dr. Peter Nelson, a Sonoma County resident indigenous community member and educator whose research includes indigenous, indigenous archeology, indigenous environmental studies and settler colonialism colonialism. I knew I was going to have trouble with that word all day. And Dr. Nelson will share the history of control burns used it as an ancestral practice by our indigenous communities, as well as the use of fire as an opportunity for renewal. We will then transition to the Santa Rosa fire department staff who will speak on the various types of burning taking place around the county, both land and piles, as well as the city of Santa Rosa's new vegetative debris burn pile burning ordinance. I would like to personally thank Dr. Nelson for his time and thank the federated Indians of the Great Rancheria for their partnership and collaboration on this important subject. Just a quick reminder that Spanish and American Sign Language Translation Services are available. It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Peter Martin. Nelson sorry, Peter Martin somebody. Thank you for that wonderful introduction, Chief Westrop. And thank you to the city of Santa Rosa and Magali as well for inviting me to be here this evening it's it's really a pleasure. So, I will go ahead and share my screen here so I can share a PowerPoint with you, and hopefully everyone now can see the slides that I've prepared. So, tonight, I'd like to talk to you about Indigenous stewardship and in particular fire management or, you know, cultural, cultural burning. You know, so you may have heard different terms prescribed burning, cultural burning, controlled fire, wildfire, good fire and bad fire. All of these are related, you know, they all have something to do with fire. And tonight, I'll talk to you about, you know, how Indigenous people have used fire, continue to use fire in the state of California, where there are opportunities for tribes and agencies to work together, and kind of looking forward to our future. And that's how we might think about these traditions of fire in terms of the health of our ecosystems here in Sonoma County and throughout the state. So, as has been said before, I'm Peter Nelson, I'm a professor at the University of California Berkeley in the Environmental Science Policy and Management Department. I just recently started in January and before that, I was at San Diego State University for about three years. And so my journey, you know, before that was in graduate school, I was also at the University of California at Berkeley. And in time, even further, I grew up in the Northwest. And so I wanted to start a little bit with that history, the history of my family and why I ended up in the Northwest. And that has to do with this generation, my grandpa's generation of people, you know, around the time of World War II, a lot of men went to war. And the same was true with Indigenous people in this area. And my grandpa, who grew up in the Healdsburg Windsor area, and my family originally being from Tamales Bay, you know, he went off to be in the Navy. And so my grandpa is the person in the top photo on the right. And his uncle, my great-great-uncle Gilbert Zape is to the left of him, those two men. They both fought in World War II. Grandpa was let off in Seattle in the Northwest, had his family there where a great-great-uncle Gil came back down to California. I wanted to highlight these men as being influential in life. And so my great-great-uncle Gil, you know, my grandpa about traditions and ultimately being mentioned for me coming back down and living in California with my tribal community and graduates at the University of California and studying our tribal heritage. But also my uncle Gil taught me a lot about family history at Tamales Bay, the community at the time when he was growing up in the 1920s and 30s in that area. And then also his inspiration, why I'd like to dedicate this talk to him, is that I worked for about four years in the California Department of Forestry fighting fires as well. And so look to him and other family members, my mother, Pete Polito, who was also a fire down in the Los Angeles area, they're really kind of my inspiration for engaging with this topic of fire, as well as my studies of Indigenous fire. I think that as Indigenous people, we look to any way that we can get involved in different practices, either in terms of protecting fire or now there's more of an outpour prescribed burning and hopefully more outlets in the future for doing cultural burning in our different areas. And I'll talk a little bit more about those opportunities in in a second, but I just wanted to highlight that that, you know, I've gone through this whole geographic sort of evolution in my life as well as learning from these elders in my community and within my own family, through the years about these different topics and these histories, and then also through my scholarship at Berkeley. So, you know, I just wanted to highlight in the bottom left photo is my great-grandma, who's my grandfather's mother. And then in the right bottom photo is me, my uncle Gil, and my mother from just a few years ago out at Tamales Bay. And, you know, another reason for this dedication to my uncle Gil is that he recently passed away from COVID, unfortunately, at the end of the year in December. And so, you know, him being a firefighter for so many years, and also just passing away, I wanted to honor him in this way. So, recently, getting the job at UC Berkeley, I was able to come back to Santa Rosa and to the Bay Area. And so I've had some time to live here, but I wanted to move further north than Berkeley and really live with with my community. And so I bought a house just south of downtown. It was a really great experience