Measure R sales tax funds are not being spent as the residents of Orinda expected they would be, for wildfire prevention, and no one is telling the residents the truth about this misallocation of public funds.  Not the Measure R commission (the SSTOC - Supplemental Sales Force Oversight Commission), not the City Council, and none of this is reported in the media.

 

The Measure R 1% sales tax was approved by the voters in November 2020 and started collecting funds starting in April 2021.  It collects about $3.7 million a year, mostly on car sales of cars registered in Orinda.  Through March 2025 it had generated about $15 million.

 

Prior to being put on the ballot, Orindans were surveyed about the tax.  One question was what they felt was the most important thing the tax should be used for.  The top vote-getters (55%) were wildfire prevention and emergency preparedness.  Since the city originally planned to use the tax for infrastructure (road and storm drain maintenance), most of the survey questions related to these needs, but only 20-30% of the respondents consider these needs to be "extremely" important, half the number of wildfire prevention.

 

So, playing to the residents' desires, the advertising for the tax stressed wildfire prevention with graphics of burning buildings and a child holding a lit match.  And after the tax was passed and the SSTOC was formed, at their first meeting, Mayor Amy Worth emphasized the focus of the tax by "instructing" the commission: "that the bulk of the sales tax measure funds for the next several years is expected to be devoted to the development and implementation of fire prevention and disaster preparedness plans".

 

But no one on the commission was a wildfire prevention expert.  So, they reached out to people who were.

 

They first spoke with MOFD about wildfire prevention.  Our fire department is obviously concerned about the threat of wildfire, but it devotes little of its financial resources (over $30 million a year in tax revenue, 2/3 of which comes from Orinda even though Orinda only receives a little over half of its services) on wildfire prevention.  It creates fire code, does cursory inspections (from the street even though most of the problem is behind homes "on the back 40"), and offers some home-hardening materials (vent screening) to lower the chance that homes become more fuel for the fire.  It used to offer to remove vegetation that the residents themselves put on the curb (the chipper service), but after Orinda got its own chipper MOFD now only provides that service to Moraga.

 

Even though Orinda taxpayers overfund MOFD by over $4 million a year (paying $6 million more than Lafayette pays ConFire for the same service), MOFD tells Orindans to pay for any wildfire prevention (vegetation removal) out of their own pocket.

 

The SSTOC also spoke with two wildfire prevention experts.  One, UC Berkeley professor and 35-year Orinda resident Dr. John Radke, provided the commission with a "wildfire prevention 101" lecture at their April 2022 meeting.  They asked him to give them a wildfire prevention proposal, which he did in conjunction with UC's Center for Catastrophic Risk Management (CCRM).  He presented this at the SSTOC's July 2022 meeting.  At their August meeting they voted to ask the City Council to fund the $600,000 study which would evaluate all of Orinda, neighborhood by neighborhood (dividing Orinda into 100 separate "firesheds").  The $600,000 would pay for graduate students to collect the data and analyze it with wildfire projection models (in use since 2006), led and guided by Radke and two other professors who would be donating their time.  The study would take about two years.

 

However, when the proposal was presented to the City Council, City Manager David Biggs advised the council to reject the proposal, stating: "we question the value of funding what is pure research, especially when we have many competing priorities for use of Measure R funds".  Biggs had no expertise in wildfire prevention.  He was wrong that the proposal was "pure research" as it utilized projection models that had been in use and vetted since 2006 (and are currently being used by a firm, Xyloplan, led by former MOFD fire chief Dave Winnacker).  And he was definitely wrong that the city had "other priorities" for the $600,000 (two months of Measure R revenue) more important than understanding the wildfire risk to Orinda’s neighborhoods.  But the council usually does what staff says to do, so they rejected the SSTOC's recommendation and did not start mapping the wildfire risk to Orinda's neighborhoods.

