Wildfire is fought mostly by the federal government, but the decisions that put homes in its path are made locally. What can communities do to plan for fire before it arrives, and who should pay when it does?
In this TalksOnLaw interview, Joel Cohen sits down with Stephen R. Miller, now Associate Dean and Professor of Law at Northern Illinois University College of Law, who studied wildfire planning for years at the University of Idaho College of Law in Boise. They discuss Community Wildfire Protection Plans, land use and building tools, homeowners associations and nuisance abatement, insurance, and who bears the cost of fire. It is the local companion to Miller's interview on the federal framework, Law Combatting Wildfires.
Federal Firefighters, Local Decisions
The defense against wildfire, Miller explains, is largely federal. The air tankers that drop red retardant and the hotshot crews are federal resources, coordinated through the National Interagency Fire Center. Climate change and forest management are making fires bigger and more frequent, but risk also grows because of where people live. The fastest-growing cities are almost all in the West or the South, and newcomers drawn by forests and rivers build in exurban areas where the risk is highest. Who controls that? Local government: some 39,000 cities and counties decide where development goes.
The Community Wildfire Protection Plan
The Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 created the Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) so that federal, state, and local governments could decide together how a community will deal with fire. The process is flexible: a "community" can be a county, a city, or a homeowners association, and smaller plans can feed into larger ones. Because fire needs fuel, heat, and oxygen, a key step is mapping fuel, including land that is overdue to burn, and defining the wildland-urban interface. Fire departments historically owned the process and used it mainly to seek equipment. Miller urges communities to treat it as a political and development tool, with elected officials and citizens at the table from the start.
Sixteen Trucks, Sixteen Houses
The communities that build in the interface do not bear all of its costs. Crews can spend extraordinary sums defending a single subdivision or house when fire comes over a ridge, and every new development there adds risk to the whole system. When federal crews cannot get there, local governments must step in without the tools to fight wildfire as they would a house fire. Boise's fire chief, Miller recalls, likes to say he has 16 trucks and can save 16 houses; the only question is which ones. A CWPP can help by setting priorities. A century of suppression has left vast areas ready to burn, and through the plan a community can ask federal land managers to treat the risk closest to it first.
A Living Plan
Miller describes a four-part cycle. The CWPP sets the strategy. The local government chooses its own mix of regulations and incentives, then decides how to enforce them, although firefighters do not want to be "tree cops." A disaster then tests the system, or time changes the community, and the cycle begins again. Because wildfire is a statistical risk competing with immediate demands, Miller favors building it into routine decisions, for example by inviting the fire department to pre-application meetings for projects in high-risk areas.
From the Comprehensive Plan to the Rain Gutter
The simple approach is to clear vegetation for 100 feet around a house and install a metal roof. The sophisticated approach nests tools at different scales. A community can require multiple access roads and signage, or even bar building in the riskiest areas, though that is a non-starter in much of the West. At the neighborhood scale, a cluster subdivision lets a developer who could spread 60 units across a hillside concentrate them on smaller lots in one part of the parcel. The site and building scales are hardest, because they regulate how people live, down to the deck and the gutters, which can feel invasive in rural areas. San Diego, Miller notes, regulates at every level with broad public acceptance.
HOAs, Firewise, and Nuisance Abatement
Many Western communities rely on Firewise, which offers education, helps residents choose fire-appropriate vegetation, and recognizes communities that commit to ongoing brush clearance. Rather than regulate directly, a local government may require a new subdivision to form a homeowners association and ask it to join Firewise. For bad actors, such as weeds around a propane tank or firewood stacked against a house, local governments have expanded nuisance abatement ordinances so crews can enter and clear the hazard. It works, Miller says, but government arriving with a weed whacker makes for hard politics.
Can Insurance Price the Risk?
Subsidized federal wildfire insurance, modeled on flood insurance, would likely repeat the flood program's problem of encouraging people to stay in dangerous places. Letting the market price the risk would build it into the cost of owning a home, but as premiums soar or insurers stop writing policies, as in California, politicians find it very hard to stand by. A middle path rewards mitigation. In Boulder County, Colorado, the Wildfire Partners program certifies work such as brush clearance and gutter replacement, and owners can take the certificate to participating insurers for a discount. Cohen calls it sweat equity. Some northern Idaho communities do the initial clearing in exchange for an owner's promise to maintain it for five or 10 years.
Who Should Pay?
The federal taxpayer bears most suppression costs, even though local governments decide where development goes. Academics, Miller included, have argued that local governments or homeowners should share that cost, but one fire could then push a town into bankruptcy or decades of debt. After federal suppression dating to 1910, people also expect someone to put the fire out. The silver lining, Miller suggests, is that wildfire has forced a reckoning with climate change in the West, which may prompt broader thinking about how the country develops.
What to Know Now
The fires have kept coming. The Marshall Fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes in suburban Boulder County in December 2021, and the January 2025 Los Angeles fires killed at least 31 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures. States have since moved, unevenly, toward the building-scale rules Miller called politically hardest. California's new Wildland-Urban Interface Code took effect on January 1, 2026. The state Board of Forestry adopted "Zone 0" rules in August 2026 requiring an ember-resistant zone within five feet of homes in the highest-hazard areas, then withdrew them from final legal review for technical changes, so they are not yet in effect. Supporters, including the insurance commissioner, see Zone 0 as key to keeping homes insurable; critics cite cost and the loss of trees and landscaping. Colorado adopted a statewide Wildfire Resiliency Code in 2025 and required local adoption in 2026, over municipal concerns about mapping and cost. Oregon went the other way, repealing its statewide hazard map in 2025 after a backlash from rural property owners.
Rebuilding has revived questions about density. California suspended environmental review for like-for-like rebuilding after the Los Angeles fires and let local governments limit SB 9 lot splits in very high hazard burn areas, which Los Angeles did in the Palisades. Supporters cited evacuation safety; housing advocates objected to exceptions from state housing law.
Insurance remains the hardest problem. California's FAIR Plan, the insurer of last resort, now holds about 697,000 policies, and after the Los Angeles fires it assessed insurers $1 billion, up to half recoverable from policyholders. Insurers may now use catastrophe models and reinsurance costs in setting rates in exchange for commitments to write in high-risk areas; consumer advocates call the new policies meager, while regulators say it is too early to judge. California also requires discounts for home and community mitigation, much like the Boulder County certificate. Federal support has shifted, too. Community Wildfire Defense Grants under the 2021 infrastructure law pay for CWPPs and projects. FEMA's main pre-disaster mitigation program was canceled in 2025, but a federal court held the cancellation unlawful, and it reopened in 2026. Interior launched a consolidated U.S. Wildland Fire Service in 2026, and the Fix Our Forests Act awaits Senate action. Miller's central point holds: risk follows local land use decisions, and how to share its cost remains unsettled.
