Board of Supervisors authorizes acceptance of $6 million BRIC grant award and transfer of matching funds

The Board of Supervisors today accepted the award of a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant in the amount of $5,727,692 toward the first phase of the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities or BRIC grant.

Permit Sonoma had applied for a total of $48.8 million in BRIC grant funding in December 2020 to go toward a series of vegetation management, defensible space and structural hardening work in three predefined areas of the county. President Joe Biden announced in June 2021 that Sonoma County would be awarded the grant. In November 2022, FEMA and the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services announced that the first phase of the grant was funded.

These activities will be organized under a project called Wildfire Resilient Sonoma County.

As part of its action today, the Board of Supervisors also approved the transfer of local matching funds required by the BRIC grant in the amount of $12.5 million from available PG&E settlement funds to be set aside, for use in the current grant award and future phases of the BRIC grant project.

“I’m grateful for the partnership of FEMA and Cal OES and the hard work of county staff to secure these funds, which will help us create more resilient landscapes and better protect our community in the face of future wildfires,” said Supervisor Chris Coursey, chair of the Board of Supervisors.

The Wildfire Resilient Sonoma County project’s two phases will develop whole‐community, landscape‐scale approaches to reduce wildfire risk, with the goal of learning how to reduce the risk of catastrophic loss of life and property due to wildfire for a whole community within one project, while promoting overall landscape resilience and health.

Project activities that fall under phase one include public engagement, education and stakeholder coordination and will last through April 2025. During this period, the county will perform free defensible space and structural hardening assessments of private properties in the project areas, planning and design for a rebate program to incentivize homeowners to do defensible space and structure hardening actions, identification of sites for environmentally appropriate vegetation management projects, and all required environmental and historic preservation reviews for the selected projects.

Including the local matching funds for phase one of $1,830,624, the total budget for the first phase of the project is $7,558,316.

The Wildfire Resilient Sonoma County project areas are in the Larkfield-Wikiup/Mark West Creek, Guernewood/Guerneville/Rio Nido and Penngrove/Sonoma Mountain areas.

For more information about the project, visit the Wildfire Resilient Sonoma County website. 

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Media Contact: 
Stuart Tiffen, Communications Specialist 
stuart.tiffen@sonoma-county.org
(707) 565-1860
575 Administration Drive, Suite 104A
Santa Rosa, CA 95403