for me and a real homecoming because of the things I've learned and the connections and family that I've reconnected with here in California, and just really wonderful to be part of the Santa Rosa community. It's a beautiful place, beautiful parks, beautiful territory, and my ancestral home in in these different areas here. So, wonderful to do that. I also at the same time, became involved with doing some prescribed burns with the Audubon Canyon Ranch. And the Fire Forward Program. And through those opportunities, you know, unfortunately we had the current wildfires in the year 2020 just recently this last year. And one of those was the LNU complex fires where you may remember the lightning storms that we had, and the fires resulting from that in the summer. We had an opportunity to go out and help out on the Wallbridge fire, gaining more experience with wildfire and going out doing some mop up work, putting out different fires that were continuing to burn in that area above Gernville and the Russian River. So continuing to get this experience, this was, you know, in many ways, a tragic event this fire, as many wildfires as we know, you know, the destruction of human lives and human property results from these wildfires, massive amounts of forest, and that takes a long time to regenerate. You know, it's also threatening and killing old growth in these forests, like these old growth redwoods. And one of our jobs when we were out in the Armstrong redwoods was to cool these gentle giants down. And so we would take care of the fires at the base of them. And then we would also put sprinkler systems in the center of these trees in the catfaces and increase the humidity in the middle of the trees to help put out those fires that were too high to reach up. So, you know, these wildfires that we've been having much more frequently in recent times in these past three, four or five years. You know, it's kind of a wake up call of the state of our open spaces. They've been, you know, in many ways just left alone and fire. The fuels have accumulated in these spaces that are very fire prone. And if we're going to live here, continue to live here permanently and sustainably as a community, we have to learn to adapt with that, you know, we have climate change happening. And these fires are becoming more and more frequent. And so taking a look at how people have lived sustainably in these same places in the past for hundreds and thousands of years since time immemorial. And I'm speaking about indigenous people in these areas is going to be really important. And so in talking about kind of, you know, dealing with these fires again, you know, there's the glass and shady fire. This was the view from my house, you know, just a couple of months after buying my home in Santa Rosa and coming back to this area, you know, again, you know, we have to deal with these issues of these massive wildfires that are happening so I wanted to start by talking about the indigenous peoples of this area. And, you know, so one of the things that I wanted to mention was a land acknowledgement so here in the city of Santa Rosa, you know, is the ancestral territory of the Federated Indians of Great Rancheria, and I also wanted to acknowledge other Sonoma County tribes as well. And so I'm a citizen of Great Rancheria. We're both close me walk and southern people. And you can see the map of California on the right, where we have all of these different language groups and so, you know, California is this very diverse region, linguistically, culturally, geographically, and biologically, it's a very, very diverse place. So tons and tons of different tribes were here, 20% of all the indigenous languages of North America were spoken in California. And it's one of these very few places, one of five places in the world with a Mediterranean climate, you know, which has basically more endemic species of plants and animals than any other place, you know, in the country. It's a very special place it has all of these tiny little micro climates, all of these different cultures, essentially tribes that are a lot smaller than a lot of the other regions in the country so a very unique place as well. Anthropologists have kind of gone back and forth on, you know, you know why there's all of this diversity in California. Also California had one of the largest population densities before European contact of any geographic region in North America, north of Mexico. And so it's a very unique situation because people here, subsisted or, you know, sustained their, their life ways and, and their livelihoods by hunting and gathering, rather than engaging in agriculture for food and and other residents like in the the Southwest with the Pueblos, the Eastern Woodlands, or in Mexico, you know, thinking of the Aztecs and the Maya's and, and those civilizations further south. So, you know, anthropologists have gone round and round with this issue. You know, they usually associate agriculture with the capacity to support those larger populations so how without agriculture are California native people doing the same thing. And the answer to that is that California people are stewarding the land in different ways than the agriculturalists are, but they're still stewarding that land. And they have a relationship that's very intensive with the difference plants and animals, and, and the land itself in these different places. And so that's one of the things that we take a look at now and we recognize that there were all of these different, the suite of landscape management practices or stewardship practices that indigenous Californians were using to enhance the resources that were available to them and so examples of these practices are coppicing, pruning, harrowing, sowing, weeding, burning, which