UKIAH — At its meeting Tuesday, June 22, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors updated the county’s general plan, focusing primarily on safety. The board also worked its way through the cannabis agricultural issues, with proposed caps cultivation site sizes and fines for illegal water hauling. Unfortunately, the meeting extended late into the evening and past this paper’s deadline.
State law mandates that each county has a general plan with seven mandatory elements. The safety element focuses on identifying potential risks that could potentially endanger the public health, safety, and welfare of the community. The safety element was last updated in 2009.
The Supervisors focused on three updates: the Multi-Jurisdictional Hazard Mitigation Plan, a Climate Adaptation Vulnerability Assessment, and the policies in the Development and Resource Management element.
The Multi-Jurisdictional Hazard Mitigation Plan is one of the pre-requisites for jurisdictions pursuing funding from FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance Program. The Mitigation Plan focuses on identifying hazards related to natural disasters and finding mitigation strategies. With the adoption of the Mitigation Plan, Mendocino County is now eligible for future FEMA hazard mitigation grants.
The Climate Adaptation Vulnerability Assessment looked at how severely climate change hazards are likely to impact Mendocino County. According to the Vulnerability Assessment, many Mendocino County citizens are highly vulnerable to climate change hazards, particularly fire, smoke, inland flooding, and landslides. The Supervisors will use Vulnerability Assessment policies to mitigate these hazards.
Development and Resource Management are two of the other seven mandatory elements. These elements have been revised to reflect the information in the Mitigation Plan and the Vulnerability Assessment, in particular fire hazards and climate change hazards. For example, lands in designated Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones will be subject to different regulations.
As these updates were very comprehensive, 2nd District Supervisor Maureen Mulheren voiced her concerns that this information isn’t freely available to the public. According to Mulheren, the county citizens won’t know that the changes are for mitigating hazards. For example, if a road is being widened for fire access, the public won’t know whether it is for fire mitigation or for another reason.
“Not sharing the information with the community leads them to believe we are not working on the things that are listed on this report,” Mulheren said.
Fourth District Supervisor Dan Gjerde agreed, saying that the Vulnerability Assessment has a lot of surprising information that the public should have available. He was surprised to find that future predictions of climate change hazards for Mendocino County involve flooding.
Mulheren will be working with the county clerks to ensure that future policies will reference the safety plan adopted today.
