Lucerne Town Hall meets to discuss wildfire protection

Loretta Krentz, Jason Mohon and Andy Peterson are now part of the council

LUCERNE >> A new year brings new members to the Lucerne Area Town Hall. Loretta Krentz, Jason Mohon and Andy Peterson are now part of the advisory council to the Board of Supervisors. The first meeting of 2021 was conducted through phone conference, and open to the community.

Andy Peterson was nominated for Vice-Chair and Loretta Krentz is now the Recording Secretary. “I think Andy would be very beneficial. He has a lot of experience,” said Chair Lani Urquiza, who also highlighted Kretz’ work with the local community and other organizations, as well as government.

The Council heard from a special guest speaker — Laurel Bard, with Clear Lake Environmental Research Center (CLERC), in partnership with the Lake County Resource Conservation District and the Lake County Risk Reduction Authority, as they discussed updating the Community Wildfire Protection Plan.

“For those who aren’t aware, if there was anyone seeing the Wildfire Protection Plan created to identify priority areas for acquiring projects, I am working on updating these priority projects. I would normally show a map, but, obviously, that’s not possible,” said Bard. Different from the current traditional video conferences that are now the “new normal” in the pandemic era, the phone conference has limitations, and the LATH Chair even had to interrupt the special guest presentation to ask other participants the obvious: to mute their phones, because there was a lot of echo and background noise. “There are different categories of items that we’ll work on,” continued Laurel Bard, who mentioned, among those, upgrading the senior centers.

“I found that in Lucerne, for safety reasons, if the trees that are underneath our power lines — that go up into the trees — are overwhelming, they go in and they cut them, but they only come down to about where the AT&T lines are at. If we ever have a fire, and people have to evacuate Lucerne and go east or west, there’s a lot of trees that are overhanging onto the roads which need to be cut down below the PG&E lines. Last time we got evacuated out of here, I had to go down through the Oaks. It took me 45 minutes to get from Lucerne down to Oaks. The way that it is right now, with all the overgrown trees that are on the highway, we’d have a big problem: people couldn’t get out safely,” pointed LATH Council member Kevin Waycik, asking the CivicSpark representative of the Clear Lake Environmental Research Center: “Why can’t the trees be placed down below where those lines, cable and AT&T are. It’s really bad and it needs to be addressed,” he said.

“Bruner Drive is an area that concerns me because there’s only one road, and it looks to me there’s a lot of trees leaning over the road coming up to it, and a lot of grasslands, at least up the hill. It’s the only road. If the fire starts from the bottom, you can’t get out. It looks bad to me. I’m not I’m not an expert, but it’s an area I think that should be looked at,” added Peterson.

“I found that in Lucerne, for safety reasons, if the trees that are underneath our power lines — that go up into the trees — are overwhelming, they go in and they cut them, but they only come down to about where the AT&T lines are at. If we ever have a fire, and people have to evacuate Lucerne and go east or west, there’s a lot of trees that are overhanging onto the roads which need to be cut down below the PG&E lines..”

— LATH Council member Kevin Waycik