 

18 months later, in March 2024, State Farm started the first wave of extreme home insurance cuts.  They cancelled 55% of policies in Orinda (they had accounted for 40% of Orinda’s home insurance policies), while canceling only 12% in Moraga, 30% in Lafayette and 15% in Alamo.  They did not state why Orinda was so heavily impacted, but it must have been because their modeling showed Orinda to be a higher risk than any other community in the Bay Area.  In February 2025 CalFire released its Fire Hazard Severity Zone map and much of Orinda was designated Very High.

 

Since Orinda had no mapping of its own, it could not confirm or refute the insurance company’s claim of fire hazard nor respond to the fact that the CalFire map questionably showed Wilder as a a Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone when MOFD designated it Orinda's only “shelter in place” neighborhood. 

 

Who is right?  Someone is wrong.  Where should Orinda be concentrating its efforts?  It doesn’t know and because it doesn’t know, it is spending virtually no money reducing the risk by removing dangerous fuels, which are the reason for the high risk in Orinda.  And it doesn’t know because it did not hire CCRM in the fall of 2022 to model where the risk is.

 

What is Orinda spending the Measure R, and other funds on?

 

Measure R is considered by the city to be a “supplemental” sales tax, supplementing other sources of revenue for the “essential services” of “wildfire risk reduction, preparation for emergencies and disasters, repair of public storm drains, and continued public street maintenance.”  For the six years 2021-2026, Measure R is expected to raise $20 million, but other sources for road and storm drain maintenance will raise an additional $37 million (see note below).  Of the $52 million to be spent on essential services over that six-year period, only 3%, $1.5 million will be spent on fuel mitigation on private properties, where the vast majority of the wildfire risk lies.

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Why are so little public funds being spent where the risk lies?  Because the city does not know where or how to spend it because it has never hired a wildfire prevention expert to advise it.  It has believed that “educating” 7,000 individual property owners will solve the problem (while their taxes get spent elsewhere). 

 

But the insurance industry and CalFire seem to disagree that this "plan" has been effective.  The risk remains at extreme levels.  Has it decreased at all since 2020 when Orindans told the city Wildfire Prevention was their #1 priority and they voted to tax themselves so the city could provide a plan to reduce the risk?  No one knows.

 

Can the risk be reduced?  Yes.  The one proposed by Radke / CCRM in 2022 is still viable.  Each of Orinda's 100 firesheds needs to be evaluated and a plan to mitigate each developed.  Radke and a fuel mitigation expert examined three of Orinda’s 100 firesheds.  They identified $350,000 of work to reduce the risk to minimal levels in just these three.  Extrapolated to all of Orinda, it would cost $12 million to make Orinda fire safe. 

 

The money is there to do it.  Why isn’t it being spent where it can make a difference?  That is the question the community need to ask our city leaders.

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NOTE: In addition to the $37 million in tax revenue for roads and storm drains that Measure R is supplementing over the six year period, 2021-2026, there is even more money going to MOFD for emergency services including fire protection (which should also include wildfire prevention, but does not).  

 

Over those six years, $129 of property tax from Orinda will go to MOFD.  But over that time period MOFD will only spend $85 million to fund operations in Orinda (net of non-tax revenue), leaving $44 million of Orinda tax dollars in surplus which could be used for service to Orinda.  But it is not.  Where does it go?

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$7 million subsidizes the cost to operate Moraga's two stations, as Moraga is only taxed $67 million but it cost MOFD $74 million to provide them service over those six years.

 

The remaining $37 million goes into reserves.  Over those six years, MOFD's reserve funds increased by that $37 million to a total of $56 million, 100% financed by Orinda's taxes; nothing from Moraga. 

 

$19 million went into employee retirement funds, supplementing the county's employee retirement plan.  While Orinda's firefighters represent 53% of the force, Orinda is paying 100% of this supplemental fund.

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$11 million went into the General Fund which will be $21 million by the end of 2026 and $7 million into the Capital Fund will grow to $10 million.  $31 million total, 100% funded by Orinda tax dollars, greater than the total of Orinda's reserves.  And, MOFD plans to spend down the Capital Fund in 2027 to rebuild Moraga's Station 41 for all cash, when it took out a mortgage to rebuild Orinda's Station 43 a couple of years ago (which Orinda's tax dollars are repaying).

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