G2. Local Greens

Make it make sense: At a time when Virginians’ bills are being hit by soaring fuel costs, yet again tied to never-ending wars overseas, Dominion is proposing what would be the second-largest gas plant in the United States. Never mind that clean energy is both cheaper and its fuel-free, unlimited and unaffected by foreign affairs. You and I will finance this unnecessary three-gigawatt behemoth in Cumberland County, and AI data centers will use the electricity.

Dominion keeps repeating the false claim that “Virginians” are using more electricity. It’s simply not true — residential electricity demand is relatively unchanged in recent years. Over 90% of projected demand is from data centers. In the absence of Big Tech leeching ever more electricity from our collective grid, the insanely oversized Cumberland Gas Plant would look even more like what it is — a cash grab.

It’s a winning formula if you’re a wealthy CEO like Bob Blue, who in 2025 made $15,219,108, including a $4.5 million bonus and $9 million in stock awards. Data centers increase statewide electric demand, your company builds enormously expensive gas infrastructure to serve them, and captive Virginia customers pay you back, plus a handsome profit. Better yet, all of the risk of volatile gas fuel costs goes directly to households and other electric customers.

So if you’re already struggling to pay — or not paying, and risking eviction in one of the highest eviction-rate states in the country — your electric bill, well, that’s a bummer. Dominion is about to add more fuel charges, and on top of that, it wants you to finance their newest enormous gas plant, plus interest, to serve data center electric demand. It’s all just cash under the mattress to Bob Blue and Mark Zuckerberg.

Exactly how much will this gargantuan plant cost you and me? We don’t have the exact numbers yet, but consider that the recently approved 1-gigawatt Chesterfield gas plant, large for a gas plant but diminutive in comparison to Cumberland, is projected to cost ratepayers over $8 billion once fuel and Dominion profits are added to already billion-dollar construction costs. Common sense would indicate that Cumberland, three times as large, could cost us three times as much. Just checking — could you and your neighbors maybe cobble together $24 billion? Zuckerberg and friends could really use the favor.

To add injury to insult, on top of the added costs to your electric bill, gas plants like Chesterfield and Cumberland are an insidious, often invisible adder to annual healthcare costs. Indeed, a Southern Environmental Law Center report found that pollutants like fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from the smaller Chesterfield plant would saddle Virginians with an additional $3.5 billion in health costs.

A few years ago, the war in Ukraine sent gas costs spiking. We will continue to pay those fuel costs for decades, because policymakers chose to spread them out over time as opposed to causing sudden short-term increases. This was, of course, before data center demand caused massive short-term increases anyway.

Now, the United States’ foray in Iran has caused oil and gas costs to once again skyrocket (by the way, Shell reported $7 billion in profit last quarter, up 24% from last year). So long as Dominion continues to choose volatile, costly gas over local, affordable clean energy, these deferred fuel costs will continue to stack onto one another for decades — locking today’s foreign conflicts into decades and decades of high energy bills.

What’s maddening is that there is very clearly a better way. Clean energy has rapidly become the lowest-cost source of electricity in the world, with solar and wind costs falling dramatically over the past decade. The International Energy Agency has called solar power “the cheapest electricity in history.” As technology improves and battery storage becomes cheaper, experts expect clean energy prices to continue declining, making renewable power even more affordable for homes and businesses.

The good news is that Virginia lawmakers have wisely chosen to chart a long-term path towards a more stable, clean energy future, and Gov. Abigail Spanberger has made energy affordability a major focus of her tenure. But decision points like Chesterfield and Cumberland test policymakers’ commitment to affordability in real time. Virginia families quite literally cannot afford to keep shelling out billions for corporate profits, volatile fuel prices and endless new data center demand. We must ask that these policies and campaign commitments to people over corporate profit hold fast.

About the author: Victoria Higgins is the Virginia Director for CCAN Action Fund. Her career in environmental advocacy began with Green Corps, a rigorous training program for environmental organizers.

She worked on campaigns with Mighty Earth, Conservation Colorado, and Environment Virginia to hold corporate polluters accountable, pass state climate policy, and limit plastic pollution in Virginia’s waterways.

She received a Master of Science in Energy Policy and Climate at Johns Hopkins University. 

The post Why Virginians Are Paying Billions for Dominion’s Data Center Gas Plant  appeared first on Chesapeake Climate Action Network.

Legal papers have been submitted to the High Court in a legal challenge against plans for lower-volume fracking at an oil and gas site in East Yorkshire.

