As the threat of catastrophic wildfire continues, state leaders turned their attention to Marin County, where fire managers recently put on display a voter-approved wildfire prevention authority designed to lower risk.
The California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force convened in San Rafael for a three-day conference last week to discuss the devastation in Southern California and to learn about work in Marin to protect the community from conflagrations.
“One of the reasons why we wanted to locate our task force meeting in Marin is the remarkable work that’s actually happening on a community scale,” said state Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot, co-chair of the task force.
The task force held a series of panel discussions at the Embassy Suites in San Rafael on March 29. More than 400 attended in person and more than 300 tuned in online.
The task force was created by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office in 2020 after consecutive years of calamitous wildfires across the state. The Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority, which put on the conference with FireSafe Marin, was formed after the passage of Measure C that year.
The parcel tax brings in about $20 million annually for prevention, education and forest management projects.