Deschutes County won’t join others that have asked the state to walk back its map assigning a wildfire hazard level to every tax lot in Oregon — but the map has caught plenty of heat from rural residents worried their livelihoods might be at stake.

After multiple hours of deliberations and testimony, Deschutes County Commissioners could not come to agreement over how to address residents’ concerns, mostly rising insurance costs, home values and personal property rights.

Commissioner Patti Adair instigated the discussion with hopes to send a letter on behalf of the commission demanding the state do away with the map. Adair said she has told Gov. Tina Kotek the state “desperately and immediately” needs to get rid of the map.

“That map is a mess,” Adair said Feb. 12.

Commissioner Phil Chang refuted many of the claims about home insurance and property value, and said many of the potential impacts of the map — which intends to make people more aware of their risk to wildfire — have been overstated and misconceived.

“My primary interest here is helping our residents do everything they can to reduce the likelihood that they are going to lose their home in a future wildfire,” Chang said Wednesday. “This discussion has been largely a distraction from that work, and I’m ready for it to be done.”

Chang didn’t rule out suggesting that the state approach changes to the map. Commissioner Tony DeBone said he would support suggesting the state retool the map to designate hazard levels for broad areas, rather than specific tax lots.

That’s the premise of a proposal to the Legislature from Sen. Jeff Golden (D-Ashland), with hopes to address anger and rumors from property owners with high hazard designations.

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Opposition is stronger from other local elected officials in Central Oregon. Crook County joined several others in Southern Oregon opposing the map when a draft version was released in August. In a letter to Kotek, Crook County Commissioners said the map unfairly and inconsistently applied high hazard designations in Central Oregon and left little room — a 60-day window — for property owners to appeal.

“The state is effectively ‘convicting’ certain property owners without a trial and only very limited grounds to challenge the classification of their property,” the letter stated.

Two Republican-led bills in the state Legislature to repeal the map or altogether nullify Senate Bill 762, the 2021 legislation directing state agencies to create the hazard map, draft building and defensible spaces codes for wildfire, and mitigate wildfire smoke impacts.

The bill was a response to broad devastation delivered by the 2020 Labor Day fires.

The map, published in January, includes revised hazard levels for some properties and other changes from the first version, which was released in 2022 and withdrawn after public backlash.

The map ranks each property in Oregon as either low, medium or high hazard. Properties prescribed with both the high hazard designation and within the wildland-urban interface will be subject to defensible space codes and home-hardening codes on new construction and significant renovations. The codes are still undergoing rulemaking at the state level.

In Deschutes County, 20% of properties are in the high hazard category, according to Joy Krawczyk, public affairs director with the Oregon Department of Forestry.

Insurance concerns remain

A stream of worried property owners — coming from Sisters, La Pine, Bend and Terrebonne — at Wednesday’s board meeting asked Deschutes County commissioners to advocate for rethinking or axing the map.

Surrounded by horse pasture, Tom Bracken’s home lies on 4 acres about 2 miles north of downtown Sisters, inside the city limits. He blames the current and former hazard maps for a 45% insurance rate increase and the inability to sell his property two years running, with buyers shying away from insurance costs.

The feeling of many property owners that insurance companies hiked rates after looking at the state’s hazard map is misguided, according to insurance professionals. In 2023 Oregon passed legislation outlawing companies from using the map for that purpose.

Insurers weren’t using the map anyway, said Kenton Brine, president of the NW Insurance Council, a trade group funded by insurers in Oregon and Washington. Companies use their own proprietary modeling tools to determine wildfire risk.

“(The bill) banned insurers from using a map we never used,” Brine said.

Still, home insurance premiums in Oregon are up nearly 30% since 2020, according to the Department of Consumer and Business Services. Premiums rose 13% across the United States from 2020 to 2023.

Brine said the unfortunate coincidence was that the state maps came out around the same time the price of replacing homes destroyed in disasters skyrocketed due to construction and labor costs, which was reflected in homeowners’ premiums.

Individual fire prevention efforts don’t change hazard level

Bracken’s community in Sisters is one of nearly 80 in Deschutes County with the Firewise designation, which shows active fire mitigation and education efforts are ongoing.

“We’ve done everything in our community to Firewise and harden and protect, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference,” he said.

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Property owners in high hazard and wildland-urban interface areas received letters from the Oregon Department of Forestry Jan. 7 explaining that previous fire-prevention measures property owners might have taken was not one of the factors used in the computer model that created the map. Those factors were weather, climate, topography and vegetation type.

The map was created in collaboration with Oregon State University.

Property owners can use an online tool to generate a report to determine fire resiliency measures for their property.

The letter to property owners states that work already completed on a property — like clearing vegetation a certain distance from the home — could mean no extra work will be required to comply with the state’s defensible space code.

Still, the map just doesn’t make sense for some property owners. Mark Knowles lives in east Bend about a mile and a half from Bureau of Land Management land. He and all of his neighbors have been flagged in high hazard areas. But, according to Knowles, there are properties in between his and the federal land deemed to be lower hazard.

“I don’t trust that map because I’ve lived here for so long,” said Knowles, who has lived in Bend for 40 years. “I cannot connect the map to this neighborhood. There’s a lot of inconsistencies I find troubling.”

Fire risk spans county

With much of the county prone to burn, local wildfire groups and officials are worried about something else: The map paints a false sense of security for those who weren’t labeled high hazard.

“We live in a high risk area,” said Deschutes County Forester Kevin Moriarty. “Regardless of what the map says, we treat it as such. There’s a good chance fire could get into neighborhoods, and we’re trying to do as much as we can to prevent that.”

Deschutes County conducted its own wildfire risk analysis, which produced a wildfire “hazard area” map for the county.

“There is essentially no place really in Deschutes County that has what you might consider a low fire hazard,” Kyle Collins, an associate planner with the county. “We at least have moderate hazards everywhere and a large majority of the county is actually, at least according to the analysis we did, fairly high hazard.”

The county’s wildfire advisory recommended the county implement defensible space and home hardening requirements tied to the map. But that effort was suspended in 2021 when the state passed its own wildfire mapping legislation.

Collins said a county code passed in 2001 prohibiting roofs with wooden shingles is the only wildfire mitigation-related code on the county’s books.

Chang said the county should encourage everyone to practice defensible space and build with fire resistant materials. The takeaway, said Chang, is that “we have been pretending that there is less hazard for many residents in Deschutes county than there is. We do not make people safer by pretending that their property is not high hazard when it is.”