The case, brought by local campaigner Peter Lomas, seeks to quash the Environment Agency’s decision to permit the operation at the West Newton-A site in Holderness.

The site operator, Rathlin Energy, plans to inject liquid and proppant into the West Newton-A2 well at pressures high enough to fracture surrounding rocks.

The operation is intended to make oil and gas flow more readily to the surface and allow the commercial exploitation of the well.

The A2 well is drilled through the chalk aquifer, which supplies water locally. The West Newton-A site is 882m from the Lambwath Meadows site of special scientific interest.

The case papers set out Mr Lomas’s three main reasons for applying for a judicial review of the decision:

• The EA breached environmental permitting and water protection regulations by failing to recognise the prohibition of inputting hazardous substances into groundwater. The EA has admitted an error in law by stating there would be an “indirect input” into groundwater. In fact, there would be a direct input. As a result, there was insufficient information for the public to comment, making a consultation so unfair as to be unlawful.
• The EA breached its responsibilities on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, facilitating public participation and understanding the effects of proposed work on the climate.
• The EA erred in law by granting Rathlin’s request for a variation of its environmental permit to allow fracking, without first reviewing the Hydraulic Fracturing Plan (HFP). This is a required document that aims to manage the risk of seismic events caused by fracking. Rathlin submitted the HFP to the EA three hours after the decision to allow fracking had been issued.

Peter Lomas said today:

“As can be seen by the grounds of my challenge it’s important that I oppose this environmental permit variation as far as I can.

“The regulators need to be held accountable at all stages of the environmental and planning processes. Scrutiny is paramount, as is transparency throughout all processes.

“Playing with figures, percentages and confusing wording when it comes to the very real risk of our precious drinking water being compromised is not negotiable. The risk of seismic events is a reality, it’s not an untruth.

“We simply cannot sit by and do nothing about it in the hope that it will all go away. We must all act and that’s why I’m acting as an individual, in the hope of quashing this permit variation.

“I thank everyone so far that have helped me in realising my legal challenge, and I hope that this will be a catalyst for others to follow suit.”

Fracking using large volumes of liquid has, in effect, been banned in England by a moratorium, in force since 2019.

But lower-volume fracking, like that proposed at West Newton and at Burniston in North Yorkshire, is allowed.

Environmental campaigners have described this as a legal loophole and urged the government to ban all forms of fracking.

• The campaign group, West Newton Said No, has launched a crowdfunder to raise money for Mr Lomas’s legal fees. At the time of writing, it had raised more than £2,000 from 36 donations. The target is £20,000.

The campaign group behind a landmark legal judgement on carbon emissions has criticised official advice to government on the climate impact of onshore oil and gas.

The Weald Action Group, which secured the 2024 Finch Ruling at the Supreme Court, said the Climate Change Committee (CCC) may have underestimated the climate risks from onshore petroleum operations in guidance to ministers.

The CCC is required by law to provide advice to the government every five years on how onshore petroleum extraction in England affects the UK’s ability to meet its climate targets.

Earlier this year, the CCC told the energy secretary, Ed Miliband, greenhouse gas emissions from conventional onshore petroleum production in England were “a small contributor to carbon budgets and Net Zero”. The CCC also assumed that emissions would decline as onshore sites matured and closed.

But the Weald Action Group (WAG) said in a response this week that the CCC’s assessment was “incomplete” and not “a robust basis” for determining whether onshore oil and gas operations were compatible with UK carbon budgets.

In a letter to the CCC chair, Nigel Topping, the group said this year’s advice “failed to reflect the current reality of the onshore petroleum sector”.

WAG also said the CCC relied on assumptions that were “inconsistent with observed industry activity and regulatory practice”.

The CCC did not appear to have taken into account new expansion plans by onshore operators, WAG said. It said the CCC’s conclusions contradicted previous support for tighter limits on oil and gas production and a presumption against further exploration.

WAG also suggested:

“the assessment used to inform the Committee’s advice is incomplete and therefore underestimates the climate risks from onshore oil and gas under current policy and regulation.”

WAG identified eight proposals to expand onshore oil and gas in the UK.

The plans include four sites in North and East Yorkshire (Burniston, Foxholes, Ebberston Moor and West Newton), three in Lincolnshire and North Lincolnshire (Wressle, Whisby and Glentworth) and one in Dorset (Waddock Cross).

WAG said a moratorium on further onshore petroleum development would be a “reasonable and logical position for the CCC to adopt”.

WAG also said the climate impact of onshore oil and gas was compounded by a failure of regulators to ensure disused wells – a source of methane emissions – were decommissioned in “a timely manner”.

