From West by Northwest.org Letters to the Editor New Lane County Fire Code? Good Intentions Gone Bad By Dick Lamster Feb 7, 2006 Dear Neighbors, For those of you that live in the country and love your rhododendrons and other shrubbery, flowers, small trees and other oxygen producing plants, then get ready to kiss them goodbye! Lane County is proposing to create a 130 foot moonscape around your home that will be free of all plant life except "green lawns" and certain "fire resistant vegetation" which can be no taller than 24 inches! All large trees must be limbed to eight feet above the ground and must be spaced apart so no branches from one tree can be closer than 15 feet to the branches of another tree or to a building. If this sounds outrageous it's because it is! If you fail to comply with this proposed new zoning, then you can be fined $100 to $1,000 a day and the local rural fire department can refuse to come to your home for a fire if they know you are not in compliance! This craziness is called the "Wildland-Urban Interface Combining Zone in Lane Code 16.266" and was featured on the front page of the Register-Guard on January 27, 2006. Visit the Lane County website at http://www.co.lane.or.us/Planning/Wildfire_Project.htm and bring your concerns to the public hearing on Tuesday, February 7th at 7:00 p.m. at Harris Hall. If adopted, this will change your home forever. You can also kiss the birds, squirrels, butterflies and almost all other wildlife near your home goodbye. They do not do well on moonscapes. This new code is at least 15 pages long and changing daily or almost daily, which makes it extremely difficult to respond to and to get your arms around. Some of the other issues that really concern us and will concern you when you learn about them are listed below. We have been so upset since seeing the article in the January 27th Register-Guard and then reading the code and then talking to the County planners, that we have had trouble sleeping! If adopted, it will change the landscape around all of your homes drastically (those of you that life in the country). We know most of us have spent 100's of hours and $1,000 of dollars to beautify our yards. This will all be gone, or you will pay up to $1,000 fines per day and the fire departmant may not come to a fire at your home. (Does this sound like blackmail? It is like an EMT responding to the scene of an accident and deciding not to treat you because you are a smoker, or are overweight, or old or somehow do not fit the "code"!) The county wants you to believe this code will only apply to new construction, but it will also immediately apply to all rural properties that require a building permit for anything, and it will very soon apply to all rural property and is already being applied to all existing rural homes in the Oakridge, Dexter and the Lowell area. Since I started looking into this, I have been looking at homes as we drive around the county, and we have not found even one that comes close to complying with these new standards! I suppose this is being driven by good intentions that have gone very bad! State Forestry personnel and local rural fire department employees have scared, intimidated and played the "safety" card to their Boards and government officials at several levels and those people have rolled over and given the fire people what they want. Paranoia comes to mind. This is not based on good botany, wildlife management, "fire management science," logic, common sense, practicality, the big picture or anything else we can think of. If a parcel of property complied with this new code, then other things (all bad) that would come into play are increased erosion, quicker rain run off which leads to flooding, decreased property values, esthetics, nutrient regeneration, no shade in the summer on your house to reduce electricity costs for air conditioning, huge destruction of wildlife habitat, lost of business to garden centers, landscaping companies and other business that sell flowers, shrubbery and other landscaping plants, bark mulch (which is also not allowed), etc., compliance costs which could be very high when it comes to removing the large trees that we all enjoy around our homes, penalties if you do not comply, and more. This is not a fire prevention issue. To prevent fires, efforts should be put into controlling slash burning after timber operations (which is frequently the major source of wildfires in Oregon in a typical year), education about cigarettes being thrown out of car windows, off-road vehicle travel that start fires when the catalytic convertor touches dry grass, campfires not being extinguished properly, sparks from trains, and so on. If they really want to prevent fires then a really good education program and enforcement of existing laws would be a really good idea. A good program to inform people about what plants are more fire resistant (no gorse), plant location, set back suggestions, construction hints and