This special meeting of the Berkeley City Council was held on Tuesday, February 11, 2025, at 4:00 PM in the School District Board Room. The council heard a comprehensive presentation from the Berkeley Fire Department and other city staff on the EMBER (Effective Mitigations for Berkeley’s Ember Resilience) initiative, a package of four proposals aimed at reducing catastrophic wildfire risk. The meeting included extensive public comment, council deliberation, and a unanimous vote to advance the proposals.
Recording in progress. Uh hold on one second. Um test. And hello. Okay. I think we're gonna get started, folks. If you could please take your seats. All right. Don't have the agenda in front of me. But all right. I'm gonna call this special meeting to order. It is Tuesday, February 11th, and I would like to start with the role, please. Okay. Councilmember Kisserwani is currently absent. Taplin present. Bartlett is currently absent. Tregob present. Uh O'Keefe. Present. Lackaby. Here. Luna Para. Here. Umbert. Present. And Mayor Ishi. Here. Okay. All right. Thank you so much. Uh, well, this is a special meeting, so I'm going to pass it over to Chief Sprague. Thank you very much. Good evening, Mayor, Council, and residents. The events of last month in LA were heartbreaking. Everyone in the Bay Area, fire service wanted to be down there helping. Most of us were not able to. And so instead, we spent the last month working with many stakeholders throughout the community to prepare for tonight's presentation. The fires in LA changed the course of thousands of lives, creating acute and chronic health problems, and a leaving in their wake a uh environmental and financial disaster. But these events were predictable, as were the fires in Paradise, Santa Rosa, La Haina, and many others. Not just predictable, but in many cases, these fires have occurred in similar areas before. Fires burn along predictable and known topographical features driven by the ripe mix of fuel and weather conditions. Fire is a natural and recurring part of the California landscape. And like many forces of nature. Sorry. Fire ran through this land on a recurring cycle every five to ten years for millennia before PG ⁇ E strung transmission lines through our through our wildland areas and before we moved into fire prone areas and filled it with hazardous vegetation. We can, however, learn to live with fire by implementing well-understood, scientifically supported defensible space and home hardening measures through which we create a fire adapted community. These steps will dramatically reduce the potential for loss of property and loss of life. While there will continue to be an important place for fire suppression, our efforts to remove fire from the landscape through an industrialized response have failed. And it will take an all-hands approach to transition our community to being more fire safe. In the photo you see here, you can see uh a tree that had experienced fire about every 10 years, ending around the turn of the century, at which point we uh systematically excluded fire from the landscape.