WAG said:

“evidence from multiple UK onshore sites indicates that decommissioning is frequently delayed, increasing the likelihood of prolonged emissions from inactive or suspended wells”.

The group accused the onshore sector of deferring well abandonment and site restoration for as long as possible “due to financial constraints, a reluctance to incur costs where funds are available, or broader political and strategic ambition”.

WAG said this was abetted by a “laissez-faire approach” from the industry regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA).

The group said the NSTA had allowed Star Energy to schedule decommissioning of the South Leverton field in Nottinghamshire in 2028, even though production had stopped in 2020-2021.

WAG added that at Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road shale gas site in Lancashire, the NSTA extended the deadline for decommissioning wells beyond the expiry of planning permission.

WAG also said the CCC had relied data on methane emissions from upstream oil and gas activities recorded in the National Atmospheric Emissions Inventory (NAEI).

The group said:

“There is doubt over the reliability of using NAEI data to estimate the impact of the onshore sector on carbon budgets – particularly regarding methane emissions.”

The CCC relied upon a production emissions baseline based on what it admitted was “limited publicly available information”, WAG said.

It added that research in 2023 indicated that the NAEI data could be underestimating true methane emissions, particularly from onshore venting.

The National Park Service is spending at least $67 million from national park entrance fees to help fund President Donald Trump’s beautification projects in Washington. According to a New York Times analysis of federal records, the Trump administration is funding nearly $60 million in repairs to nine ornamental fountains in D.C., and another $7 million toward the renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

In April, the administration awarded a no-bid contract to Virginia-based Atlantic Industrial Coatings to repair the Reflecting Pool and paint it blue. Federal records show that the contract is worth $13.1 million, more than seven times what Trump initially promised the work would cost. Additionally, the firm is being paid an inflated profit margin, according to federal documents obtained by The New York Times. The profit margin for federal construction contracts is typically between 6 to 12 percent. Atlantic Industrial Coatings submitted a bid that charged 20 percent, adding at least $850,000 to what a more typical contract would have cost.

“Our parks and public lands have been underfunded for decades, and there are many genuinely urgent projects in need of funding across the country,” said Aaron Weiss, executive director of the Center for Western Priorities. “Instead, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is determined to divert millions of dollars to projects that President Trump can see out his window.”

The Park Service has a backlog of deferred maintenance projects for repairs to bathrooms, campgrounds, roads, visitor centers and other aging infrastructure that came to an estimated $23 billion at the end of 2024.

Arizona Republic

New York Times | The Hill

Colorado Sun

KJZZ | KGVO

Colorado Sun

New York Times

High Country News

WyoFile

The Lincoln Memorial is one of the most significant civic landscapes in the country, and it deserves care. The question is whether Congress and the federal government are providing enough funding for the entire national park system.”

—Natalie Britt, the president and chief executive of Zion Forever Project, New York Times

@nationalparkservice

Ah, camping. It can be in-tents!

Sometimes spending a day in the wilderness isn’t quite enough to truly capture the feeling of a special place. Let’s be honest, though…sometimes it is. You know who you are. <slowly raises paw> For others, maybe you’ve really wanted to experience a park after dark: taking in the starry night sky, getting lost in the howling of a distant coyote (wait, what??), hearing the rustling sound of something on the other side of a very thin tent wall (why didn’t you splurge on the more moderately affordable tent with better zippers?), wondering if it’s just your partner…until you remember you’re single and out there alone. Then things get really existential. Is anyone ever really alone? Who am I? How far is the car? Also, something is definitely now crawling in the tent. How many hours until dawn?

Magical.

Story time: What are some of your favorite camping stories or experience from some nights spent in a national park? Are you in a tent right now and have a visual on the spider? It’s not a spider?

Well, good luck with that.

Image: Tent seen illuminated from within under a night sky @joshuatreenps NPS/ Hannah Schwalbe

Featured image: Contractors painting the Reflecting Pool surface blue. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The post National park entrance fees are funding Trump’s D.C. vanity projects appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

RFK JR Lies Us Americans Die.

Over the last decade, Greenbelt Alliance has been advancing research on nature-based solutions and land-use planning best practices to achieve comprehensive wildfire resilience across our Bay Area landscapes. In our latest report, An Interwoven Greenbelt Buffer for Wildfire Risk Reduction, we discuss the challenges of implementing strategically-placed greenbelt buffers in existing communities, using Sonoma Springs as a case study.

One key takeaway from that research highlighted the need for regulatory and governance frameworks that enable effective collaboration among private property owners, government partners, and fire professionals.

