Speaker numbers apply only to this recording. Names come from transcript evidence. “Possibly” marks uncertain attribution.
The Bend City Council held a work session on October 14, 2026, covering four major topics: a comprehensive update on the city's wildfire resiliency strategy including a proposed defensible space code; updates to the city's fiscal policies; a discussion on funding affordable housing projects via the Juniper Ridge Land Sale Reserve Fund; and the findings of a market analysis on neighborhood-serving commercial development. The session was focused on discussion and direction-setting, with no formal votes taken.
Alright, we're gonna start our city council work session. Alright, so we are all here except for Councillor Norris, who was going to refuse on this first item, which is going to be our wildfire resiliency defensible space code. So let's go ahead and get into it. Good evening, Mayor, Councillors. I'm Sarah Hudson, Senior Policy Analyst in the City Manager Manager's Office, joined by Deputy Fire Marshal of Wildfire Preparedness, Melissa Steele. And today we're here to continue our conversations around wildfire preparedness, specifically around defensible space. So why are we here? Why are we talking about this? So we have the council goal of building wildfire resiliency through awareness, education, and actions, specifically looking to evaluate and update codes to reflect current best practices and coordinate and expand uh resiliency outreach and education. So today we'll really cover what we've been doing in this space particularly over the last year with a specific goal of trying to get council direction to guide future defensible space policy development. So we'll get to discussion and questions toward the end of this presentation, but really getting into kind of the scope of what we're talking about. How far should the city go in expanding requirements? What level is council willing to consider not to make any firm decisions today, but just to kind of understand, get a temperature check on what that resourcing piece would look like depending on the scope, uh the role of a community engagement in this work, and how do we balance what we know about wildfire science but with feasibility in community exactly how it so kind of before we even start just kind of covering some baseline assumptions to ground this conversation. So first and foremost, Bend is a wooy community, we mean wildland urban interface. So really the entire city is considered high risk for wildfire. Um we really found in the Bloomberg work, which we'll talk more about shortly, that there can be kind of a misunderstanding around this that you know fire starts in the forest and then comes in, and that folks who are on the edge of the community are most at risk, which is not actually the case because of how embers can fly, and thinking about structure to structure ignition. So kind of keeping that in mind as we think about policy direction. Uh we know uh that home farming defensible space and culture change do reduce risk and increase community resiliency. Uh today we are focusing about on defensible space. We're not talking about home hardening or evacuation. There's a lot of topics in this space, but really uh defensible space is the focus of um tonight's conversation. And we've done enough work as kind of this internal group, uh cross-departmental staff group to provide a framework and some recommendations and some thoughts for consideration, but depending on council direction, that's where we'll get into more detailed implementation analysis of what it would cost, what that would look like. So trying to provide enough to have an informed conversation, but there's more to be figured out depending on uh the direction provided. Um since we were last here in February, um, several things have occurred. Just want to kind of note it real quick. We did adopt R 327, the home hardening code that became effective May 15th. So we're ready, kind of making progress on that council goal evaluating updating codes. That was uh a big um effort in that direction, and again, that establishes home hardening requirements for new detached residential construction. Um, also since we last um were here, the state, the Oregon State Fire Marshal, released a finalized state model defensible space code. Um, that helps provide like a foundation, a framework for um jurisdictions to to use as they consider what would that look like locally. Um to date, no one has uh adopted that um in the state. Uh the city also completed the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. This was an intensive 10-month program, really focused on wildfire resiliency, trying to understand uh barriers, perception perceptions, understanding of uh uh of this topic with community. So there was a staff group that completed uh this work and it involved a lot of community conversations. There was a lot of really rich kind of qualitative research that came up and is informing our understanding of folks, um, how they're orienting to this topic. And then um 2026 with the was the largest fire um season on record with over two and a half million acres for right. So we'll define defensible space uh for everyone. And so defensible space is really that buffer zone around the property. It's void of flammable vegetation and other combustibles. And so we really want to reduce ignition risk from structure to structure because that's where we see the large conflagrations happening on a dry windy day. Again, it halts fire from engulfing properties. This gives firefighters time, which is super important to think about. You know, we've got our engines in the city, but it takes a lot of them on a conflagration to get here and get in place. Most times firefighters have about 60 to 90 seconds to assess the structure and say, yes, we can take a standard no. And so you really want to give the firefighters time to get to your property for sure. The first five feet is the immediate zone, and that is the most critical zone as far as all the research is showing. Thank you, ring cameras, too, because now we can see how one ember landing in a wrong bush. Uh it takes maybe an hour and a half to burn a home down, but we can watch the whole progression.