Boulder’s Wildfire Wake-Up Call: Words Aren’t Enough

TL;DR

·      According to the USDA Forest Service, Boulder is in the top 3% of cities nationwide for wildfire risk, and the Colorado State Forest Service identifies Boulder as the highest-risk community in the state

·      The Colorado State Forest Service estimates Boulder faces a 7% annual risk of catastrophic wildfire, which compounds to roughly 50-50 odds over the next decade

·      Our Community Wildfire Protection Plan is a good document, but it has no prioritization, no action timeline, and a tiny budget

·      At the current pace of voluntary home hardening, it will take 100 years to harden the 8,000+ homes in our wildland-urban interface

·      Research from the Marshall Fire, the LA fires, and Camp Fire all point to the same conclusion: you are only as safe as your neighbors, voluntary, piecemeal action will never be enough

·      Boulder allocates roughly $1 million from its $9+ million annual Climate Initiatives budget to wildfire resilience, about 10 cents on every climate dollar, far short of what our risk demands

·      Homeowners are already paying the price: 30% insurance premium increases, coverage cancellations, and costs of doing nothing far exceeding the cost of acting

·      Boulder’s own Fund Our Future community survey found that nearly 75% of residents rank wildfire mitigation as a top priority, above parks, recreation, and nearly everything else

·      It’s time our actions matched our words

The Heart Attack Analogy

A community member mentioned this analogy, and I thought it was spot on; Imagine going to your doctor for a full workup, blood work, imaging, the whole battery of tests. The doctor sits down and gives it to you straight: there is a 50% chance you will suffer a major heart attack in the next 10 years.

But here’s the thing: your doctor also tells you there are proven, well-understood ways to dramatically reduce that risk. Take this medication. Change your diet. Adjust a few lifestyle habits. Do those things, and you push that 50% risk out over the next 50 years instead of 10.

Would you slowly make those changes over five or seven years, rolling the dice and hoping the 50% doesn’t land on you? Or would you make those changes immediately, without hesitation, because the science is clear and the stakes are too high to gamble with?

I think most of us know the answer.

This is exactly the situation Boulder faces with wildfire. The Colorado State Forest Service estimates our community faces roughly a 7% annual risk of a catastrophic wildfire, which compounds mathematically to approximately 50-50 odds over the next decade. And just like your doctor’s advice, we have science-based, well-understood tools to dramatically reduce that risk.

The question is whether we’re going to act like a patient who just got the hardest news of their life or keep slowly rolling the dice.

Our Risk Is Real

Boulder is not a community that can claim ignorance about wildfire risk. The data is unambiguous:

·      According to a USDA Forest Service assessment, Boulder ranks in the top 3% of cities nationwide for wildfire risk

·      The Colorado State Forest Service identifies Boulder as the highest-risk community in the state

·      Our wildland-urban interface (WUI) encompasses more than 8,000 homes in the areas most directly exposed to fire coming off the foothills and national forest to our west

The Marshall Fire in December 2021, which burned in a matter of hours and destroyed more than 1,000 homes in neighboring Louisville and Superior, was a preview. It started on grassland. It moved with terrifying speed. It caused more than $2 billion in damage. The conditions that created it haven’t gone away. They’ve gotten worse.

A comparable fire moving through Boulder’s WUI, with higher home values, greater density, and hillside terrain, could easily exceed that. We’re not talking about a hypothetical. We’re talking about a community-ending event that we have a coin-flip chance of experiencing in the next ten years.

Boulder is not immune. We are, by every measure, at the front of the line.

Words vs. Actions

To be fair to our city: the language has been right. Boulder leadership consistently says we take wildfire risk seriously. We acknowledge our risk factors. We support wildfire preparedness.

But language and action are two different things, and right now, our actions are not commensurate with our risk.