One organization has emerged as a leader in doing just that – creating a collaborative system that delivers real results. Napa Communities Firewise Foundation (Napa Firewise) is a Napa County-based nonprofit supporting 25 Fire Safe Councils across the county.

This organization quietly built one of California’s most effective regional wildfire resilience models that centralizes grant writing, environmental compliance, and data collection under a single nonprofit “mothership” while keeping 25 community Fire Safe Councils as its connective tissue to residents on the ground- and in doing so, has already helped surface roughly $47 million in private resilience investments that firefighters and insurers never knew existed.

In this conversation, facilitated by Senior Director of Planning and Research, Sadie Wilson, Napa Firewise CEO Joe Nordlinger*, and Communications Director Stephanie Smithers** discuss how that structure works, the importance of engaging private landowners through their new Valley Stewards program, and how they’re bringing insurers back to fire-affected communities.

Joe Nordlinger* has been the CEO of Napa Firewise since 2024 and a volunteer with the organization since 2017. After the 2014 Wragg Canyon Fire got dangerously close to his hillside property in the lower Mayacamas, Joe was spurred to action. He got involved in the Mount Veeder Fire Safe Council, got trained as a volunteer firefighter, and has since continued to change the way we think about wildfire preparedness by bringing decades of experience in the business world to think differently about how communities work more efficiently and effectively to build resilience.

Stephanie Smithers** has been with the organization for two years after working in crisis communication and public information during the 2017 and 2020 fires in Napa Valley, and has been steeped in wildfire for the last decade, tracking wildland fire blogs, listening to radio traffic, and working to understand the landscape that her husband works in as a career firefighter.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Joe Nordlinger: In Napa, we filled a vacuum and were able to change the trajectory of how wildfire resilience was being approached in the county. We basically reorganized, recruited a new board, and decided that Napa Firewise would be the shared services platform doing all the grant writing, grants administration, environmental compliance, project development, and portfolio management for what are now 25 Fire Safe Councils.

There are absolutely lessons that could apply in other counties. One thing we’ve realized is that you have to think about your customers (homeowners, landowners, firefighters, etc.) and what the experience is like on their end. If the customer has to deal with nine different organizations, “Oh, you can go here for this. You can go there for that.” It just becomes so overwhelming and confusing that they tend to just get paralyzed.

That said, I’m aware we’re a smaller, more affluent county with fewer players and a tight alignment with CAL FIRE through Napa County Fire. But the core insight is structural efficiency. If you’re trying to support 20 different nonprofits, all with their own overhead, there simply isn’t enough money to do that. You have to be very efficient.

What we’ve uncovered is that there’s a lot of value in centralizing and aggregating data to drive better wildfire containment outcomes and better insurance outcomes.

If you have too many entities gathering their own data, you don’t benefit from the aggregation needed to get actionable intelligence to firefighters or tell a better story to insurers. And fragmentation is compounded by complacency; you go a few years without a fire, the vegetation grows back, and you can find yourself right back in a potential catastrophic situation.

Stephanie Smithers: The community preparedness paired with the fuels management that we do is imperative to supporting wildfire response. It really helps us burn on our terms so we can help manage fire behavior and create opportunities for firefighters to contain wildfires faster and more safely.

What Napa Firewise does well is understand that we must be flexible. It isn’t a cookie-cutter approach. The needs and risks vary by neighborhood, terrain, and landowner profile. Our communities run the full spectrum, from very affluent neighborhoods to rural areas with very limited means. We walk each Fire Safe Council through their own community wildfire protection plan rather than expecting them all to fit into one bucket.

JN: Our model is efficient because all our Fire Safe Councils are essentially satellite entities that are part of us. They’re our connective tissue into the community. They help us push communications out, feed us project priorities, and we do the care and feeding in return: collateral, project delivery, grant writing, support with their community marketing.

For many Fire Safe Councils, it might be a retired teacher or a landowner running things. To expect them to write grants, do environmental compliance, and manage vendors is totally unrealistic.

Our model works because they can rely on us for all that back-end heavy lifting, while they stay focused on the community, which keeps us from getting complacent, because that’s the other big challenge in wildfire.

Every Fire Safe Council has its own Community Wildfire Protection Plan and NFPA Firewise designation, but they all roll up into the countywide CWPP. And all project priorities on the fuel and containment side are determined by the firefighting authorities (Napa County Fire, the city fire departments, CAL FIRE), not by us unilaterally.

