Community Engagement Site

The webpage serves as a central location for all information related to the 2024-2025 update to Gallatin County’s Hazard Mitigation and Community Wildfire Protection Plan.  The document is the official document covering the cities of Belgrade, Bozeman Three Forks; towns of Manhattan and West Yellowstone; unincorporated areas of Gallatin County and the Madison County portion of Big Sky.

Background

The Hazard Mitigation Act of 2000 created the authority for a risk based approach towards reducing hazards.  The Act also requires states, counties and cities to have a FEMA approved mitigation plan (updated every 5 years) in order to be eligible for non-emergency federal assistance.  There are several programs that this applies to, but generally these are the programs that address repetitive loss issues, wildfire projects, building retrofits, waterway projects to address flooding, emergency power and many more.  These programs are often available to jurisdictions on an annual basis and following presidential declared incidents that trigger the Stafford Act.

During the planning process participants will identify the hazards present in our communities, provide those identified hazards a relative ranking and identify potential projects that can minimize the impact of the identified hazards.  Identifying projects doesn’t automatically mean they will be conducted (it’s not an obligation), but rather identifies them as potential options that communities can work towards.  Federal mitigation funding can only be utilized for identified projects, so we want to be thorough.

Community Wildfire Protection Plans are similar while focusing on wildfire risk and mitigation actions that can be taken to reduce the impacts from wildfire.  They were created by the Healthy Forest Restoration Act in 2003 and largely focus on reducing wildfire impacts in the built environment.  Because of the similarities, we combined the two plans into a single document in 2021 and plan to further integrate it into a single cohesive document in 2025.  An important component that will come out of the CWPP portion is an update to our wildland urban interface boundary.  This boundary has impacts on the land owners and the adjacent land management agencies.

Process

The following outlines the general process we have lined out.  Some steps may have some overlap in timing.

1.  update of base data in plan
2. Hazard Identification and Evaluation Workshops
3. Document editing, data and GIS refinements
4. Wildfire modeling
5. Project identification
6. Draft document review
   1. Gallatin County
   2. State of Montana
   3. Federal Emergency Management Agency
7. Plan Adoption
   1. Belgrade
   2. Bozeman
   3. Manhattan
   4. Three Forks
   5. West Yellowstone
   6. Gallatin County
   7. Madison County

2020 Hazard Summaries

2021 Wildland Urban Interface Boundary

Draft Products