Ray Rasker, the Antiplanner’s friend from the days when the Antiplanner worked primarily for environmental groups, has published a paper offering ten ways to reduce firefighting costs in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). That’s the private land where people are building homes near fire-prone federal lands. Unfortunately, the Antiplanner must respectfully disagree with most of Rasker’s proposals.
Rasker’s view is that fire costs have escalated in recent years as people have built more first and second homes in rural areas near public lands. This leads firefighters to make extraordinary efforts to keep fires from burning those homes. The solution, then, is to keep people from building in those areas, and at least eight of Rasker’s ten proposals focus on that solution.
For example, one of Rasker’s solutions is to “Allow Insurance Companies to Charge Higher Premiums in Fire-Prone Areas.” That sounds innocuous enough, except for the fact that insurance companies are already allowed to do that (and they do). Rasker’s real goal is to set the premiums “sufficiently high to discourage development in the WUI” (p. 45).
