The Municipality of North Cowichan has been granted $34,500 dollars in funding to update its Community Wildfire Protection Plan.
The money comes from the Provincial Community Resiliency Investment Program and the funding will be used to hire an outside company to develop a comprehensive plan.
North Cowichan Mayor Al Siebring explains the goal of this plan.
“What we do need to do is develop a consistent plan across the municipality, we have a lot of land, we have a lot of rural areas, with these interface dangers and things like that,” said Siebring. “We need to come up with a plan and a policy that says ‘how are we going to address this on a consistent basis, at a high level, so that everybody gets treated the same way.”
He explains the timeline for developing this new plan.
“The updating of the plan will happen, hopefully, over the summer and the fall and then they’ll have [it] written by the end of the year so that, hopefully, we can adopt it by December 31 or early in 2020 and put in place for next summer,” said Siebring.
The Municipal Forest Reserve makes up a quarter of the North Cowichan land base.