We created the Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) and it’s actually a good document. It lays out what we need to do. But here’s what it’s missing:

·      Any prioritization of which actions matter most

·      A concrete action plan with measurable outcomes

·      A budget and cost estimate for achieving those outcomes

·      A timeline; specifically, what it would cost and what it would take to dramatically reduce our risk by 2030 (or some other time frame). Examples of measurable outcomes should include, but not be limited to: the number of acres of mitigated land per year, the number of homes meeting IBHS per year, etc…

A plan without those things is a list of good intentions. Our community deserves more than good intentions.

What Recent Wildfires Are Telling Us

Three of the most studied wildfires in recent history, the Marshall Fire in our own backyard, the 2025 Palisades and Eaton Fires in Los Angeles, and the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise, California, all point to the same set of conclusions. This is no longer theory. It is documented evidence from thousands of destroyed homes.

The Marshall Fire (Boulder County, December 2021)

When Boulder’s own National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) investigated and studied the Marshall Fire aftermath, one finding stood out: wood fences acted as fire highways. Fence lines carried fire directly from structure to structure and from wildland areas into neighborhoods, like a fuse running from home to home. Homes that might have had a chance were ignited because a burning fence ran right to their foundation.

The other finding was equally stark: 99% of homes in the burn zone had no ember-resistant vent covers. Standard builder vents allowed burning embers into attics and crawl spaces, starting interior fires that consumed homes from inside out, before firefighters could even reach them. Ember-resistant vents cost between $200 and $500 per home. They are among the highest-impact, lowest-cost modifications available. And almost nobody had them.

The Palisades and Eaton Fires (Los Angeles, January 2025)

The Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety (IBHS) deployed investigators to assess more than 250 properties during and after the LA fires. Their findings:

·      Homes with all four key hardening features; Class A roof, noncombustible siding, double-pane windows, and enclosed eaves had a 54% likelihood of avoiding damage

·      Homes that had taken only one of those actions had just a 36% likelihood of avoiding damage

·      Homes with more than 25% vegetation coverage in Zone Zero (the first 5 feet around the structure) faced a 90% chance of damage or destruction

·      Healthy, well-watered plants adjacent to a home can dry out in minutes during a conflagration and become ignition pathways

“Wildfire doesn’t sweep through in a perfect line; it finds weak spots, one by one,” said IBHS researcher Murray Morrison.

You Are Only As Safe As Your Neighbors

Here is the hardest truth to communicate and the most important reason why voluntary action will never be enough:

In both the Camp Fire and the LA fires, researchers documented widespread structure-to-structure fire spread. Once one home ignites, it becomes a torch for the next one, regardless of how well that neighbor has prepared. A homeowner who has done everything right can still lose their home because their neighbor hasn’t cleared their Zone Zero (5ft from home) or replaced their wood fence.

This is why voluntary, individual action, however well-intentioned, is structurally insufficient. You cannot protect your own home in isolation. Neighborhood-wide hardening is the only approach that actually works. And neighborhood-wide hardening requires community-wide policy, not individual choice.

The 100-Year Problem

The most urgent gap is home hardening. There are proven standards for making homes more resistant to wildfire. Vent covers. Ember-resistant roofing. 5 ft defensible space. Fire-resistant siding. Homes that meet these standards are dramatically less likely to ignite when a wildfire moves through.

Here’s the hard math: Boulder has more than 8,000 homes in our primary wildland-urban interface. Under current policy, we rely largely on voluntary action, and the natural trigger point when a home undergoes remodeling or reconstruction, at which point new WUI building codes kick in.

That natural turnover rate? About 1% of homes per year.

At that pace: 8,000 homes ÷ 80 homes per year = 100 years to harden enough of our WUI to meaningfully protect our community.

We could be one week, or one decade, away from a catastrophic wildfire. We do not have 100 years.

Reducing Fuel Loads — And the Grants We’re Not Pursuing

Home hardening alone isn’t enough. We also need to dramatically reduce the fuel loads on Boulder’s western edge, the grasslands, underbrush, and forest that act as kindling when fire approaches.