JN: The program grew out of the reality that Napa, and this isn’t unique to Napa, has a lot of large landowners holding forested land, oak woodland, and mixed hardwood conifer forests, both burned and unburned from the major fires of the last seven years. To think about county-wide resilience, we have to figure out how to work with those landowners and understand what their needs are.

We ran focus groups and quickly discovered a few distinct groups. There are landowners with financial means who have done tremendous fuel mitigation, road improvement, and water storage work that nobody knows about. There are landowners willing to do more but who need to know it’ll improve their insurance or that firefighters will actually use the elements the landowner invests in. And then there are what we call property-wealthy but means-challenged landowners sitting on 450 acres with generational wealth tied to land at a very low tax basis, living on a fixed income, with limited capacity to invest.

The insight is that many of these large landowners possess critical locations for wildfire containment—about 25,000 to 30,000 of the 40,000 to 60,000 acres of forested land around the county—are strategic and critical. Firefighters look at topographically significant locations: where’s a ridge, a spur ridge, a wide saddle or bench? Those are places where they can take a stand and stop a fire. Many of those landowners already have legacy fire roads, ponds, reservoirs, areas of grazing and understory clearing, and if we can map those things and get them to firefighters as actionable intelligence, it improves containment outcomes. That’s the underpinning of Valley Stewards.

JN: Let me preface this by saying the insurance issue is very complicated, and I’m not going to claim this solves California’s insurance crisis. But we do seem to be making a difference because we’re helping insurance companies get a better understanding of contextualized risk around certain properties. Once they understand that some properties are more strategic by virtue of the resilience attributes landowners have invested in, they recognize those as likely priority locations where firefighters will want to take a stand.

We’re not telling insurers, “these properties can withstand a wildfire” or that “firefighters are going to save that house.” We’re saying: this 500-acre property has three and a half miles of critical dozer lines on a ridge, abundant water, good staging…those are properties firefighters want to know about because they could mount backfiring operations or retardant drops there. That changes how an insurer thinks about that property, and about the properties adjacent to it. We initially thought it would take ten years to develop 100 of these enhanced resilience sites (a formal designation we worked out with CAL FIRE). In our first year, we already have around 200 landowners enrolled and expect to reach 350 or so sites in three years.

If we can build large enhanced resilient sites around a suburban neighborhood, then the insurance companies are saying that they would think differently about those neighborhoods [because] we can provide actionable intelligence to firefighters about where they can take a stand before the fire even gets into the neighborhood and we can build these big swaths of resilience and buffering layers, that helps to protect those [suburban] neighborhoods as well.

We’ve participated in about a dozen insurance renewals that resulted in substantially lower premiums, increased coverage, better terms, and, in about four cases, got people off the FAIR Plan entirely. Another 15 or so renewals are in process now. CAL FIRE is also interested in expanding this framework to potentially six or eight additional counties.

SS: To simplify – for non-insurance people, myself included – what Joe is describing isn’t about individual policies, but about creating a recognized standard of mitigation that the market can respond to, giving insurers something they’ve never had before: real, verifiable data about what’s actually been done on the land. CAL FIRE told us what they need for rapid containment and response. We built this around that.

SS: One thing we pride ourselves on is that we generally don’t use fear-based marketing. You see a lot of organizations sharing structure-loss imagery over and over again. For our community, they know what that feels like. I don’t need to share triggering content—our hillsides have the scars. That’s enough.

The power of our organization is that we have all these Fire Safe Councils. We are locals. This is a neighborly effort, and we have those trusted local connections with institutional support behind it. We’re not a government organization, but we have the backing of our fire authority, the county, and electeds—while also having grassroots community trust. We speak concisely, clearly, and lean toward the technical side, which shows we know what we’re doing. We also use an agnostic approach to fuels treatment. It could be grazing, it could be mechanical treatment. Why does it matter? What matters is risk reduction.

And the messaging must change community by community. We’re constantly asking: how do we speak to the people of Napa City differently than the people of Calistoga? How do you speak to people in the suburbs versus those in the wildland-urban interface?

JN: The communities with the largest wisdom about this are often the ones that have directly experienced wildfire. They know what it feels like to be evacuated, to see fire on their hillside. In more suburban areas where wildfire has been a distant threat, it’s challenging to ask people to foot the bill. Enough time goes by without a fire, and people forget. Fire doesn’t care about a city boundary or a county line; it moves on fuel, weather, and topography, but keeping that reality in people’s minds is its own ongoing job.

