What fire recovery looks like in Talent, Oregon

In 2020, the Almeda Fire ripped through the Rogue Valley and destroyed about a third of the town of Talent. Among the losses were nearly 90 homes located at the Talent Mobile Estates park. Years later, the town continues to rebuild, including a groundbreaking ceremony for the mobile home park last year. We check in on recovery efforts from Darby Ayers-Flood, the mayor of Talent.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Geoff Norcross: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Geoff Norcross. 2020 was one of the most destructive wildfire years on record in Oregon, and the Southern Oregon town of Talent was hit especially hard. The Almeda Fire destroyed about a third of that town. We wanted to get an update on the rebuilding effort. Talent Mayor Darby Ayers-Flood joins us now on the line. Mayor Darby Ayers- Flood, welcome to Think Out Loud. It’s good to have you.

Darby Ayers-Flood: Yeah, thank you, Geoff. Thanks for having me.

Norcross: How would you describe the years since the fire ripped through your town in 2020?

Ayers-Flood: You know, it’s been challenging. Some of what we expected happened and we made a lot of progress, but there are still areas that we have a long way to go. It’s just a really challenging experience.

Norcross: Yeah, you have a long way to go. Is there any way to quantify that for me? I mean, can you give me some numbers?

Ayers-Flood: Sure, we lost just over 700 homes in our community, most of it affordable housing. It just, very succinctly, ripped right through most of our naturally-occurring affordable housing. And we also lost 60% of our commercial area, as you said, a third of our town. We’ve recovered a lot of our housing, 85% of our housing, but most of that has been the housing that was single-family homes that were insured. Where we are still lagging is in our affordable housing. So, for those folks who are underinsured or not insured at all, it’s still a struggle getting them back home. But we keep trying.

Then, on the commercial front, we lost about 60% of our commercial sector and only about 15% of that has recovered. We put forth a plan for some TIF [Tax Increment Financing] funding that would have helped us recover much faster than we have in our commercial zone … didn’t pass the voters. There was a vigorous campaign against it by the fire department, because TIF funding reallocates some tax funding. In the case of the fire department, it would have been about 2 cents on the dollar of their funding to pitch in for the recovery. They put up a defense and we just were not able to get it passed with the voters.

So we still struggle, really very much behind on our commercial recovery. And again, we still have about 85% of what was about 60 commercial buildings lost in the fire. So we still have a long way to go.

Norcross: Yeah, and it sounds like that funding that you asked voters for, that didn’t happen, is a big hurdle here. Do you anticipate going back to voters and asking for funding again?

Ayers-Flood: That’s an interesting question because we are watching our neighboring community of Phoenix, who did have TIF funding passed prior to the fire. They were still collecting TIF funding in their community and we’re seeing them bounce back much, much quicker. It’s such a value lesson to our communities about the importance of that type of financial mechanism to recover. I don’t think it’s something we have in our immediate plans, but it’s certainly open to further discussion with leadership in our community. I think it would look different than the original plan, but we’re gonna need to do something. It’s a tough road back.

Norcross: You use the term TIF funding – that’s Tax Increment Financing. It’s a public funding method that uses property tax increases to pay for community development projects. And it has to be said that communities all across Southern Oregon have a record of not really going for tax increases. I’m wondering if that’s a hurdle that you’re having a hard time getting past?

Ayers-Flood: Yeah, in the event of an emergency or a crisis like this kind of loss, really what it is, is future tax increases. So, as your community starts to rebuild and you have new building on what is now vacant land, it’s the future tax increases that you’re actually leveraging into funding. So, in a way, those are the taxes you’re gonna pay anyway, no matter what, if you rebuild on your vacant land. But in this instance, it gets reallocated to help with investments that you can leverage in terms … I hope that made sense. It’s very complex.

It is a really important tool that the state has provided every city in Oregon for not just mitigating blight – which is the more common use – but also in the event of a catastrophe, like the Almeda Fire. It doesn’t really cost the taxpayers more money, it just reallocates taxes in smaller amounts from other jurisdictions into the recovery. It’s like everybody pitches in a little bit to allow for investments to recover. And then in the end, after recovery happens and the rebuild is in place, everybody benefits because the tax does increase with the recovery, if that makes sense. So it is a long-term benefit for all of the jurisdictions, and a short-term benefit for the community that is trying to recover.

Norcross: Let’s talk about federal funding a little bit. Among the many orders that President Trump signed last week, one of them commands federal agencies to immediately pause giving out any funds under President Biden’s 2021 Infrastructure Law and his 2022 climate statute. Reporting by Politico says that wording could imperil billions for projects that states have already begun working on. Given this environment, how confident are you that you’re going to get the federal funding that you’re expecting?