we'll talk about more in depth, digging, thinning and selective harvesting. So cultural burning, why it's so significant is it's one of the most impactful landscape management practices in this whole suite of, of different techniques for enhancing the land around you, and it's abundance and and biodiversity. So, we're going to take a look at that because, you know, this talk is about fire and why we need it on the landscape to have a healthy and sustainable relationship with the land around us, and, you know, how it's been a part of California for so many years. So, you know, examples of these other practices, you know, I have a picture of a Poma woman to the right, doing some seed beading and just to give you a sense for how this feeds back into the health of the landscape and those plants that we're collecting sustenance and food, you know, the seed beading method is a little bit of a intentionally messy method where you lose some of the seeds from the seed beading process and they are replanted at the same time that you're gathering seeds. So it's not collecting as many seeds and all of the seeds that you can, it's, you know, both planting and gathering those seeds for food at the same time. So, to set up our discussion of cultural burning and indigenous stewardship I'd like to talk about kind of the natural setting of fire and how what we would expect to see on the landscape and so the natural way that the land and the plants, plant communities regenerate in these different areas. If you're starting out with grasslands eventually shrubs will encroach on those grasslands and fill it in and then you'll get larger trees, woodlands with oaks and bays and other sorts of trees like that, and then eventually conifer forest will encroach on those woodlands and completely encase it in dense forest and then in order to break up that forest. You need some sort of disturbance and so usually that disturbance in a natural setting is fire. And so if you have a wildfire or something like that then it reverts to these open patches where sunlight is let in, you get grasslands again and that cycle starts over. So, if you have extensive grasslands in any of these areas that gets less natural sources of ignition or fewer fires, you know something else is going on other than the natural cycle of things so in California, there are more lighting strikes over in the eastern part of California in the Sierra Southern California than there are in Central California we really shouldn't have a lot of lightning in Central California. And so the fire frequency should be very low and the interval between fires should be very high 50 to 100 years, you know, of many decades before another wildfire comes through naturally. Why do we have these extensive coastal prairies and grasslands in Central California. You know so again, the reason why a lot of these places have been maintained through the present is because of grazing again a human disturbance of the landscape, but also we want to acknowledge that in the past. These disturbances would have been from cultural burning and so you know these extensive prairies extensive grasslands would have been kept open by native people, setting fire to the landscape to maintain that environment for food for travel for many different reasons that would be advantageous for people to keep open areas. And this was true right up into the mission period and on into the Mexican Rancho period in California's history. So here in the snow Ma Valley, just south of Santa Rosa. We have Jose Altamira who came through in his expedition of 1823, where he traveled from San Rafael through the toll a valley he recorded the dimensions of toll day lake, which is a front lake to the Federated Indians of Great Rancheria and on through into the snow Ma Valley where other cost me what people were, and he recorded that there were blackened hills in the snow Ma Valley from indigenous burning. There's, you know, native people going up to these hillsides and and managing or stewarding these areas for food for tools and and other purposes with fire, even as late as 1823. Indigenous fire fire and cost me what because I'm I'm cost me what I don't know my southern promo as well, but it's the the word for it is wookie. You know, so this is what a fire drill looks like where you basically spin one of these sticks around in the notch that's created. And that produces a powder that creates charcoal and this this little coal that ignites and you can make fire with just sticks and indigenous fire on the landscape. On kind of the macro scale rather than the micro with just creating a coal when you set a blaze, and you have a system, you know, this is very controlled with different kinds of fire breaks, you know, you have different ridge lines. Natural fire breaks again like rivers and different areas that you burned in different years which can also act as those fire breaks if one area has burned the year before, it may not be ready to burn the next year and have the fuels available to burn and so you can see the difference between the area on this map, labeled one versus nine, you know, in the ninth year, it would have a lot more shrubs, be a lot more dense with fuel, and it may need to be burned off. You know, in that year, and it wouldn't impact the different resources in that area labeled one. So you create this really diverse landscape that has a bunch of different areas that you can manage in different ways with fire and with other means to get all of the different things that you would need to sustain your livelihood. So that's roughly how indigenous burning works and kind of, you know, a model sense. So to bring it back home with some really grounded examples of what does indigenous burning do for these different plants and