Catron County Community Wildfire Protection Plan
INTRODUCTION

• Home page
• CWPP Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Declaration of Agreement and Concurrence
• Preface & Introduction
• Planning Process
• Community Profile
• Planning for the Future
• Monitoring & Evaluation
• Appendix 1 - data
• Appendix 2 - maps
• Downloads

Overview:

Catron County’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan has been created to be a landscape scale overview which provides direction and guidelines for short- and long-term planning in Catron County. This Plan is not a citation of all the research available on the need for forest restoration for wildfire protection, nor is it a discussion of legislation supporting such plans as this. This plan is rather a determination of landscape scale treatment priorities across Catron County for all land ownerships.

The Catron County Commission, through resolution in December, 2003, created an Intergovernmental Task Force for Expediting Reduction of Hazardous Fuels. This Task Force was created to deal with real and perceived threats from wildfire to the citizens of the County . The Task Force realized that it could best accomplish its mandate through satisfaction of the requirements of the Healthy Forests Restoration Act (HFRA) and the creation of a Community Wildfire Protection Plan, however the Task Force further realized that such a document should not just be a community specific wildfire protection plan but a landscape scalecounty-wide wildfire protection plan. Reasons for this decision include:

• Population is spread out throughout the entire 7000 square mile county with minor concentrations in small community centers.
• Expertise and citizens involved are similar from one community to the next.
• Collaboration processes already in place are county-wide.
• Recent extremely large wildfires in nearby forests (e.g. Rodeo-Chedeski) indicate a need for landscape scale planning.

All parties to this Plan agreed from the beginning that collaboration was an absolutely essential part of writing the plan. The County, as the lead, strongly supported collaboration and other parties to the Plan willingly provided the assistance necessary to complete this plan. All meetings were open to the public, with a special effort made to involve all interested parties through a series of community meetings in the County.

It was additionally agreed that the Plan would be a landscape level assessment as well as an assessment of treatment needs in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI). Because the scope of such an assessment would necessarily be very large, priorities would need to be established for treatments, and there would be a need to address the availability of raw materials at a landscape scale .

Project level planning will be subsequent to this plan. Project level planning and associated funding requests will be accomplished using this plan and any updates as a guide for project location, method and amount of treatments. Data developed in the course of this plan process will aid in project level planning. Examples of project level planning for the 11 highest priority Wildland Urban Interfaces are included in the appendix along with example maps for the highest priority Wildland Urban Interface.

map

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