As crews thin fire fuel in Spokane parks, officials look to upcoming tax ask to fund maintenance

Under the crisp but sunny spring sky, crews are hard at work in the wooded park near the Corbin Art Center fighting a fire that hasn’t happened yet.

They are slashing through the thin trees and understory, chopping the bushes and saplings that have over time crowded below the canopy at Edwidge Woldson Park, stuffing the cut foliage into a mobile heavy-duty wood chipper and leaving behind a layer of mulch that will help retain moisture in the soil, suppress weeds and improve soil health.

The thick understory they’re removing poses a real risk, said Nick Jeffries, wildland resource planner for the Spokane Fire Department.

Last July, the Upper Cemetery Fire burned 50 acres west of downtown Spokane near Palisades Park before firefighters stamped it out.

In the immediate aftermath, a passerby walking through the fire’s footprint would notice some areas where the trees were completely consumed, but others where the verdant canopy still promised recovery was possible. Those latter patches were saved by the timely work of local firefighters and Washington Department of Natural Resources staff, who in the weeks before the fire sparked had been clearing the undergrowth.

“They saw a reduction in flame height, and the ability for the firefighters to be safe and catch it,” Jeffries said Tuesday. “The retardant in the air was actually able to permeate the ground because there wasn’t as much canopy – we know this stuff works.”

As the climate becomes hotter and drier, and fires in the West increasingly threaten communities, especially cities like Spokane where wildlands surround and interlace the urban landscape, the work of reducing the fuels for those fires has become a more pressing concern for officials, Jeffries said .

“Thirty years ago, you might not have heard a lot about fire fuel reduction,” he said. “It’s because we didn’t have the fire and intensity that we do today. These fires are getting bigger and stronger, and we’re having these catastrophic urban events.”

The Spokane Fire Department since 2022 has partnered closely with the Spokane Parks Department to mitigate fire fuels across the city.

Removing the understory doesn’t just help prevent fires, Parks Director Garrett Jones said. Getting rid of shrubs and vines also creates sight lines through the park, revealing interesting geography like Edwidge Woldson Park’s basalt columns, but also making it more difficult to hide a camp or nefarious activity.

“We have Corbin Art Center behind us, and this is one of our largest growing youth programming in our recreation department, and we have a lot of youth that are utilizing this facility,” Jones said. “So not only does this work help us in creating a healthier forest, it also reduces that negative activity that’s happening.”

But doing that work is expensive, at least the first time. Spokane has received a $1.5 million Community Wildfire Defense Grant, administered by DNR with funding from the federal 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and has requested another $5.4 million this year. If granted, that combined funding will be sufficient to do that initial work across the “bulk majority” of the city, Jeffries said.

However, that funding only lasts for five years, and while maintaining that work in the years to come costs a fraction of that initial clearance – 5-10% as much, Jeffries estimated – it still costs money.

The ask

Parks officials hope that city voters will consider this investment into fuel reduction worthwhile when they likely will be asked to approve a major tax levy this November.

The proposed parks levy would raise $240 million in property taxes over the next 20 years from city taxpayers, at a rate of 27 cents per $1,000 of assessed value. That means the owner of a $400,000 home in Spokane would pay an additional $108 per year.

The parks levy has been tied to the proposed 20-year, $200 million school bond voters may be asked to consider on the same ballot in a political and marketing campaign titled “Together Spokane.” The investments the package would fund, including several only possible if both the parks levy and the school bond are approved, are myriad, ranging from the buildout of new all-weather fields, expanding swim lessons and high school swim teams, improved park bathrooms, and dozens of other projects big and small.

In Edwidge Woldson Park, approval of the parks levy would fund a significant improvement to the park’s trails, connecting the top of the hill around Cliff Drive with the rest of the park and opening that area to sightseeing.

But the levy also would create stable funding for fire fuel mitigation, Jones said.

“The grant is good for five years,” Jones said. “Once that five years is gone, we’re done. We won’t have any more funding.

“So the reality is, we need some long-term funding in the city and in the parks to be able to maintain what we’re doing now and again,” Jones continued. “It’s still a fraction of the cost, but we need that levy to be able to maintain that cost.”