Probably September. The schedule is not finalized.

The Greater Glenshire Firewise Community, which is the manager for the area-wide project, will select a contractor to do the entire project, including our piece of it.  Before any trees are removed, a professional forester will mark which trees should be removed.  This will probably be Bill Houdyschell, who was the forestry expert for the area-wide project. 

All brush within 10 feet of the asphalt.  In the next 5 feet, all brush that's under tree canopies.  Lower tree limbs (within 6-10 feet of the ground).  Entire trees if they are over-crowded, too close to the road, or already topped off by the utility company (because they are under power lines).  In most cases, the removed trees will be small (<10" in diameter).

No vegetation on private lots will be removed, since this project is on Association land.    Also, the target is native vegetation.  If any landscaping vegetation (like Aspens) happen to be planted on the Association's roadway property, they are not to be removed.  Most trees on Association land, especially the larger ones, will not be removed. 

The Board contracted Bill Houdyschell, an experienced forester and fire-vegetation manager, to assess The Meadows and recommend actions.  Bill's report can be viewed here. This assessment was done as part of the larger-area set of projects developed by the Greater Glenshire Firewise Community and in collaboration with the Truckee Fire District.

The contractor selected by the Firewise Community for the larger-area project.  Project management and oversight will be provided by the Firewise Community.  Bill Houdyschell has been instrumental in the project planning and the successful Measure T grant application, and he will most likely be heaviliy involved in the next steps.  Bill is an expert in this field.  He has worked in forestry management and fire prevention for decades, in the Tahoe-Truckee area.  Currently employed by the Glenshire-Devonshire Association, for a couple of decades he was in charge of fuel management projects for Tahoe Donner.

The current understanding is that most of the work in The Meadows will be hand work -- workers with chain saws for example.  There may be a couple of areas where a masticator will brought in (a masticator is like a lawn mower on steroids that chews up brush and even small trees and spits out chips).  There will be wood chippers, and trucks to haul away the larger debris.  This will be clearer after a contractor has been selected and put together a detailed plan.

To quote Dillon Sheedy of our Fire District, "we love roadside projects".  From discussions with Dillon and Bill Houdyschell, there are a number of reasons why.  Roadside fuel reduction makes evacuation routes safer; we've all seen news clips of residents trying to escape wildfires on roads that are burning on both sides.   It's also safer for firefighting crews enter a community that's on fire, position equipment, and get out and do the work.  The original meaning of "defensible space" actually was to create space from which it was safe for firefighters to take defensive actions.  Roads also make for pre-existing fuel breaks where it can be possible to stop a fire, so fire crews like to position resources along roads to make a stand.  Having low fuel along the roadsides widens the fuel break and makes the firefighting work easier.  Finally, aircraft-based crews that drop fire retardant like to do so along natural fuel breaks like roads.  If the trees are too dense, the retardant just lands in the tree canopies, where it does little good.  Wildfires primarily spread through surface fuels, and the goal is to get the retardant down to the ground. All that said, how much will this project help?  That is difficult to quantify.  If we have a completely out-of-control ember storm, such as happened in Paradise, no fuel break will stop the spread of the fire.  That's why owners need to work on home-hardening and on fuel reduction around the home.

Yes.  Removing trees that are close to the asphalt will prevent tree roots from damaging the road and forcing the Association to pay for repairs.  Thinning over-crowded trees is good for tree health; over-crowded trees starve each other of water, nutrients, and sunlight.  Equestrians may benefit from some of the vegetation removal.

Most will be chipped on-site and spread out on the ground (this saves cost).  Larger limbs/trunks will be hauled away.  There may be opportunities for residents to take chips for mulch and logs for firewood.  This will become more clear after a contractor has been selected.

$6640 cost to the Association, and $19920 cost to the Measure T fund.  Those are the numbers that went into the Measure T grant application.  As with any project, there could be surprises, but these numbers are believed to be fairly solid.  To put the Association's cost in perspective, the Association's reserve budget has about $12000 earmarked for defensible space work, with allocations for 2025-26 and every 5 years thereafter.  By using Measure T grant money, the Association can stay below budget.

That's a call to be made by the committee responsible for Measure T funds, and it judged the greater-Glenshire grant application to be worthy, including our portion.  Measure T has been used in other areas in the past, and will be this year and in the future.  Only about 10% of the funds being spent in the Greater Glenshire area will be spent in The Meadows.  The Measure T money that will be spent here in The Meadows is less than what our residents have paid in Measure T taxes, so  by that measure The Meadows will remain a net subsidizer of work elsewhere in the Truckee area.  There is, in short, little reason to feel guilty about spending taxpayer funds here.

No.  Wood chips on the ground can burn, but they do not burn quickly or create high flames.  Bill Houdyschell, the forester for this project, tells of a fire that swept across a forest-service road that had been covered in wood chips.  The brush and trees on either side were burned, but the chips were barely scorched.  One reason is lack of oxygen; chips packed flat on the ground have less access to air than do branches surrounded on all sides by air.  Another is that flames rise up, not sideways, so a flame in a shrub or tree can ignite more of the same directly overhead, but burning chips on the ground are connected to nothing but air above.  Flame height is also very low with chips, which makes it very hard for burning chips to ignite a tree several feet overhead.  Sagebrush flames will go several feet into the air.  And, although it's true that dry grass will readily ignite, there is very little fuel in grass.  Burning grass will not ignite a healthy, limbed-up tree.

This project is on community property.  Private residential lots will have no vegetation removed.  Although many people think that their deeded property goes to the edge of the asphalt, it does not.  The Meadows' roadway is 60' wide (except for 50' on Mare Court), and the asphalt uses only about a third of it.  If your lot is typical, you fill find your lot's iron survey stake buried underground about 19' from the edge of the asphalt.  

Before any trees are removed, Bill Houdyschell (the forester who has managed this project) has said that he or another professional will mark those trees that are recommended for removal, and residents will have an opportunity to ask for certain trees to be preserved.  To paraphrase Bill, it is not a big problem to remove every tree that a forester thinks warranted, and it is not worth the hassle and headache of making people unhappy.  The details will become clearer when the planning stage is farther along.  

The people behind this are well aware of the ecosystem considerations.  The Meadows is a deer fawning area.  The deer not only eat the shrubs, but they also hide their young among the shrubs.  Other wildlife, such as birds, make use of the shrubs as well.  But the treated area will be less than 3% of the total area of The Meadows, and our roadsides, including drainage ditches, aren't good nesting and fawning areas.  The worst thing that we could do for the wildlife would be to allow our community to burn.

Not as part of this project, because the grant request was approved for just the 15-foot work described above.  In principle, grant money can be used on private property, as long as the land in question is more than 100 feet from the home and other structures.  Within 100 feet, law requires homeowners to take full responsibility for all costs.  But grant money being available in principle does not mean that it is easy to get in practice.  The grant application process is complicated and highly regulated; for example, the greater-Glenshire project is required to hire an archaeologist to assess whether any of the areas to be disturbed might contain Native American artifacts.  It would not be easy for an individual homeowner to get through the grant process with a successful result.  In some future year, and if residents are of one mind, it might be possible for a grant project to be defined that would perform vegetation thinning on private land, perhaps on the borders of our community.  But something like that is not on the horizon.