August 9, 2015

Diamond Mountain was identified in the Lassen County Community Wildfire Protection Plan (CWPP) as its highest priority in February of 2014. The CWPP Working Group agreed that Lassen County Fire Safe Council, Inc. (LCFSC) should take the lead role in developing a public/private partnership that could assist the USFS with getting needed fuel reduction and watershed restoration treatments completed on the public land in the Diamond Mountain area. The group also agreed that at the same time LCFSC should continue its efforts to accomplish treatments on adjacent private lands; over 2,000 acres have been treated to date.

The first meeting of DMI was called in November of 2014 and formed the DMI Working Group. Participating partners now include: Lassen County Fire Safe Council (LCFSC), US Forest Service (USFS) (both the Plumas and Lassen National Forest), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Cal Fire, Lassen County, Honey Lake Valley Resource Conservation District, W.M. Beaty and Associates, HL Power and many members of the public. Sierra Nevada Conservancy (SNC) has been monitoring our meetings as well. The primary focus of Diamond Mountain Initiative (DMI) is to assist the US Forest Service (USFS) in any way that we can with getting National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) surveys completed in order to facilitate forest and watershed restoration treatments in the Diamond Mountain area. Everyone seems to agree that USFS has been put in a reactive mode as the result of staff reductions and large fires. When large fires occur staff resources shift to dealing with suppression efforts. After the fires are extinguished staff then has its hands full with near term restoration and salvage operations. This results in projects such as Diamond Mountain being continually put “on the back burner” and delayed.  The DMI Working Group is pushing to make the DMI a priority for USFS.