March was a huge month for us as our first HOA, Country Glen, received Firewise USA recognition. There was a lot more, including the following major activities and accomplishments in February:
- Our first Firewise USA community was recognized by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). Country Glen HOA achieved its new Firewise status, the first community in Oak Park and the eighth in Ventura County to do so. Another story in this month’s newsletter covers this achievement and its benefits in more detail. Congratulations to the Country Glen Firewise team!
- The board approved moving forward with an interactive map from the Center for Geospatial Science and Technology (CGST) that will be available on our public website. This map will identify homeowners’ defensible space that needs to be mitigated and will provide a measuring tool to identify the boundaries of the defensible space that Rancho Simi is responsible for. We will be sharing this with Rancho Simi as well.
- We have strengthened our engagement with PMF Consulting Group who will now provide monthly social media campaigns and a monthly newsletter. They will also continue to provide some amount of website support as part of this engagement.
- We submitted a grant proposal to the California Fire Foundation which, if approved, would enable us to increase the level of structural hardening and defensible space mitigation for senior homeowners in Oak Park. To do this, we would utilize a portion of the grant to fund social and print media advertising to generate home wildfire assessments. We propose to separate another portion of the grant into small, individual sub-grants of $1,000 each to fund post-assessment improvements. This would encourage homeowners to sign up for assessments, targeted particularly at our senior residents (over 65 years of age), who account for approximately 16 percent of our population. In addition to the advertising media, we can leverage our current Firewise communities (one currently recognized and two in process) to generate interest. Although this project would fund post-assessment improvements for only about nine to ten homes, it should generate interest and excitement and position us for additional grants to help subsidize additional post-assessment improvements in the future.
- We agreed with the Ventura Regional Fire Safe Council that it would provide our home wildfire assessments for now. The council will train Oak Park residents to do these assessments, so we won’t need to depend on an outside entity in the future.
- We received a $4,000 grant from the Ventura Regional Fire Safe Council as part of its County Coordinator Grant. We expect this grant to be used to further develop our interactive map, with both Firewise and Home Wildfire Assessment information.
