FAIR Plan policies & premiums

During the CZU Complex Fire in 2020, we heard from essential workers engaged in local school districts who faced evacuation from their homes in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and we heard how food service workers were losing income with workplace closures due to poor air quality that smothered the entire region with a heavy orange blanket of smoke. Manzanita Coalition members invited Manzanita Works to explore prevention options should another wildfire occur.

In January 2024, a community stakeholder reached out to Manzanita Works to share their concerns about wildfire insurance, their efforts to prevent wildfire through vegetation management, and their imaginative ideas as to how Manzanita Works' consortium model for multi-party collaboration might offer future options for the prevention of catastrophic wildfires.

We spent that year and much of the next dusting off our consortium model, which we've applied to the creation of transportation and childcare options, and we were invited to become a California Department of Insurance Community Partner. We are also collaborating with the San Mateo County Office of Emergency Management on promoting "home hardening" and related disaster preparedness initiatives. Our Essential Tools™ mobile tool share program acquired vegetation management equipment, we conducted outreach to community members who live in Wilderness Urban Interface (WUI) zones that have some of the highest wildfire risks for the region and are honored to be collaborating with community group Coastside Allies on home hardening initiatives as well.

Inspired by the San Francisco Chronicle's recent press coverage of the State's FAIR Plan, the public's insurance of last resort for wildfire policies, we went through our own mapping exercise with publicly available information from FAIR and dug into it a bit more. There are different kinds of households who live in the WUI, including our region's essential workers—and as we saw most recently with the Altadena and Pacific Palisades fires, one year ago—we all are impacted should a catastrophic wildfire unfold in our region.

If you are a FAIR policy holder, we'd love to hear from you about what other supplemental insurance you have, what your premiums are like, what concerns you have, if you've embarked on home hardening efforts, and if there are needs or ideas you have for support that could help you in connection with wildfire prevention efforts. Information gathered will inform if and how we adapt our pilots, programs, and model.

We invite you to complete Manzanita Works' FAIR Policy Holder Questionnaire to help shape our work in our Futures Portfolio.