This means thinning underbrush, limbing up trees to reduce ladder fuels, managing grasses, and creating defensible buffers between our community and the national forest to our west. These are not whimsical preferences; they are science-based, federally recognized fuel reduction practices with proven track records. For us locally, this means prescribed burns, seasonal mowing on the western edge of the city, and well-maintained fire breaks.

Here’s what makes this especially frustrating: the federal government is actively funding this work through programs like the USFS Community Wildfire Defense Grants and FEMA’s BRIC (Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities) program. Communities up and down the Front Range, including in Larimer and Jefferson counties, are receiving substantial federal grants to do exactly this work.

Boulder has not pursued those grants.

The Climate Funding Gap

Here is something that should stop every Boulder resident in their tracks: Boulder has taxed itself specifically to address climate change. We have dedicated funding for climate action. We care deeply about this issue, and we’ve put our money where our mouth is.

Boulder’s Climate Initiatives program does invest roughly $1 million annually in wildfire resilience — funding a dedicated Wildfire Resilience Program Manager and the WRAP homeowner assistance program. That investment is real, and I want to be precise about it.

But context matters. Boulder’s total Climate Initiatives budget is more than $9 million annually. Wildfire gets approximately $1 million of that, about 10 cents on every climate dollar, and even that figure has been declining, down from $1.5 million in 2024. The remainder of our climate investments fund carbon emission reductions, building electrification, and renewable energy transitions, all important and well-intentioned. We are spending money to address the causes of climate change while not spending nearly enough to protect ourselves from its most immediate and catastrophic consequences.

The threat that climate change is actively delivering to our doorstep, today, is wildfire and flood. Boulder ranks at or near the top of the state’s risk list for both.

Boulder’s recently updated Climate Action Plan mentions wildfire 22 times, but only as a risk to acknowledge, never as a priority to fund. It cites no spending commitments, no measurable goals, and no timeline for wildfire mitigation. Every other climate challenge in that plan, building electrification, EV infrastructure, clean energy, has dashboards, milestones, and dedicated funding paths. Wildfire, Boulder’s greatest climate threat, gets acknowledgment. Everything else gets a plan.

Open Space and Mountain Parks: A $42 Million Budget, a Few Million on Wildfire

I want to add one more piece to the climate conversation above. Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP) has a $42 million annual budget, but only a few million of that, out of the roughly $7.8 million Resource Stewardship division that handles forest health and fuels reduction, actually goes toward wildfire mitigation.

I think that math is backwards. OSMP manages roughly 46,000 acres total, but it's really the roughly two-thirds of that land sitting along Boulder's western edge, the wildland-urban interface, that carries the wildfire risk that matters most. That's the terrain a wildfire is most likely to start on or move through on its way into our neighborhoods. No other department has that combination of land, crews, and mandate over our worst wildfire risk.

To be fair, there is real work happening. The city's Wildfire Ready Projects page lists several forest thinning projects for 2026; Bison-Kossler (100 acres), Shanahan Ridge (35 acres), Sanitas Valley (25 acres), Flagstaff Road (100 acres), plus targeted grazing and a perimeter mowing pilot in a handful of neighborhoods. That's good news. But here's the problem: none of these projects come with stated goals or metrics. We're told acreage treated, but not how that acreage compares to what's needed, what "success" looks like, or how these efforts stack up against community expectations. Is 260 acres of thinning a lot or a little against 30,000+ acres of WUI land? Nobody's said. Good intentions and isolated projects aren't the same as a plan with a target and a way to measure whether we're hitting it.

I'd also push back on the idea that wildfire mitigation is somehow in tension with open space values. It isn't. Fire is a natural part of these ecosystems, and healthy fuels management, thinning, prescribed burns, defensible space — is conservation, not a departure from it. That's especially true this year: 11 red-flag fire days by early April, versus six in a typical season, and the Goat Trail Fire burning within 500 feet of homes on Hawthorne Avenue. We all remember what happened to Superior and Louisville four years ago.

For 50 years, OSMP's mission was acquiring land. That's largely done, no new purchases planned this year or next. The next 50 years have to be about protecting what we already own, with real targets attached.