Ayers-Flood: Not at all. We are expecting … There was a $422 million HUD package that was dropped into the state a couple of years ago, and really, none of our communities have seen the money land at the city level. We have a big infrastructure package that is pending, as we wait for the funds. So I am nervous. Just two days after the inauguration and the day of signing all those executive orders, we already saw one of our transportation packages, in this little tiny city in Southern Oregon, be put on hold because of those executive orders. It was just an improvement along the highway, but an important one. So, that’s a shot over the bow. I said to a friend the other day, “I think that’s the canary in the mine,” that we can expect more of this freezing of projects.

Norcross: Mayor, there is good news. I’d like to talk about a particular neighborhood in your community there. It’s called Talent Mobile Estates. It’s a community of 100 homes. Most of them were wiped out in the Almeda Fire, and there was a groundbreaking ceremony for the revitalized community last spring. I was wondering if you could let us know how that’s going.

Ayers-Flood: I was at that groundbreaking. It was a phenomenal day and really hopeful. That is a really great example of that naturally-occurring affordable housing that was lost. It is going well. They are, last time I checked, about 40% repopulated. I do, again, have concerns that they’ll be able to finish out the project with some of those executive orders being signed and the ability to freeze the funding that’s actually repopulating that very neighborhood.

I won’t celebrate, I think, fully, until it is fully occupied and everybody is safe and back home. So, it’s a mixed feeling. On the one hand, it’s a real blessing to see almost half of the park repopulated and folks coming back home. But again, we still have a ways to go, and a lot of that is depending on some of this federal funding.

Norcross: Are there any lessons from the rebuilding of that community, even though it’s very much in process, that you think can be applied elsewhere in the city?

Ayers-Flood: It is being applied elsewhere in the city. That’s one of the first things the city did right after the fire, was just freeze all mobile home parks, because we lost most of our mobile home parks in the fire. And to freeze all mobile home parks, and disallow any other kind of development in those parks other than mobile homes, and preserving that kind of housing was a really, really smart thing for us to do.

That’s one of the lessons learned. Then, just supporting the non-profit organizations that do that kind of work – Casa of Oregon was a partner in that project – and being very flexible as a city, and nimble, and helping them get through their process. Those are the lessons learned. We are doing projects like that all over town – some senior housing, we have the Gateway Project that we did transitional housing on, in partnership with the state. That mission is now ending and people are finding permanent housing. Then we’ll be able to turn around, as we’re vacating that mission, to go ahead and rebuild at that site for more affordable housing.

So, there has been a lot of support at the state level and a lot of it was backed by federal funding. So hopefully, we won’t see all of that grind to a halt as we try to move forward on, again, the area of housing that we still have a long ways to go, which is affordable housing.

Norcross: You touched on this earlier, but insurance is a big question here. What are you hearing from your citizens about their ability to get homeowners’ insurance, given the wildfire danger and the wildfire history?

Ayers-Flood: That’s a big story across the country, because with all of the natural disasters, we’re watching climate chaos unfold before our eyes. It’s happening all over the nation and insurance companies are pulling back. And there are stories in Southern Oregon of homeowners that have either had to switch to much higher-cost insurance with much lower coverage, to where some insurance companies just full on pulled out and are not funding in our area anymore. So it’s been a real challenge. I think it’s a situation that is gonna have to be solved in the coming years, because the strategy that insurance companies are using right now is not sustainable.

Norcross: There’s been a lot of attention paid to Los Angeles lately. And now that the wildfires there are dying down somewhat, they’re thinking about their recovery. I’m wondering what lessons city leaders could learn about protecting their communities or rebuilding them after the devastating fires that we’ve heard about in Southern California.

Ayers-Flood: That is a great question, because so much of what we did was really out of lessons we learned from Paradise, California. Just a few days after our fire here, actually about a week after our fire here, leaders came from Paradise to support our knowledge about how to move forward.

I would say one of the most important things is just really focus on transitional housing and getting people stabilized within the community, because so much is lost when the residents themselves leave the area. We did a really good job of that and we were able to retain a lot of our community, which benefits all of the jurisdictions in the long run. So it’s an important aspect of keeping your community whole. I would say transitional housing is an important focus, and it’s not just about emergency shelter, it’s about keeping people sheltered for a couple of years. My hat is off to Oregon, I think they’ve done a great job supporting that after the fires, and I hope California is able to do the same.

Norcross: Mayor, thank you so much for the time. I appreciate it.

Ayers-Flood: Oh, thank you, Geoff, and best to everybody in these changing times.

Norcross: Indeed. Mayor Darby Ayers-Flood is the mayor of Talent, Oregon.

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