for native people who use them. Fire has a lot of different uses. I mentioned some of these in terms of getting rid of the pests, you can see the, in the lower left corner, the picture of the acorn, those little holes from the grubs from acorn weevils. You can also see the picture just to the right of that is a wood rats nest, and it's just enmeshed in all of this bramble of poison oak and other sorts of shrubs, you know, so reducing the amount of fuels ladder fuels that create these wildfires so it's protecting the community doing these controlled burns or cultural burns, opening up vast areas for travel trade networks, other sorts of things, you know, mobility is a huge issue in the past as well as today and so you can see up top, you know this burn that's been done. You know across this open area if you don't do those burns, those you know shrubs and trees and dense forest will continue to encroach on this area until you know mobility is impaired in that area and so this opens up the area for travel as well. So basketry materials are really essential for many different aspects of California Indian life and so if you don't burn these materials, you know, willow, hazel, you know other basketry materials that benefit from burning and also from pruning and trimming, but you can see what happens to these materials on the left is a healthy straight shoot of willow and in the middle picture, you can see that bugs have gotten into these different shoots of willow and so it's all bumpy and it's essentially unusable for basketry. The picture on the right at the top shows one of the bugs that's in, you know, encased by the willow plant, but it's just burrowing around in the center there. And then on the bottom right, I just wanted to show you how willow is used in basketry this was my first start of a coil basket with the willow in the center and sedge wrapping around that those strands of willow. So again, burning can produce habitat for plants and animals and so in terms of having, you know, quail running around from, you know, little patch of manzanita to another one. You know they like that kind of patchy environment and it makes it easier to hunt them as well. And having more of an open environment for deer to run around new shoots for them to eat. You know you'll often find deer in areas that have recently burned because they like that environment they also roll around in the ashes to get rid of ticks and other pests that are on them as well. And one thing that a lot of people don't think about, but I've learned from, you know, studying this, you know, issue of fire, as well as talking to people out in the Sierras is that, and up north as well. You know, in Karuk and Urok area and those places is that there's a connection between fire and water as well. And so when you burn the forest and thin out the forest, you're taking water that was in the root system and in these trees and plants that's holding that water from the water table and when you thin out the forest, it produces more water as drinking water for people but also as habitat for fish. This cold water that we need for our trout and our salmon and all of these fish in the springs and and creeks and rivers that we have flowing through California. And so this picture was an amazing event that happened to me just this last spring. I saw these trout basically halfway up Mount Tomopaius on the slopes there, you know, between Balinas and, you know, Stinson beach around that that whole ridge area that Mount Tomopaius watershed area. I mean, amazing to see them that far up in elevation just in one of these little pools and these weren't small fish they were about, you know, a foot long. So just, you know, amazing to see them there when you know they're so rare these days but fire can help them as well. So I just wanted to conclude this discussion of all of these different benefits of of fire with showing you more of a complete meal in terms of an indigenous meal in in this area so acorn mush, which is okay. We have ashi salmon and hash gula, which is seaweed. And in one way or another, basically all of these food products have been touched by fire, either in terms of the basket tree that holds them, you know, from, you know, picking these to processing the acorn mush leaching it and, you know, pounding and also, you know, using a watertight basket to, you know, to cook the mush. Of course, in these days, you know, I cook it on the stove top. It's more of a modern version, but you know, back in old times and and some, you know, lots of people still do, you know, use baskets because it's part of the culture and parts of taste to the to the mush just a very subtle taste. You know, it's a very different quality and something that is traditional and people still engage with it's very important for this cuisine is the basket tree. And again, fire that goes into that basket tree. You know, to maintain the sticks that are needed to produce those baskets. Again, you know, for acorn, the pests, you know, getting rid of the pests, having more acorns that are healthy available for collecting, you know, so fire really in every part of this is important for producing this cuisine. And so why don't we see more cultural burning today and the short answer to this. Again, as you may have guessed is colonialism, you know, three different waves of colonialism. The first being Spanish colonialism with the missions and presidios native people being rounded up and forcibly removed from tribal territories, forced to work, you know, in service of the missions. And, you know, these being very hard demanding physical labor jobs, as well as forced conversion to Catholicism which didn't necessarily take in a lot of cases. But, but yeah just very unfortunate circumstances disenfranchisement