Projects/Regional Priority Plan

The Parks and Recreation Department and Fire Department have partnered to improve the community’s fire resilience and reduce the risk and severity of wildfires. The collaboration balances the expertise of both teams to manage vegetation while protecting the natural ecosystems within the city’s open space parks. This work is a critical component of Santa Barbara’s Community Wildfire Protection Plan.

Parma Park is a City of Santa Barbara owned 200-acre open space park located within the extreme foothill zone of the high fire hazard area. The park is composed of twelve different vegetation communities. The native bigpod ceanothus chaparral community makes up a majority of the park space, followed by the coast live oak woodland and forest community.

Honda Valley Park is a City of Santa Barbara owned 48-acre open space park located within the coastal interior zone of the high fire hazard area. The park has diverse, dense vegetation along steep slopes and within canyons, as well as a heavy understory of invasive plants and thatch.

LAFCO is seeking to develop a regional strategy for growth in the County through a planning effort with partners and cities.

Girls Inc. of Carpinteria provides year-round programming for girls and their families at its facility which includes classrooms, a STEM lab, library, conference room, gymnasium, kitchen, offices and outdoor spaces. Girls Inc. recently opened a 24/7 community food pantry, a clothing closet for women and girls and now offers mental health services.

Resilience Hubs are a central component of ensuring that our community has the critical resources, security, and information it needs during disasters to weather and recover from even the greatest adversity.

Blue Sky provides cultural activities and economic development opportunities to the community in addition to mobilizing resources during COVID and other emergencies.

Create a regularly occurring opportunity for cross sector sharing learnings and collaborating on potential policy, actions and projects.

Develop and pilot a replicable process and framework for developing wildfire resilience plans for housing developments in high fire risk areas.

Create and implement an education program to build youth resilience to climate change induced crises. This project builds local capacity to quickly respond to wildfire and other disasters in a coordinated and responsive way.

Often the biggest challenge to habitat restoration and fuel mitigation is labor capacity. The Ecological Restoration Volunteers project would train volunteers and implement restoration projects such as invasive species mitigation and restoring and monitoring habitat.

Establish a fund for ecological and neighborhood community recovery and restoration.

Create a fund to study ecological/ecosystem recovery processes. Studies would include, at a minimum, a baseline biological assessment after every disaster, to identify sensitive natural communities, threats (i.e. invasive species vectors/vulnerabilities) and priorities for mitigation/restoration.

Build County wide capacity to cover all components of the resilience cycle: a) prevention, b) community preparedness, c) community organizing, d) short term relief, e) long term relief f) recovery and g) rebuilding and planning, in a way that reduces vulnerability. Identify and implement the best practices for resilience cycle action, understanding that we need to always be preparing for the next disaster.

The Santa Barbara County Regional Climate Collaborative (Collaborative) has selected three sites to pilot as a part of the Resilience Hubs program. A resilience hub is a community-serving facility that can coordinate resource distribution and services before, during and/or after a natural hazard event.

Develop a replicable framework for creating a fire-safe landscape with healthy ecological function in post-fire recovery areas …

Establish a partnership in Lompoc for resilience related projects and begin building partner capacity to plan, coordinate …

Host a series of convenings or summits to develop a framework for a community supported grazing program.

Implement a Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX) and cooperative burns to provide experiential training that builds robust local capacity for…

Citizens and community leaders alike struggle to find timely, relevant and validated data during times of crisis. Despite the best efforts of agencies to coordinate communications to meet this need…

The Cachuma Resource Conservation District (CRCD) plays a critical role in our community as a partner to and bridge between farmers, ranchers and other landowners and conservation groups and agencies focused on the health of our land, water, soil, wildlife, agriculture and food systems.

Amped Solutions, Inc. is partnering with Mission Driven Finance (MDF) to develop and finance the installation of a portfolio of commercial scale power storage systems for Santa Barbara …

In June of 2021, the Land Trust of Santa Barbara received a grant of $23,588 from the Coastal Conservancy for a targeted prescribed grazing project at the Arroyo Hondo Preserve, a project that the RPP team had identified through their outreach efforts to the Land Trust and helped facilitate funding for.

The Fire Wise Project is a collaborative effort among multiple agencies and institutions in the Santa Barbara area, including UCSB, Westmont College, and the SB Botanic Garden.

There are many people, organizations and agencies working in the fire readiness and climate resilience fields here in Santa Barbara County, but even professionals dedicated to wildfire prevention in the county are not necessarily aware of and connected to everyone else doing this work.

There are a multitude of agencies in SB County involved in fire management, and each has their own subset of relevant GIS data. They would all benefit from having the sum of all these data layers available to them…

This opportunity matrix is a useful compendium of priority projects, but it is presented in table form, as project descriptions on the website.

Community Wildfire Protection Planning is a structured process that helps communities assess their preparedness for wildfires, identify priority actions and secure policy guidance from their elected leaders so that fire protection agencies…