After the 1991 inferno wiped out swaths of the East Bay hills, Oakland hills residents began paying into a fund for fire prevention work.
But that money went away 10 years ago, after voters narrowly rejected a new tax to support the mitigation efforts. Now, the city is poised to put a similar tax measure back on the ballot this November, banking on voters feeling a refreshed sense of urgency after years of deadly blazes around California.
Be prepared for wildfire season
Everything you need to know about evacuation, preparation, air quality, power outages, protecting property, and more answers to your questions about wildfire season.
At a special City Council meeting Tuesday, officials considered a recommendation from Councilmembers Janani Ramachandran and Dan Kalb and city staff to place the “Wildfire Prevention Zone Special Tax” on the Nov. 5 ballot. Election measures require two council meetings before approval, so the item will come back for a final vote and possible amendments on June 18. Councilmembers have already expressed support for the measure.
“The danger and risk of wildfires has never been greater than now,” said Ramachandran, who represents the fire-prone hills in District 4, at the Tuesday meeting. “This is a very exciting proposal that addresses the needs of the moment.”
If the tax makes it onto the ballot, only Oakland voters in the area the state calls the Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone will have a say on it. This zone includes all of the Oakland hills located above Highway 13, along with some areas below it—a total of around 26,000 properties.
Property owners in this zone would pay the annual tax, $99 per single-family home or $65 per apartment to start. Some low-income homeowners and seniors won’t have to pay. Oakland expects the tax to bring in $2.7 million in its first year.
The money would be used to carry out the city’s new 10-year Vegetation Management Plan. It would pay for prevention efforts like beefed-up firefighter patrols, goat grazing, property inspections, homeowner education, and road clearing.
Unlike some measures that only require a simple majority to pass, this one would need two-thirds of the vote in the impacted area. In 2013, a similar tax fell just 60 votes short of that mark.
Deputy City Administrator Joe DeVries told the City Council that the need for more robust prevention support is only growing in Oakland.
“When we see high rains in the winter as we’ve seen in the last two years, we see even more vegetation that needs to be managed in the dry months,” he said. “This work will continue into the future for as long as climate change continues to fuel greater and greater wildfires.”
Some members of the public urged the council to make tweaks to the measure, though, ensuring the tax rate doesn’t increase too much over time and that Oakland uses the money for its intended purpose.
Oakland has used special taxes to pay for wildfire prevention in the past
The city originally established a Wildfire Prevention Assessment District in 1992. The previous year, the Oakland-Berkeley firestorm had scorched 3,000 homes and killed 25 people. The new district included the hills area considered highly fire-prone by the state. Property owners there paid an assessment that Oakland used to clear vegetation on their properties and increase fire services during warm months.
Five years later, people in the district declined to renew the assessment. After that, “the city struggled to maintain the necessary level of safety in the hills by reducing fuel loads,” DeVries said.
In 2003, property owners changed their minds and reestablished the district, contributing $65 per house annually for the next 10 years. According to the city, this district generated nearly $2 million a year for fire prevention.
In 2013, the city decided to put a special tax measure on the ballot instead of renewing the assessment district. These are similar mechanisms, with households in the affected area contributing payments for fire prevention in both cases. But, DeVries said, a tax enables Oakland to do prevention work in the broader area—not just on the specific properties in the assessment district—and includes fewer bureaucratic requirements.
“The truth is, wildfires don’t know political boundaries or property lines,” DeVries said, so the city administration wants the ability to clear roads in the entire fire-hazard zone.
But there wasn’t enough support for the 2013 tax.
Will it see more success a decade later? Voters may be catalyzed by the string of devastating fires in California in the past decade, like 2017’s Tubbs Fire and 2018’s Camp Fire, which wiped out entire neighborhoods and towns and killed dozens of people. And Oakland is home to the densest portion of the state’s Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone.
There are concerns about the proposed measure, even among some who support the concept.
Gail Wallace, president of the League of Women Voters Oakland, urged the city to include a 5% annual cap on how much the tax amount can increase. As proposed, the city would base the increase on either inflation in the Bay Area or average incomes in the state.
She also criticized the proposal of a “forever tax.” Unlike with many ballot measures, there would be no “sunset” of this one. The tax would continue indefinitely, unless voters organized to put a measure on the ballot repealing it.
“It’s out of reason to think citizens can do that on their own, with the expenses of bringing ballot measures,” Wallace said.
DeVries argued that the threat of fires will be permanent in Oakland.
“The need will never go away,” he said, “unless we were to solve climate change tomorrow.”