of, you know, and being divorced from land and territory, but also throughout these times people being very resilient, coming up with strategies to stay connected to traditions and to tribal lands and to home spaces within our tribal territories and and the maintenance of those traditions throughout time. So there are success stories as well as the atrocities of these missions. There's also at this time widespread environmental impacts as well as impacts to indigenous people and so you see really early on, even in the founding blocks, the bricks of the missions. You know, they're invasive species of grasses and other sorts of plants as well. And so, I'm going to try and advance this here. We get into the Mexico Mexican Rancho system with you know you may be familiar with the Petaluma Adobe. This is the continuation of that system of PNH and labor that native people were drawn into forcibly by Mexican citizens in in this area. And that lasted from about 1821 when Mexico won its independence from Spain until 1850 when California became a state. And so we advance also into the American period with unratified treaties, genocide and you know, leading on to our modern state of affairs in California so many of you may have heard of treaties, treaties afford California tribes, the government to government relationships that they have with the United States government in California. None of those treaties that were originally drafted and signed by tribal leaders. They were not ratified in in 1850 when they are originally written. And so they were shelved because of many different reasons, one being gold found in California, different concerns over resources in the reservation lands that would be, you know, given to native people and the potential to find new resources. And essentially the main argument that politicians came up with in blocking the ratification of these treaties was that, well, Spain and Mexico had conquered, you know, California, and essentially the sovereignty transferred to those colonial nations and then when the United States essentially, you know, won the Mexican American War, and Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, that those lands that were transferred also with those lands transferred to the sovereignty over to the United States and so through this roundabout reasoning, they reason tribes out of these treaties and agreements. That was not permanent. And in the early 1900s, the US government also revisited these treaties and, you know, began to again create agreements with California tribes and create reservation lands for them. You know, throughout this time, you know, it was an incredibly dark time in California history. There was a genocide. You know, thousands and thousands of California Indian people were killed in the name of profit and gold and other sorts of reasons as well. You know, people were taken as slaves. It was a horrible time and so in the early 1900s. Some of these agreements were being made. You know, some amends in terms of creating a judgment role and making compensation for these unratified treaties, but still, you know, going through the boarding school system and these other more subtle forms of colonialism were intended to distance people from their traditions from language from lands. So all of those things were still happening, even though explicit killing and those sorts of things were not, but I wanted to bring this up because this, you know, these treaties and agreements do establish the modern relationships between the US tribes and tribes in this area as well as across California. And those agreements still are in effect today with federally recognized tribes and unrecognized tribes as well. And so there have been these various impacts on tribes from colonialism, one of them being along the coast of California where you see, you know, the mission system having the most impact through the work of anthropologists as well as government agents who were not as attentive to understanding where communities were and who were in those communities, they just wrote off a bunch of those people as being culturally extinct, you know, biologically extinct. And so, even though these communities are still here but we have many more federally recognized tribes outside of the limits of the mission system as opposed to inside the limits and you can see Great Rancheria as the red star there. In the middle of that down near Santa Barbara, you have, you know, Santa Ines and then Humiae and Lysenio tribes down near San Diego. But tremendous impacts on people and so essentially, you know, through colonialism as you know and these colonial policies as well of fire suppression. And the creation of this idea of wilderness area as being very highly valued and good. You know, we've created this situation in California as well as across the United States where, you know, our open spaces are very different than what they used to be pre-contact before Europeans came to this area. And there still are areas that are remnants of, you know, pre-contact times. There are places that native people have continued to tend and to steward all throughout this time. You know, so we have those different places but we're in this situation now where we've created a tinderbox essentially in many places where we have dense forest and lots and lots of fuels. You know, it's been because of these values of, you know, keeping people separate from nature and, you know, you have cities and then you also have natural areas. And those two were not mutually exclusive in the past. And I think to many native people, there never was that differentiation in terms of, you know, people being separate. There was more of a relationship where we have to steward and play an active role in the world around