My ask: OSMP should commit to spending at least $10 million a year on wildfire mitigation, with clear metrics tied to that spending, still under a quarter of its total budget, funded entirely within its existing dedicated tax. No new taxes, no raid on other services. Just a department matching its spending and its accountability to the risk it's actually responsible for.

The Insurance Crisis: The Cost of Doing Nothing

Some argue we can’t afford to move faster on wildfire mitigation. I’d argue we can’t afford not to.

Boulder homeowners are already paying the price of inadequate wildfire preparedness:

·      30% increases in homeowners insurance premiums are now common across Boulder

·      Many homeowners are being dropped by their insurance carriers entirely

·      Those who can find coverage are sometimes paying thousands of dollars per month in wildfire-specific insurance premiums

The cost of making a home fire-wise ranges from roughly $3,000 to $15,000, depending on its current condition. That is real money, and I understand it’s a burden. But compare that to years of escalating insurance costs, the risk of being uninsurable, or in the worst case, losing your home entirely.

IBHS certification is increasingly recognized by insurance carriers. Homes that meet the Wildfire Prepared Home standard are more likely to be insured and often qualify for premium reductions. We should be actively promoting this standard and creating pathways for Boulder homeowners to achieve it.

Equity and Shared Responsibility

I want to be direct about the equity dimension: we cannot ask homeowners to bear this cost alone.

Many of the homes most exposed to wildfire risk are owned by long-time Boulder residents, older adults, fixed-income households, people who have lived on the west side for decades and may lack the financial capacity to make the investments we’re asking. That’s not fair. That’s not a policy I’d support.

Our city’s Wildfire Resilience Assistance Program (WRAP) exists to help, but it is chronically underfunded relative to the scale of the need. The city and county need to step up with meaningful subsidies for residents who cannot afford to harden their homes on their own. Equally important is that we need WRAP to prioritize homes in the WUI. Currently, any home can apply and receive funds. Only after we’ve strengthened our front line should we expand this funding to homes outside the WUI and specifically Class 1.

This is also, critically, a one-time investment with a clear end date. Once the homes in our WUI are hardened, once we can say that by 2030, the homes in our highest-risk zones meet fire-wise standards, that expense is done. We can redirect those resources to other priorities. That is a fundamentally different financial commitment than the open-ended, ever-growing cost of doing nothing.

What Other Communities Are Doing

Boulder doesn’t have to guess at what works. Other communities have already done this.

Marin County, California passed one of the first mandatory retrofit ordinances for existing homes in the United States. All homes in high fire hazard severity zones are required to comply with specific hardening standards, ember-resistant vents, non-combustible roofing, Zone Zero clearance, on a phased timeline, with financial assistance programs for lower-income homeowners. This is the model.

South Lake Tahoe and the Tahoe Basin have adopted mandatory defensible space requirements with active enforcement, annual inspections and fines for non-compliance, combined with community chipping programs and subsidized assistance. Compliance rates exceed 85%.

Post-Camp Fire Paradise, California, required all homes rebuilt after the fire to meet full WUI building standards. An entire community rebuilt to a mandatory higher standard.

Victoria, Australia, after the Black Saturday fires killed 173 people in 2009, adopted mandatory ember-proofing standards for homes in high-risk areas, backed by government subsidy programs. Subsequent fires showed measurably lower home loss rates.

These aren’t radical ideas. They are proven, implemented policies that other communities have adopted after confronting the same risk Boulder faces today. The question isn’t whether this is possible. It’s whether we have the will to do it.

What We Need to Do

Boulder is not without tools. What we lack is urgency. Here’s what I’m calling for:

1.        Update the CWPP with a prioritized action plan, measurable outcomes, cost estimates, and a hard target, I’d propose 2030 for WUI home hardening

2.        Pursue federal fuel reduction grants, USFS Community Wildfire Defense Grants and FEMA BRIC are available now; Larimer and Jefferson counties are already in line

3.        Fund WRAP adequately, the program exists; it needs the resources to match the scale of the challenge. I’d start with nearly tripling the size of this program.

