The city of Cranbrook will be sending a letter to the premier, forests minister and local MLA asking for continued support of a wildfire mitigation grant program.
Fire chief Scott Driver said the UBCM has notified communities that the Community Resiliency Investment fund’s reserves are getting low and may not be refilled.
“They had initially $125 million and they are down to $25 million remaining and ahead of the provincial program they have changed the program, indicating that there is possibly not a lot more funding coming into the program.”
Driver said the funding stream recently changed and now only supports FireSmart initiatives and not other fuel management projects.
“They removed the landscape treatment fuel prescription portion of the program to just leave the FireSmart portion,” he said.
“Communities are still allowed to ask for the same amount of money, they just aren’t allowed to do prescriptions or landscape treatment including logging and prescribed burning.”
City staff said the province hasn’t indicated if more funding will be made available as part of the 2026 budget.
The letter to provincial officials will be showing how important this type of work is to the city to help prevent future wildfires.
Be the first to know! Don’t miss out on breaking news and daily updates in your area. Sign up to MyEastKootenayNow News Alerts.
