Austin Council Passes Wildfire Plan on Consent Despite Housing, Tree Concerns

Despite concerns over codes and provisions that could conflict with city housing density and tree-cover initiatives, Austin City Council passed an update to the Community Wildfire Protection Plan last Thursday, Oct. 22. The Travis County Commissioners Court also gave the plan its stamp of approval. The plan is now set to kick off in early November.

The CWPP is a 413-page guiding document updated every 10 years to assist Austin and Travis County in establishing plans for wildfire mitigation, preparedness, response coordination, and resilience. It was originally created under the Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 and is a “collaborative non-regulatory plan” developed with residents, property owners, and landowners, according to city staff. At an Oct. 20 work session before the vote, Council Member Marc Duchen said the city was due for an update.

“The world of wildfire prevention preparedness has evolved over the last decade, and so I think this plan incorporates a lot of those changes,” Duchen said at the session. “Given our substantial risk factors here, I think it’s important that we continue to stay current on this work.” 

The Austin metro is ranked fourth in the nation in the number of properties at moderate or greater wildfire risk, behind three California cities, according to the 2026 Wildfire Risk Report by Cotality, an international real estate data company.

The CWPP flags eastern and southeastern Austin as most dangerous for fast-moving grass fires after winter freezes dry out the land, while the western half faces hilly woodland terrain with limited escape routes. Because 90% of wildfires are human-caused, prevention targets the Wildland-Urban Interface – where settlement meets forest or grassland – and nearly half of Travis County residents live within it.

The plan has 71 recommendations covering vegetation management, home hardening (a method of using construction materials and maintenance practices to reduce fire risk), fire alerts and warnings, post-fire watershed recovery, and code changes. Its authors stressed at the Oct. 20 work session that all recommendations are voluntary. Though the plan carries no funding of its own, an active CWPP is required for the city and county to apply for Community Wildfire Defense Grants from the U.S. Forest Service.

Austin’s Wildland-Urban Interface Code, adopted in 2020 and updated in 2025, requires a variety of fire-prevention upgrades on new or substantially remodeled homes in WUI zones – but only adjacent to wildland areas of 40 acres or more. That threshold cuts out a lot of small greenbelts, pocket parks, and wooded corridors in the center of Austin. And while city staff will manage vegetation on public lands, approximately 71% of the WUI boundary, or 650 linear miles, is privately owned land in Austin, per the Austin Fire Department.

That is where the CWPP’s “voluntary” framing gets complicated. Council Member Krista Laine pointed to large private grassland owners in East and Southeast Austin, asking how discussions with those owners have progressed.

“We can only make limited inroads with private landowners, and we do our best to reach out to them where we can and provide education, and recommendations, and so forth,” said David Skowron, interim assistant chief for the Austin Fire Department. “It’s a large part of why the Wildfire Division and our county partners focus a lot of our efforts on home hardening, and we talk about the WUI code and why it’s so important. …. While that fuel mitigation risk is super important, that’s only one piece of the puzzle, and the science really speaks to that home hardening as being the most bang for the buck, so to speak.”

A city survey of 377 residents found that 77% are concerned about wildfires near their homes. Additionally, 32% cited cost as the biggest obstacle to home hardening and creating defensible space while about 45% said they are unsure how to safely evacuate in the event of a wildfire near their home. Most respondents were interested in a cost-sharing program, with 48% saying they would participate and another 40% of residents saying they would consider joining. The cost-sharing programs would incentivize residents to participate in the plan, paired with code updates and stronger enforcement. 

One update that Mayor Pro Tem Chito Vela pointed out was a proposed 50-foot setback between structures, including accessory dwelling units (ADUs). Vela noted that the language in the plan was broad.

“It says ‘all jurisdictions,’” Vela said. “That would essentially eliminate ADUs, duplexes, any type of ‘missing middle’ housing. Again, I mean, in vast swaths of Austin, we’ve been going in the opposite direction, going to five-foot setbacks, very small setbacks to allow for smaller lots and to allow for affordability. This seems to go in the exact opposite direction.”

Interim Fire Chief Tom Vocke agreed with Vela to an extent.

“The 50-foot separation distance across a city like Austin doesn’t make sense at all, but what does make sense is maybe against those very high-risk areas where we’re directly within 50 feet of a wildland area. … We would only be talking about the WUI areas as well,” Vocke explained. “So a majority of the city does fall into some portion of the WUI, but in high-risk areas, [that’s] where we would probably function or focus that.”

The recommendation conflicts with a vote Council members took in May directing the city manager to update land development regulations to allow two dwelling units on lots between 3,600 and 5,750 square feet, consistent with the HOME initiative’s minimum principle of roughly 1,800 square feet per unit. Those updated regulations are expected in December.

Another expected area of friction was raised by the only speaker at the Oct. 22 Council meeting. Bill Bunch, executive director of the Save Our Springs Alliance, argued the plan’s emphasis on thinning tree cover to get grants was “junk science” from the Trump administration, as well as logging and oil-and-gas interests, and that the city should instead protect mature forests that retain moisture.

The report acknowledges that Austin’s urban shading and tree canopy initiatives provide heat reduction, public health, and ecological benefits, but adds that “in wildfire-prone areas, canopy preservation should be paired with vegetation management.” That tension shows up in the city’s emphasis on “shaded fuel breaks,” where trees remain but undergrowth is removed, slowing down the spread of wildfires.

The plan also acknowledges that wildfire mitigation can conflict with other environmental rules. “Efforts to reduce wildfire risk sometimes intersect with other land management priorities, particularly stormwater and watershed protection requirements,” it states. “These situations can create a tradeoff between reducing wildfire ignition potential near structures and minimizing additional impervious surface that could affect runoff and watershed health.”

Implementation of the plan will begin on Nov. 6 with a coalition kickoff at Austin Energy Mueller headquarters, where nine task groups will take separate chunks of the 71 recommendations. With no funding attached and most recommendations voluntary, the plan’s real test will be whether Austin and Travis County can turn its recommendations into action – and whether residents and landowners will help pay for it.

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