JN: We consider ourselves realistic optimists. Fire will come again, but we think we can be prepared for it. When we started enrolling large landowners into the Valley Stewards Initiative, we uncovered something like $47 million in resilience investments—expanded water, improved roads, fuel reduction—that had been made privately but never captured or considered by firefighters or insurance companies. Meanwhile, we’ve been out there raising $36 million in grant funds and over $26 million in County Funds. Private industry, among just the first 100 landowners, has already matched nearly that amount, and we’re uncovering more and more of it.

By almost every measure we are far better off than we were in 2017 and 2020. PG&E has hardened a lot of infrastructure. More people have solar panels, batteries, or generators. Thousands of acres of fuel mitigation and forest health work have been completed. There’s a lot still to do, but we’re far more resilient now.

I’d also add that maintaining fire roads is one of the most cost-effective ways to mitigate risk, even if it sounds counterintuitive ecologically. We’re far better off maintaining existing roads properly, with water bars and erosion control, than letting them fall into disrepair and having firefighters push roads in an emergency in ways that aren’t ecologically sensitive. Good roaded infrastructure is valuable for containment and for doing prescribed fire, grazing, and forest health work.

SS: We know that pre-fire work makes a difference. We saw this in 2025. There was a fire in Napa County last year that, without pre-fire work, had every opportunity to greatly disrupt the communities of Angwin and Pope Valley. They contained it pretty quickly with zero structure loss. CAL FIRE said at their press conferences that they used those mapped resources in their operational planning. That’s enough for me to continue this work for the next hundred years.

And for anyone concerned about costs, these efforts reduce firefighting costs, too. If firefighters can contain fires faster, that’s fewer resources on the ground. The cost of rebuilding a single home in Napa County is greater than the critical ridgeline fuel break we just finished in the Mount Veeder area. The return on investment for doing this work ahead of time is massive. We’re honored to take the responsibility seriously, creating environments for firefighters to respond effectively and safely.

JN: For individual landowners: maintain vigilance, stay on top of notifications, track weather and fire conditions, and make those investments in defensible space and home hardening where you can. At the agency level, collaboration is everything. We can learn from [other counties], and we’re happy to share what we’re doing here.

SS: People should join their local Fire Safe Council. Even if you’re a quarter-acre property owner in the middle of town, there is something really empowering about working with your neighbors. Whether it’s a community work day, sharing education, or just inspiring one another, that connection matters. And it’s one of the most powerful ways we know to keep communities engaged over the long term.

Joe Nordlinger:<\/strong> In Napa, we filled a vacuum and were able to change the trajectory of how wildfire resilience was being approached in the county. We basically reorganized, recruited a new board, and decided that Napa Firewise would be the shared services platform doing all the grant writing, grants administration, environmental compliance, project development, and portfolio management for what are now 25 Fire Safe Councils.<\/p>

There are absolutely lessons that could apply in other counties. One thing we\u2019ve realized is that you have to think about your customers (homeowners, landowners, firefighters, etc.) and what the experience is like on their end. If the customer has to deal with nine different organizations, “Oh, you can go here for this. You can go there for that.” It just becomes so overwhelming and confusing that they tend to just get paralyzed.<\/p>

That said, I’m aware we’re a smaller, more affluent county with fewer players and a tight alignment with CAL FIRE through Napa County Fire. But the core insight is structural efficiency. If you’re trying to support 20 different nonprofits, all with their own overhead, there simply isn’t enough money to do that. You have to be very efficient.<\/p>

What we’ve uncovered is that there’s a lot of value in centralizing and aggregating data to drive better wildfire containment outcomes and better insurance outcomes.<\/strong><\/p>

If you have too many entities gathering their own data, you don’t benefit from the aggregation needed to get actionable intelligence to firefighters or tell a better story to insurers. And fragmentation is compounded by complacency; you go a few years without a fire, the vegetation grows back, and you can find yourself right back in a potential catastrophic situation.<\/span><\/p>

Stephanie Smithers: <\/strong>The community preparedness paired with the fuels management that we do is imperative to supporting wildfire response. It really helps us burn on our terms so we can help manage fire behavior and create opportunities for firefighters to contain wildfires faster and more safely.<\/p>

What Napa Firewise does well is understand that we must be flexible. It isn’t a cookie-cutter approach. The needs and risks vary by neighborhood, terrain, and landowner profile. Our communities run the full spectrum, from very affluent neighborhoods to rural areas with very limited means. We walk each Fire Safe Council through their own community wildfire protection plan rather than expecting them all to fit into one bucket.<\/p>"}},{"@type":"Question","name":"How do you manage 25 Fire Safe Councils without things becoming fragmented?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"