us. And so, you know, there's a different kind of engagement there than some of the ways that management has taken place in the past, in the past 100 years. So, leading on with some of these environmental impacts, just in our local area, you know, lakes have been drained. You know, native villages have been inundated by water through the creation of dams and the flooding of tribal areas for Lake Sonoma, and chemicals and sedimentation and other sorts of impacts to the San Francisco Bay, and other places as well have also taken place. And these are all different ideas about how to manage lands and, you know, for profit for other sorts of things. And we're in this situation now where we have an opportunity. You know, we all know climate change is happening. These fires are becoming more frequent, but we have the opportunity to change that and to look towards, you know, Indigenous knowledge working with tribes, and I would like to highlight working with tribes, not taking tribal knowledge and using it without tribes, because that's a very important piece of that relationship. And again, those relationships are very important to keep in place and to keep in mind that, you know, we need to work with each other. And so, you know, that's why I take every opportunity to learn about fire, about prescribed burning, not just the cultural burning, but the prescribed burning that Audubon Canyon Ranch is doing. I want to talk a little bit about the wildland firefighting that's going on as well. I want to protect the community. I want to also promote more of this prescribed burning and cultural burning if we can get to it in the coming years in order to manage these areas. So we don't get to those wildfires. We can take preventative action to keep these areas safe and, you know, talking about cultural burning, we can even have benefits to Indigenous peoples and practices as well, being able to continue our culture, eat our cultural food, and our traditional food, and have that continuing and transferring to our youth as well as we're teaching them in our communities going forward. So, again, these cultural and prescribed burns can be done very safely and, you know, under the right conditions with cooler temperatures at the right times of the year with higher relative humidities, it can be done in a very controlled fashion with very minimal risk. There will never be a situation where there will be no risk, but you can get to a place where it's much, much safer. And again, lots of people looking at every little aspect of the conditions all the way up to the hour of the burn to make sure that it's a successful burn and plenty of preparation of the land before these burns happen. And again, the point of all of this, doing these burns, fire shouldn't be a negative thing, you know, like wildfire is, that's the bad fire that's been happening. But good fire, you know, positive fire should be about renewal, regrowth in the wintertime when we get the rains. And, you know, we're putting nutrients back into the soil by burning and we'll get this regrowth happening throughout the year that promote wildflowers, all kinds of indigenous foods, you know, plenty of habitat for animals, and it's playing our part in creating sustainable, you know, plant communities and animal communities and people communities, all within these areas where we live. And that's our, I think, our commitment that we should have to every living being in this area. And, you know, so this last picture that I wanted to end on is just one of these areas where we've been doing controlled burns, prescribed burns, where you can see the massive amount of wildflowers that have come back in this oak woodland and grassland area. And so I just wanted to say, you know, thank you for letting me share all of this information, Kamolish in Kosmiwak and Yahweh in Pomo, and yeah, thank you for coming and listening to me. I'd be glad to answer questions. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Nelson. That was an incredible, incredibly informative presentation. I'd like to invite you to please stay with us for the question and answer period at this time. I'd like to introduce Paul Lowenthal, our assistant fire marshal. Thank you. Hi, my name is Paul Lowenthal, assistant fire marshal with the Santa Rosa fire department. I currently manage the development of our department city vegetation management program, and I'm implementing our cities vegetation, sorry, community wildfire protection plan. Give me one sec. So continuing along with the burning theme that we had this evening. So Santa Rosa. Obviously appreciates everybody for being here tonight. Burning is one of several topics that will be covering this week. That can be found on our wildfire ready website as our city.org forward slash wildfire ready. So areas within our wildland urban interface, which is primarily our hillside communities have scenes like these that are far too common throughout our community, we have areas that have been devastated by some of our recent wildfires, and other areas that have been relatively undisturbed and are heavily overgrown with brush. So what's happening here locally in Santa Rosa and across Sonoma County. There have historically been burn permits issued primarily across the unincorporated areas of Sonoma County where residents are able to use the burn permits to reduce fuels to work on vegetation management, create defensible space. And that's historically not something that has been allowed or utilized within the city limits. There's been a lot of prescribed fires as was previously discussed that are taking place, most notably in the last year or so, primarily in the North County, where there's been several instances of prescribed fires being used to reduce fuels and our forested