Property owners in the Sherwood Corridor will receive a special ballot on Friday, June 7, 2024, asking them to decide if they want to pay an assessment to maintain two emergency access routes on the north and south ends of the community.
The plan to raise money to keep 4.3 miles of FirCo Road and Willits Creek Trail in decent shape for fire engines has been in the works for five and a half years. The roads are private and unpaved. Advocates have had to wrangle MOU’s, or memorandums of understanding, with property owners on adjacent parcels, to negotiate easements to the access roads. The agreement is that they would only be used in case of emergency, most likely fire.
In order to accommodate large fire engines, the two roads need an estimated $120,000 worth of work over the next ten years, mostly on culverts and gates. The proposed assessment, which would be a line item on the tax bill, would be $30.88 for each developed parcel per year. Undeveloped parcels would be assessed one dollar and 39 cents per year. Eligible voters are in Brooktrails, Sylvandale, Spring Creek and the Gates.
The work being paid for would be performed by the county’s Department of Transportation and overseen by the Board of Supervisors. The board could grant a holiday, if there’s a year when no work needs to be done. The assessment sunsets after 20 years, when voters can decide if they want to continue it. The amount is connected to the Consumer Price Index, so it will rise with the buying power of the dollar.
The assessment needs a simple majority to pass, and each parcel gets a vote, so some property owners will have a chance to cast multiple votes. The ballots must be cast by the end of a hearing in the Board of Supervisors chambers on July 23 in order to be counted. “It’s a public hearing, so everyone can come and express their opinion about this,” said Third District Supervisor John Haschak after a meeting of the Brooktrails Community Services District. The proposal was generally well received, though the new owners of one parcel said they had not been contacted about the MOU and described themselves as “insulted.”
The Brooktrails evacuation during the Oak Fire of 2020, which utilized the FirCo road, was widely commended for being well organized. Keith Rutledge of Sherwood Firewise Communities reflected on the history of Brooktrails, which was originally designed as a part-time vacation occupancy subdivision. “So they didn’t really think about three-bedroom, two-bath houses, full-time occupancy and such at the time,” he concluded. “But more than that, they didn’t design adequate evacuation routes, and we’re not the only community like that. There’s plenty that have one way in, one way out, and there have been national stories on it.” Prior to the 2017 fires, he recalled, there were four other emergency access routes on the community’s evacuation plan, “which we had on our refrigerator for a decade.” In 2017, “We found out…that they weren’t applicable anymore because they hadn’t been maintained. And again, all the questions: Oh, wait a minute, why weren’t they maintained, who’s responsible? What can we do about it?” He credited former Third District Supervisor Georgeanne Croskey with getting the effort started, and attorney Chris Neary with the idea of using MOU’s to gain access, “which is sort of a really an interesting way to do it because we don’t have deeded easements. So we’re relying on people giving us their permission to do what’s really a win-win-win situation. We’ll maintain the property in the route, the fire crews can use it, and the community benefits from the safety.”
Haschak said that out of the seven MOU’s that are needed, only one of the property owners is unwilling to participate. “It’s maybe a couple acres or so out of the two or three miles of the FirCo road,” he estimated, which would not doom the whole effort. MOU’s are revocable with one year’s notice.
Haschak is optimistic that the effort will meet with voter approval. “If people have the decision whether it’s $30 a year, or life and death situations,” he predicted; “I think that people will come out and support this enthusiastically.”
There are about 6,500 parcels in the proposed Sherwood Corridor Special Benefit Assessment area, the majority of them undeveloped. Approximately 1,600 of the parcels are developed. The votes are weighted, so that a developed parcel vote is 22.22 times that of an undeveloped parcel. You can find more information on the Mendocino County economic development webpage.
