to stop fire

BY CLAYTON FRANKE

The Bulletin

Planners of some of the largest upcoming developments in southeast Bend are considering how to make their neighborhoods less likely to burn when wildfire inevitably threatens.

Though wildfire-specific development planning has been ongoing on the west side of Bend for years, it’s new in the southeast part of the city, which is pushing farther into the fire-prone High Desert landscape of sagebrush and juniper trees. The hope is that open space fire breaks, fire resistant building materials and vegetation buffers will reduce the risk of homes burning as Bend expands outward.

“It does not guarantee that the risk is mitigated to zero, but it simply can’t hurt,” said Brian Rankin, the city of Bend’s long range planner.

On Nov. 21, regional developer Hayden Homes submitted concepts for a new 261-acre neighborhood on the southeastern edge of the city called the Stevens Road Tract. It’s even farther east than the 360-acre Stevens Ranch development off of 27th Street, where homes are going up and a new library is almost finished. The plans for Stevens Road depict the zoning and road layout to support about 2,500 new homes of all types along with a 23-acre park and a commercial center.

Alongside the neighborhood concept developers submitted a Wildfire Mitigation Plan. It states developers will use an easement to establish a 100-foot firebreak around the edge of the property, while layers of open space along with a community park will provide fire protection throughout. According to the plan, the builder plans to use home construction materials with “fire reduction advantages that exceed current building code requirements” — fire-resistant finishes, paved patios, composite shingles, mesh-covered vents and non-combustible gutters and fences. The plan says neighborhood covenants will enforce “defensible space” requirements, keeping

plants and debris from a zone around the home.

On the heels of a state effort to implement building codes and vegetation buffers in high-hazard areas, the onus has fallen on local governments and communities to decide how to prepare themselves. Bend hasn’t gone so far as to put wildfire requirements on all new development, like the cities of Sisters and Ashland. But the city’s comprehensive plan does tell developers of certain large master plans to incorporate wildfire mitigation tools “as appropriate.”

“We have had a practice of more or less doing what the state isn’t doing,” Rankin said.

Wildfire planning at the Stevens Road Tract was, however, a requirement of state legislation —_ HB 3318, the 2021 bill that brought the land into Bend’s urban growth boundary without having to endure the lengthy process normally required to add urbanizable land.

It recognized an “acute” need for land to build workforce housing in Bend.

The city needs more than 30,000 new homes in the next 20 years, according to a state analysis. Thousands of homes at the Stevens Tract, and broader southeast Bend, is a big part of meeting those targets.

In response to concern that new development would put the area at risk for devastating wildfire, the city council tacked on wildfire mitigation requirements when it approved another special 100-acre urban growth boundary expansion in southeast Bend — a development called Caldera Ranch — in 2024.

Depending on the terrain and surrounding infrastructure, each plan is a little different, said Joey Shearer, an associate at AKS Engineering & Forestry. That company has served as the planning consultant for many of the large master plans in Bend, including Caldera Ranch and Stevens Tract. Shearer consulted on some of the west Bend neighborhoods built on land that had been added to the urban growth boundary in 2016. There, planners placed lower-density housing closer to the edge of the city while transitioning to standard density near existing neighborhoods.

Both Hayden Homes consultants declined to discuss the wildfire plan for the Stephens Tract specifically, citing the open application process.

While Bend’s west side is closer to large pine forests, the east side is drier. It also has more varied winds and “flashy” fuels that are quicker to ignite, like juniper and sagebrush, said Melissa Steele, the city’s deputy fire marshal for wildfire preparedness. That makes fires in east Bend more unpredictable, she said. “They’re going to burn more rapidly, and they’re going to spread to whatever fuel is next to it,” she said.

Wind can carry airborne embers over firebreaks and buffers and directly onto homes, which is why multiple lines of defense are important, Steele said.

A century of fire suppression has resulted in accumulating brush and trees that would have been cleared out naturally by periodic, low-impact fire. According to Hayden Homes, there are more than 3,000 juniper trees across the 260-acre Stevens Tract property. As it prepares to break ground, the company and other homebuilders are lobbying the city council to remove junipers from the city’s tree preservation code, citing ecological benefits. Under the code, Hayden Homes estimates it would cost about $2.5 million in fees to remove those trees.

But it’s not just junipers that pose that pose a wildfire threat in southeast Bend, Steele said.

“Everything we own has some kind of plastic or petroleum in it,” Steele said. “We are basically living in a flammable environment.”

█ Reporter: 541-617-7854, clayton. franke@bendbulletin.com