fires, create fuel breaks and have really shown a lot of the partnerships and collaborations between agencies, countywide working to ultimately reduce the threat of fire from our communities. And we also have our recent fires which in some cases creates some confusion where we have some residents that feel that the recent fires have mitigated our risks. It's true in some cases but in others, it's actually created some unintentional consequences and has created additional growth and dead and down fuels. So ultimately, to work on mitigating that risk here locally, the city of Santa Rosa move forward with our first burn ordinance. Here locally was based on our community wildfire protection plan, the perfect the word for two is the CWPP. And this was an objective of our community wildfire protection plan that was not only based on our consultant and scientific data and information but also ultimately on community feedback. The goal of this burn permit process was to treat our wild laminar faces and ultimately reduce a lot of the fuels and protect our community from potential future wildfires. As mentioned it was contained as an item that was developed in our community wildfire protection plan, and became an actionable item that we move forward on and brought to council. And finally, the council did approve the ordinance. It will now allow private landowners and specific locations in the city's wild land urban interface to burn and reduce those fuels. These are primarily on our larger undeveloped lots. This is not intended to allow your typical homeowner or property owner within our hillside community in your average neighborhood to burn fuels in their backyard. This is really targeting large open lands where the reduce reduction of the fuels and removal of the fuels is fairly limited and or cost prohibitive. This is primarily up in the fountain grove and hillside communities in some of their open space areas where they've already been spending upwards of millions of dollars of their own funds to mitigate their risks within their HOAs and their communities. But there's other areas where they stand to benefit from this. Ultimately, it protects our entire community. This is again in our wild land urban interface on primarily parcels that are five acres or more in size. There is an application process for the permit. And unlike a lot of other jurisdictions throughout the county. This will actually require a per inspection by our staff physically going to the site and making sure that they are adhering to our requirements. We're doing this obviously because it's new to our community, and we're doing what we can to ensure these are done as safely as possible. Based on our experiences with loss locally and showing that our community that we are engaged in doing what we can to help mitigate the risks but stay on top of it and directly be involved in the process. The outreach on this effort was primarily move forward and our city connections newsletter. This is a newsletter that reaches approximately 90,000 residents in our community. I encourage those viewing this if you're not already signed up to be a member and sign up for our city connections newsletter. And the information on social media media release. And again on our website as our city.org forward slash wildfire ready. This was a new website that was rolled out, not only to educate our community on pile burning, but also on a number of other topics that will be covered throughout the week by various staff. So any questions about how community members can know whether smoke during our burn season was from a burn pile permit. There's a number of ways that you can find out the most useful tool will now be on our primary website our fire department home website. Our city.org forward slash fire, where we now have live events that will stay on our website that are fire related and or related to a control burn within our community of the city of Santa Rosa, where residents can actually go and see if a control burn listed at a specific location. So the example on your screen is of other fire related incidents that have occurred over the last 24 to 48 hours during our burn season, which is primarily in our winter months. You'll now be able to see where again where the fires are taking place within our community. Right now properties that will be eligible for this burn permit will be approximately 50 to 75. There are only 32 properties in our wildland interface that are over five acres, however, there are other parcels that could be smaller that are in an accessible areas that could be permitted by our department. So we're not looking at a lot of permits being issued locally, but we want to make sure our community is aware of them and understands the benefits of them locally. That concludes the talk on burn piles and I'll hand it back to you, Magali. Thank you so much to all of our speakers. We now would like to open it up to for some question and answers. Starting with one of our community members who mentioned that he saw a video on a control burn and it looked like to him that they may have spread herbicide first on the control burn and the question is this common practice or a practice that we've seen in Sonoma County for control burns. So I can't speak to that specifically but typically the areas that are burning or where they have not had any treatments and the treatment will be from the prescribed fire in the city of Santa Rosa. We don't allow the spraying of chemical treatment on our city owned open spaces and city owned properties. So that was something that was passed by council but I don't have any other information to offer on that. Thank you. Another great question here. Do control burns help the land to keep carbon in the soil? I don't know if Dr. Nelson wants