The City of Bend held a hybrid work session beginning at 5:00 p.m., followed by an Urban Renewal Agency work session, an executive session, and a regular council meeting at 7:00 p.m. on August 7, 2024. The evening included a fire season update, selection of a preferred bridge type for Hawthorne Bridge, a preview of draft Tax Increment Financing (TIF) policies, public testimony on the Milepost 132 fire and other neighborhood concerns, approval of contracts, and adoption of ordinances.
All right. We are ready to begin our work session tonight, and we are starting with a fire season update. So we'll have our staff come on up for that. And just to provide some introductory comments here, so really we had scheduled this a couple of weeks ago. We've been kind of in the pattern of providing a water update in the spring and a fire update in the height of the fire season. So obviously there's some significant concerns that we're seeing across the region, across the state. So with that, I want to introduce uh Todd Riley, Fire Chief, and Kerry Carl, our emergency management director. Thanks so much for having us here tonight. Um I'm gonna talk with uh about kind of a general overview of where we stand across kind of Oregon, but also maybe uh at the national level, and then Todd will take us a little bit closer in. Uh so you can see shared up on the screen is the Oregon State Um Oregon Department of Emergency Management's uh fires dashboard, and that kind of gives you a perspective of how many fires are burning across uh Western United States. Um that's important to think about because a lot of the resources that we utilize in order to fight fires are uh not just located within one state, they are shared across states. Uh and the governor's declaration allows us to use emergency management assistant compact, which allows us to bring resource resources in across state boundaries. Um the bright yellow circles are the fires that have been ignited within the last 24 hours or have been identified. So you can see that there's you know, storm systems that are moving through uh with lightning causing uh natural caused fires, and then there's also human-cause fires on the landscape. So as we kind of zoom in a little bit, um, the bigger fires or the bigger circles, those are gonna give us kind of our large fire perspective. Uh if it's and by large fire, I mean if it's a timber fire, it's over a hundred acres. If it's a grassland fire, it's over three hundred acres. Um when we think about large fires, that means more complexity, there's more resources, there's things that are needed in order to address that. But looking at all these these kind of circles or points really gives us this perspective that a lot of resources come in in alignment with those fires needs, and that means resources are constrained as well. Uh and resources are personnel to fight the fires, equipment, air assets, all of those things uh uh that we need in order to deal with fire suppression or also uh handle initial attack. When we look at the nation, there are 88 uh large fires that are burning in uh um United States. Uh but when we look at Oregon, 33 are located here. Uh so that's about 37% of the large fires that are occurring in the nation are actually occurring within the state of Oregon. Um again, that speaks to the resources that are here. We have over um 9,000 personnel working these different uh large-scale fires uh that are impacting the landscape. So it's it's a it's a pretty huge undertaking. Uh it's a lot of resources, uh but there's a lot of coordination that's been happening at the state level, so the emergency coordination center has been activated for quite a while to actually really help us through this process to bring these additional resources in. Uh, and of course the governor's declaration helped with uh um I believe it's operation uh plan smoky smoky, I always think that backwards for the National Guard, but other resources to be available that we may not normally have uh in a fire season. So that's kind of the larger perspective, those different bigger fires that are happening. And Todd, do you want to take us down to maybe the local level? Absolutely. So a year ago I was in front of you and delivered a similar update, and there wasn't a lot to report last year. Um this year, unfortunately, is a very different story. And that was just fortunate. If they were committed to another incident, they would not have been available for this one. So when the mile marker 132 fire started, um, we knew it was going to have the potential to get big. So we did send a lot of resources to it and had a ton of help from partner agencies. So the cooperation worked. Um, the communications plan worked, the evacuations worked, but again, it was a high profile, uh high anxiety event for a lot of folks in our town and continues to be. Um it's not not lost on us, even though we did not lose any structures. We are can tremendously fortunate to end up where we did. At the end of that fire, well, about three hours into it, we did lose those two task forces that were helping us because they had to go fight yet another fire that was in the area, and now there's the conflagration that's happening in Jefferson County west of Madras, and we again supported that cause as well. So resources are stretched thin, just like Carrie was saying. And so what we like to do is remind individuals what they can do, because oftentimes you get into the state of we live in central Oregon, we're in the wildland urban interface, and conditions are extreme. So there is still personal responsibility and ownership that people can take to help keep their homes, their neighborhoods, and their communities safe. So please pay attention to our our defensible space standards, and they're outlined in the own your zone strategy or own your zone initiative that we have published on our website. And also sign up for the dischutes alerts. That's one of the best ways that our community members can stay aware of what's happening. And it's it's not always a progression from level one to level two to level three. And those folks that live on the north end of end, their first indication of this fire was level three, get your stuff and get out.