City staffers are recommending crews stop using synthetic herbicide to reduce vegetation in wilderness areas and around the community to help cut down on potential fuel for wildfires and instead rely on more mowing and hand equipment.
The City Council on Tuesday, Jan. 9, will consider that option and a handful of others, including the continued use of a synthetic herbicide. A group of South Laguna residents concerned about the potential impacts of using Roundup to kill vegetation along trails, hillsides, and streets has been lobbying City Hall this last year to put an end to its use.
The intended goal of killing the vegetation is if a fire were to break out, having cleared the “fuel modification zones” would offer less vegetation for a fire to burn, slowing its advance and giving firefighters a chance to get the upper hand and residents more time to escape.
Hand crews and goats are also used to help eliminate unwanted vegetation to curb fire hazards.
Those zones encompass 400 acres throughout the city. The effort is part of a wide-ranging fire management plan rolled out by the city starting in 2019 with blessings from the California Coastal Commission.
The city contracts with Nature’s Image Inc. to conduct the spraying for the fuel modification efforts and with the Laguna Canyon Foundation to monitor that environmentally sensitive animals and plants are protected – for example, its biologists flagged patches of the Big-Leaved Crownbeard and Coulter’s Matilija Poppy, considered threatened in the state, in the past to be avoided. Around them, any weed removal was done by hand.
Following the complaints and petition effort of the South Laguna residents, city staff are recommending increasing the use of crews using weed whackers and other tools to mow down the plants and grasses before they became 3 feet tall. That would be done three times a year.
The change would come with a cost of $1.3 million a year, compared to the current program, which costs…
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