to take that one. Yeah, I'll do my best. Yeah, so in terms of carbon, you know, so I'm not an expert in this so I don't want to say anything that I don't know. But, you know, in terms of we know that trees, you know, sequester carbon, but also grasslands and really deep rooted plants that you wouldn't also sequester carbon as well. And so burning these different areas thinning out for us is not necessarily, you know, releasing so much more carbon into the atmosphere because you can have different kinds of plants that have long roots and can sequester that carbon as well. But again, you know, like, you would have to check with someone else. I'm a little bit hesitant to answer that question because, you know, I'm not an expert in the carbon aspect of fire. So those are just a couple of thoughts maybe to follow up on. But again, you know, you'd have to follow up where I could check with some other people and get back to you. Yeah. Thank you. Another question we have is, now that we have overgrown areas to the extent that they are, how and where do we start to reduce the chance of major conflagrations like we have experienced in the last few years. So thank you for that question. So the city of Santa Rosa adopted and approved the community wildfire protection plan. So that plan was put together through a grant through FEMA that developed a roadmap that identified nine objectives and 42 actionable items to reduce the threat of wildfire here locally. Like I mentioned previously, the pile burning ordinance does help mitigate some of that but not all of it. There's a lot of work that needs to be done, both in areas that have not burned and areas that have previously burned. So, and I say previously burned because there's some parts of Fountain Grove where we are obviously seen a lot of dead and down fuels and regrowth of some evasive species such as Scotch broom on the backside of Fountain Grove. So there's a lot of efforts that are taking place to mitigate that. Right now, we have most notably recently received the PG me settlement funds and the amount of five and a quarter million dollars that are being used to kickstart our vegetation management program. Right now, in addition to that funds, we're applying for multiple grants that are using the community wildfire protection plan as kind of the backbone to start mitigating our risks locally. We have one grant in for 2.8 million dollars that's cured towards reducing and removing vegetation and fuels along our evacuation routes. We have a 2.1 million dollar grant in progress to work on defensible space and home hardening throughout our wildland interface. And we're also working on a have submitted for grant through Cal fire to reduce the potential for repeat events in the city of Santa Rosa Santa Rosa has been on the receiving end of multiple large scale wildfires historically. So we have both a regrowth in areas like the Mark West corridor and rebally and cross Creek. We have put in for grant through Cal fire to help offset the costs of property owners to clean up and remove a lot of those fuels. Ultimately, that is what helps and will help protect our community. Thank you for the information on what we're doing and what the actions that we're taking can be found as our city.org forward slash CWPP, and you'll see the link to the plan on page 100 is where the actionable items start. Thank you and we'll end here with this question and if there are other questions. We will provide an email for the city wildfire ready at SR city.org which will also put on a slide. But I think this is a really great question if we don't know we will definitely circle back and get an answer to this is the city of Santa Rosa or the county of Sonoma working with local tribes at this time to share information. So, indirectly and directly. Yes, so I'm the one of the board members of fire safe Sonoma their organizations throughout Sonoma County that work on collaboration and bringing groups together to ultimately help protect our community, share information and work to mitigate the risks around Santa Rosa and around the county. So, yes and no. And I saw the last question was about the timeline for our plans. So we've been providing a lot of outreach information, education, but a lot of people are looking for a lot of the physical activities to take place in the field, where people are actually looking for removal of vegetation cleaning up of properties. And that is absolutely one of our goals and objectives. Santa Rosa has put in for multiple grants. Since 2017, both at the state and federal level, and have been unsuccessful. Historically, our hope is that with the community wildfire protection plan in place. The backbone to outlining our plan is that we will now start becoming more successful in the grants and start actually being able to take action. We are aware that we're in fire season. There's this season and many more seasons to come. And our goal is again to lay out a successful plan that will involve us helping to offset costs, helping to fund programs, and ultimately working on future businesses locally that will make our community safer. So there's a lot of work that has been done and a lot more work that will be done to mitigate our risks here locally. Thank you so much. I want to thank everybody who's participated in this event. Thank you for hanging in there with us. This is one event again tomorrow where we're going to be preparing your home and property that will be the topic of the conversation. If you have any questions here is our, here's an email that you could submit your questions to, and also the website where a lot of this information is. Thank you all so much and I hope you have a great rest of evening and thank you so much again to all of our presenters. Thank you.