LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Bureau of Land Management on Tuesday unveiled what it called an ambitious and coordinated approach to tackle high wildfire risk through an accelerated process for creating fuel reduction projects on millions of acres throughout California and northwest Nevada.

At the BLM’s Sacramento headquarters on Tuesday morning, California State BLM Director Karen E. Mouritsen signed the decision record for the Statewide Wildland-Urban Interface Fuels Treatment Programmatic Environmental Assessment.

“This plan helps reduce the intensity, severity and spread of wildfire near communities that border public lands managed by the BLM,” said Mouritsen. “Through partnerships with local and state agencies we will prioritize and coordinate fuels treatments to protect people, property and vital infrastructure.”

The assessment is meant to accelerate fuels reduction projects on 930,000 acres of public lands in Lake and 43 other California counties and two Nevada counties by streamlining plans to protect communities, reduce wildfire risk and improve forest health.

The BLM said the assessment conducted a broad analysis across the public lands slated for fuel reduction.

As local communities and the BLM identify wildfire concerns, the new streamlined fuels treatment plans will permit on-the-ground work to begin in a matter of months. This will allow the BLM to treat an anticipated additional 20,000 acres of public lands each year.

Jessica Gallimore, the BLM’s California state fuels specialist, told Lake County News that the framework is the result of two years of development work.

She said the BLM did an earlier programmatic assessment for the Hazardous Vegetation Removal Management Plan, or HVRM, in 2018.

“It’s a similar tool that allows for us to do hazardous vegetation removal,” she said of the HVRM, adding that the plan allows them to remove vegetation within 200 feet of infrastructure, like roads, power lines and homes.

The new assessment unveiled on Tuesday built off the HVRM, Gallimore said.

She said they focused on areas of high fire risk and analyzed all the types of vegetation management treatments — including prescribed burns, mechanical means like cutting and mastication, herbicides and grazing — to use on BLM lands.

“Without this process, everybody would have to do their own full analysis. We’ve just taken that piece off the table by doing it up front,” said Gallimore.

This will expedite the process significantly. Gallimore said it will now be a couple of months for field offices to go through the project preparation process, versus up to two years to get to the point of implementing a project.

Under this plan, fuels treatment projects will be coordinated across land ownerships to provide the best results for communities, creating a landscape-level network of strategic fuels treatments and breaks within the wildland-urban interface, the BLM said.

Gallimore said field offices will be able to develop local projects, determining what treatments are needed and at what size and scale specific to their areas, and they will do that work in partnership with other agencies and the community.

She said it opens up the ability to partner with neighbors — including private landowners, counties, the states and the U.S. Forest Service — and work together on “meet at the fence” projects in the expedited treatment areas. “The work can happen anytime, year round.”

The BLM manages 15 million acres in California and 1.5 million acres in northwest Nevada. “The goal was really to focus in on the urban interface,” said Gallimore, in an effort to make the most positive impact for communities and the urban interface.

“We honed in on a one-mile radius around the urban interface, in the high and very high risk areas,” said Gallimore. “That’s where they came up with the 900,000 acres that this project covers.”

Lake County is part of the Ukiah Field Office. The BLM said 13,240 acres in Lake County were assessed as part of this project.

Gallimore said the process locally would include Lake County entities working together to conduct coordinated planning of fuel reduction projects in an expedited manner.

The plan covers 44 counties in California: Amador, Butte, Calaveras, Colusa, El Dorado, Fresno, Glenn, Humboldt, Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Lake, Lassen, Los Angeles, Madera, Mariposa, Mendocino, Modoc, Mono, Monterey, Napa, Nevada, Placer, Plumas, Riverside, Sacramento, San Benito, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Joaquin, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Solano, Sonoma, Stanislaus, Tehama, Trinity, Tulare, Tuolumne, Yolo and Yuba; and two counties in northwest Nevada, Douglas and Washoe.

Gallimore said projects under this program can begin as soon as this fall.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.