JN:<\/strong> Our model is efficient because all our Fire Safe Councils are essentially satellite entities that are part of us. They’re our connective tissue into the community. They help us push communications out, feed us project priorities, and we do the care and feeding in return: collateral, project delivery, grant writing, support with their community marketing.<\/p>

For many Fire Safe Councils, it might be a retired teacher or a landowner running things. To expect them to write grants, do environmental compliance, and manage vendors is totally unrealistic.<\/p>

Our model works because they can rely on us for all that back-end heavy lifting, while they stay focused on the community, which keeps us from getting complacent, because that’s the other big challenge in wildfire.<\/strong><\/p>

Every Fire Safe Council has its own Community Wildfire Protection Plan and NFPA Firewise designation, but they all roll up into the countywide CWPP. And all project priorities on the fuel and containment side are determined by the firefighting authorities (Napa County Fire, the city fire departments, CAL FIRE), not by us unilaterally.<\/p>"}},{"@type":"Question","name":"What is the Valley Stewards program, and why does it focus on large private landowners?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"

JN:<\/strong> The program grew out of the reality that Napa, and this isn’t unique to Napa, has a lot of large landowners holding forested land, oak woodland, and mixed hardwood conifer forests, both burned and unburned from the major fires of the last seven years. To think about county-wide resilience, we have to figure out how to work with those landowners and understand what their needs are.<\/p>

We ran focus groups and quickly discovered a few distinct groups. There are landowners with financial means who have done tremendous fuel mitigation, road improvement, and water storage work that nobody knows about. There are landowners willing to do more but who need to know it’ll improve their insurance or that firefighters will actually use the elements the landowner invests in. And then there are what we call property-wealthy but means-challenged landowners sitting on 450 acres with generational wealth tied to land at a very low tax basis, living on a fixed income, with limited capacity to invest.<\/p>

The insight is that many of these large landowners possess critical locations for wildfire containment\u2014about 25,000 to 30,000 of the 40,000 to 60,000 acres of forested land around the county\u2014are strategic and critical. Firefighters look at topographically significant locations: where’s a ridge, a spur ridge, a wide saddle or bench? Those are places where they can take a stand and stop a fire. Many of those landowners already have legacy fire roads, ponds, reservoirs, areas of grazing and understory clearing, and if we can map those things and get them to firefighters as actionable intelligence, it improves containment outcomes. That’s the underpinning of Valley Stewards.<\/p>"}},{"@type":"Question","name":"You mentioned that this program has been able to bring insurers back into Napa communities. How does that work?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"

JN:<\/strong> Let me preface this by saying the insurance issue is very complicated, and I’m not going to claim this solves California’s insurance crisis. But we do seem to be making a difference because we’re helping insurance companies get a better understanding of contextualized risk around certain properties. Once they understand that some properties are more strategic by virtue of the resilience attributes landowners have invested in, they recognize those as likely priority locations where firefighters will want to take a stand.<\/p>

We’re not telling insurers, “these properties can withstand a wildfire” or that “firefighters are going to save that house.” We’re saying: this 500-acre property has three and a half miles of critical dozer lines on a ridge, abundant water, good staging\u2026those are properties firefighters want to know about because they could mount backfiring operations or retardant drops there. That changes how an insurer thinks about that property, and about the properties adjacent to it. We initially thought it would take ten years to develop 100 of these enhanced resilience sites (a formal designation we worked out with CAL FIRE). In our first year, we already have around 200 landowners enrolled and expect to reach 350 or so sites in three years.<\/strong><\/p>

If we can build large enhanced resilient sites around a suburban neighborhood, then the insurance companies are saying that they would think differently about those neighborhoods [because] we can provide actionable intelligence to firefighters about where they can take a stand before the fire even gets into the neighborhood and we can build these big swaths of resilience and buffering layers, that helps to protect those [suburban] neighborhoods as well.<\/p>

We’ve participated in about a dozen insurance renewals that resulted in substantially lower premiums, increased coverage, better terms, and, in about four cases, got people off the FAIR Plan entirely.<\/strong> Another 15 or so renewals are in process now. CAL FIRE is also interested in expanding this framework to potentially six or eight additional counties.<\/p>

SS: <\/strong>To simplify \u2013 for non-insurance people, myself included \u2013 what Joe is describing isn’t about individual policies, but about creating a recognized standard of mitigation that the market can respond to, giving insurers something they’ve never had before: real, verifiable data about what’s actually been done on the land. CAL FIRE told us what they need for rapid containment and response. We built this around that.<\/p>"}},{"@type":"Question","name":"What have you learned about communicating wildfire risk in a way that actually motivates people to act?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"