then even courtesy inspections to promote voluntary compliance would help. We would comply as we desired and be concerned about wildfires in a logical and appropriate way. To really be effective, this code should really be applied to all properties in all cities where there are thousands of more fires than in the country. How about no trees in cities and then we might just as well concrete everything over which is about the only way to really prevent fires! This 130 foot setback also applies to all barns, shops and other out buildings. No firewood can be stored in this area unless it is in an enclosed building. How would you like to walk 260 feet round trip (almost a foot ball field) on a cold rainy night to get some firewood! It also applies to rural lodges, restaurants, plant nurseries and other businesses in the country. Can you imagine a nice lodge in the forest with no landscaping around it? I wonder that if my house is only 100 feet from my neighbors property, then do the the neighbors have to clear an additional 30 feet so my house has the required 130 feet of moonscape clearance? If a new home or out building is suddenly built close to your property line by a neighbor, do you have to clear your land so the 130 feet is met? This is so outrageous I am having trouble knowing were to start and stop with issues and concerns. It is just nuts! The few of you whom I have talked to about this in the last 10 days or so, all said the same thing: "I will not comply with this", with a few very bad words which I have deleted for this letter. This is really interesting because you all are generally good law-abiding citizens! The code also requires huge changes to existing driveways from the County Road to your house to include requiring the driveway to be 12 feet wide and gravel at least six-inches deep or paving "having a crushed base equivalent to six inches of gravel" and then two more feet on each side free of vegetation, for 16 feet total.. Your driveway will have to have a verticle clearance of at least 13 feet 6 inches. If you have a road (I guess this is longer that a driveway?) then it has to be 16 feet wide plus two feet on each side free of vegetation for a total of 20 feet. Any dead-end driveway 150 feet or longer (ours is longer than 150 feet and I believe all of yours are also) shall include a turnaround at the terminus which is very, very big! There are also standards for bridges, culverts and grade. Longer roads (over 400 feet) must provide turn outs which are also very, very big! Sounds expensive to me! This nightmare goes on and on and it all will result in extreme lost of habitat, will adversely affect the esthetics of where we live and will be very, very expensive to comply with. Again, the County and State will try to calm our concerns by saying this only applies to new construction, but the stated intent is to have it apply to all rural homes in the entire state, and very soon! Two counties (Deschutes and Jackson) are already applying it to 41,000 rural homeowners and they have only two years to comply. I talked to Don Nickell who is the "land county official" who was pictured and quoted in the R-G about how he cleared all the vegetation except for grass and a very few tall trees on the back of his property and how "the forest animals like it". I asked him if he did a pre-test (survey) and then a post-test to verify the animal populations and he said "no" and probably thought I was nuts. I asked him how he knew the animals liked it and he said he still heard some birds way up in the top of the trees. I asked him if he knew much about birds and he said yes and that he had binoculars and a bird book. I stated something like not all birds spend their entire lives in tree tops and again, his response told me it went right over his empty head! He did say he did live on five acres and he has seen or heard about bear, cougar, racoon, skunk and birds being there. I asked if any were near his home or in the 130 foot grass strip and he said "of course not"! Sounds like really great habitat! I am thinking about asking his supervisor to reprimand him for misleading and lying to the public. I know we are all very busy and there are dozens of really bad ideas, bad proposed laws, inequities and really poor decisions by government officials always out there to do battle with, but this is one that must be stopped. First we will fight it locally and then at the State level and some of our research shows it is being pushed at the federal level. Please, at least, call, e-mail or write your County Commissioner with a copy to the Planning Commission and to the County Planning Department. Attend the hearing on Feb. 7th at 7:00 p.m. at Harris Hall, 125 East 8th, Eugene Oregon, if you can or attend and testify at one of the hearings before the County Commissioners in March or April. The sooner we make our concerns heard the better. I will be testifying on Tuesday. Dick © Copyright 2000-2004 by West by Northwest.org