4.        Align our climate funding with our climate risks, wildfire mitigation should be an explicit part of Boulder’s climate investment strategy

5.        Move toward mandatory home hardening with a Marin County-style phased ordinance, city and county subsidies for those who need help, and a clear certification pathway through IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home

6.        Prohibit new juniper plantings in the WUI and update landscaping standards to require fire-resistant plant species near structures. Junipers are among the most flammable plants commonly used in Colorado landscaping — their volatile oils make them burn intensely even when green, and they are frequently cited in post-fire investigations as ignition accelerants adjacent to homes. We should stop adding fuel to the fire, literally.

7.        Support the state’s Firehawk helicopter program, Colorado has two of these gold-standard rapid-response helicopters; the goal is six. Boulder should continue championing this at every opportunity

What You Can Do Right Now

While Boulder works toward the policy changes this moment demands, there are steps every homeowner in our WUI can take today:

·      Check your vents — are they ember-resistant? If not, this is the single highest-impact, lowest-cost action you can take ($200–500)

·      Clear Zone Zero — remove all combustible materials within 5 feet of your home, including wood fences touching the structure, patio furniture, and dead vegetation

·      Apply for WRAP — if you need financial assistance for home hardening, Boulder’s Wildfire Resilience Assistance Program is available

·      Get your home assessed — Boulder Fire-Rescue offers free wildfire home assessments

·      Know your WUI zone — check the Boulder WUI map to see exactly where your home falls

·      Read the plan — review Boulder’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan to understand what’s been committed to

·      Pursue IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home certification — available now in Colorado at wildfireprepared.org — your best tool for maintaining or improving insurance coverage

What I’m Fighting for in This Year’s Budget

My next newsletter will go deeper on the city’s budget and the decisions coming this fall. But I want to say something clearly here: the wildfire investment in Boulder’s current budget is not commensurate with the risk we face.

Earlier this year, the city ran its most extensive community engagement process in recent memory — the Fund Our Futureinitiative — asking hundreds of Boulder residents to prioritize city services. The results were unambiguous: 75% of participants said they want Boulder to invest more in wildfire response. 73% said they want more investment in wildfire mitigation. Those were the top priorities of the entire exercise, above parks, above recreation, above transportation, above nearly everything else.

Our community told us exactly what it needs. Now we have to deliver. A WRAP program with a tiny budget, seven wildland firefighters, and an updated community plan is not a match for a community that has a 50-50 chance of a catastrophic wildfire in the next decade. I am pushing for a dramatically stronger financial commitment in this year’s budget, real dollars, real timelines, and measurable outcomes that actually close the gap between our risk and our readiness.

If Fund Our Future means anything, it has to mean this.

This Affects All of Boulder

I want to close with this: wildfire is not just a west-side problem.

If a catastrophic wildfire burns through Boulder’s WUI, even if your home is miles away, your world changes. The Marshall Fire didn’t just destroy homes in Louisville and Superior. It shook the entire region. Property values shifted. Smoke blanketed communities for days. The economic disruption hit every business, every household, every corner of the area.

A wildfire in Boulder would be worse. The terrain is more complex. The density is higher. The home values, and the losses, would be greater.

Boulder has always risen to serious challenges. When we see a real problem, we bring real solutions. We don’t slow-roll existential risks.

Wildfire is an existential risk. The science is clear. The tools exist. The grants are available. The models from other communities are proven.

The only thing missing is the urgency to act on what we already know.

If you found this helpful, I'd appreciate you forwarding it to friends and neighbors. If you havnt already please feel free to sign up to my Newsletter HERE. The more people understand the full picture, the better decisions we'll all make together.

As always, thank you for being engaged, asking hard questions, and caring deeply about Boulder’s future.

Matt Benjamin

Boulder City Council

benjaminm@bouldercolorado.gov