SS:<\/strong> One thing we pride ourselves on is that we generally don’t use fear-based marketing. You see a lot of organizations sharing structure-loss imagery over and over again. For our community, they know what that feels like. I don’t need to share triggering content\u2014our hillsides have the scars. That’s enough.<\/p>

The power of our organization is that we have all these Fire Safe Councils. We are locals. This is a neighborly effort, and we have those trusted local connections with institutional support behind it.<\/strong> We’re not a government organization, but we have the backing of our fire authority, the county, and electeds\u2014while also having grassroots community trust. We speak concisely, clearly, and lean toward the technical side, which shows we know what we’re doing. We also use an agnostic approach to fuels treatment. It could be grazing, it could be mechanical treatment. Why does it matter? What matters is risk reduction.<\/p>

And the messaging must change community by community. We’re constantly asking: how do we speak to the people of Napa City differently than the people of Calistoga? How do you speak to people in the suburbs versus those in the wildland-urban interface?<\/p>

JN:<\/strong> The communities with the largest wisdom about this are often the ones that have directly experienced wildfire.<\/strong> They know what it feels like to be evacuated, to see fire on their hillside. In more suburban areas where wildfire has been a distant threat, it’s challenging to ask people to foot the bill. Enough time goes by without a fire, and people forget. Fire doesn’t care about a city boundary or a county line; it moves on fuel, weather, and topography, but keeping that reality in people’s minds is its own ongoing job.<\/p>"}},{"@type":"Question","name":"What gives you hope? What's the bright spot in the often difficult world of wildfire?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"

JN:<\/strong> We consider ourselves realistic optimists. Fire will come again, but we think we can be prepared for it. When we started enrolling large landowners into the Valley Stewards Initiative, we uncovered something like $47 million in resilience investments\u2014expanded water, improved roads, fuel reduction\u2014that had been made privately but never captured or considered by firefighters or insurance companies.<\/strong> Meanwhile, we’ve been out there raising $36 million in grant funds and over $26 million in County Funds. Private industry, among just the first 100 landowners, has already matched nearly that amount, and we’re uncovering more and more of it.<\/p>

By almost every measure we are far better off than we were in 2017 and 2020. PG&E has hardened a lot of infrastructure. More people have solar panels, batteries, or generators. Thousands of acres of fuel mitigation and forest health work have been completed. There’s a lot still to do, but we’re far more resilient now.<\/p>

I’d also add that maintaining fire roads is one of the most cost-effective ways to mitigate risk, even if it sounds counterintuitive ecologically. We’re far better off maintaining existing roads properly, with water bars and erosion control, than letting them fall into disrepair and having firefighters push roads in an emergency in ways that aren’t ecologically sensitive. Good roaded infrastructure is valuable for containment and for doing prescribed fire, grazing, and forest health work.<\/p>

SS:<\/strong> We know that pre-fire work makes a difference. We saw this in 2025. There was a fire in Napa County last year that, without pre-fire work, had every opportunity to greatly disrupt the communities of Angwin and Pope Valley. They contained it pretty quickly with zero structure loss. CAL FIRE said at their press conferences that they used those mapped resources in their operational planning. That’s enough for me to continue this work for the next hundred years.<\/p>

And for anyone concerned about costs, these efforts reduce firefighting costs, too. If firefighters can contain fires faster, that’s fewer resources on the ground. The cost of rebuilding a single home in Napa County is greater than the critical ridgeline fuel break we just finished in the Mount Veeder area. The return on investment for doing this work ahead of time is massive.<\/strong> We’re honored to take the responsibility seriously, creating environments for firefighters to respond effectively and safely.<\/p>"}},{"@type":"Question","name":"Any final advice for individual residents, or for organizations in other counties looking to learn from your model?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"

JN:<\/strong> For individual landowners: maintain vigilance, stay on top of notifications, track weather and fire conditions, and make those investments in defensible space and home hardening where you can. At the agency level, collaboration is everything. We can learn from [other counties], and we’re happy to share what we’re doing here.<\/p>

SS: <\/strong>People should join their local Fire Safe Council. Even if you’re a quarter-acre property owner in the middle of town, there is something really empowering about working with your neighbors. Whether it’s a community work day, sharing education, or just inspiring one another, that connection matters. And it’s one of the most powerful ways we know to keep communities engaged over the long term.<\/p>"}}]}

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