West Point, CA… Calaveras Healthy Impact Product Solutions (CHIPS), working together with the Stanislaus National Forest, has been awarded a $1.98 million grant from CAL FIRE for the Arnold-Avery Hazard Fuels Reduction and Fuel Break Maintenance Project under the CAL FIRE California Climate Investments (CCI) Fire Prevention (FP) Grants category.

This project is part of a collaborative bi-county fuel break effort, and represents one strategic segment within a much broader, high priority effort to create a bi-county fire mitigation fuel break stretching from the Tiger Creek and View 88 fuel breaks in Amador County to the Arnold-Avery/Ebbetts Pass corridor fuel reduction projects in southeast Calaveras County. Much of this larger project has been implemented, funded, and/or completed NEPA/CEQA. This project will tie into these existing efforts and make
significant progress toward completing the bi-county fuel break.

The Arnold-Avery Hazard Fuels Reduction and Fuel Break Maintenance project is situated in the Calaveras Ranger District of the Stanislaus National Forest and immediately-adjacent to privately-owned areas directly east of the communities of Hathaway Pines, Avery, Arnold, White Pines, and Big Trees and southeast of Dorrington and Camp Connell located in southern Calaveras County, California (see map
below).

The project will be implemented beginning in the winter of 2020-2021 and be completed by 2024. Project activities will include removal of excess surface and ladder fuels and maintenance and expansion of the 2015 Butte Fire Dozer Line fuel break and the Village fuel break which is located in the vicinity of Dorrington, consistent with the Stanislaus National Forest, Forest Plan Direction. The area of project
activities includes a total of 940 acres of Sierra mixed conifer forest, all of which are located within the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) and the State Responsibility Area (SRA).

As part of the collaborative bi-county fuel break effort, the Arnold-Avery Hazard Fuels Reduction and Fuel Break Maintenance Project, will promote landscape scale forest restoration and watershed protection through strategic hazardous fuels reduction, and will provide critical protection of life and private property within multiple at-risk and low-income communities.

As a non-profit organization that specializes in vegetation management in Calaveras and Amador counties, CHIPS is intimately familiar with local forest management needs. CHIPS hires at-risk personnel, and has a long history of hiring Native Americans and others at-risk to carry out its work. The organization staffs’ crews across three counties and conducts works on public lands, including four National Forests, Bureau of Land Management and Yosemite National Park lands, and also private lands. CHIPS hires contractors from locally distressed communities which have been heavily affected by the closing of numerous lumber mills as recently as the early 2000’s. CHIPS crews and local contractors will be utilized whenever possible to implement the CAL FIRE grant, creating new job opportunities, and helping to establish a forest restoration and stewardship economy.