The Board of Supervisors is slated Tuesday to consider the Riverside County Fire Department’s request to attach fire mitigation charges to the tax bills of 450 property owners, whom officials say failed to pay the cost of abating weeds and other potential fire hazards around their parcels.
The owners, whose properties are located in unincorporated communities countywide, are delinquent and altogether owe a total of $295,356 under the county’s Fire Hazard Reduction Program, according to the fire department.
The amounts, which range from $423 to $2,348 per property, stem from activity in calendar year 2024.
The reduction program involves deploying contractors to clear weeds and related overgrowth that might otherwise fuel brush fires during wildfire season, which generally spans from May to November. In most cases, the parcels that were mitigated were vacant or set off from main residences, said the fire department.
Officials said property owners were served with orders to abate, or mitigate, the potential hazards, and when inspectors received no reply or saw that no action had been taken, contractors were sent to the locations under county authority to clear away the excess foliage.
“The purpose of the Fire Hazard Reduction Program is to reduce or eliminate fire hazards created by vegetative growth and the accumulation of combustible debris, which poses a danger to the health, safety and welfare of the residents in the vicinity of any real property,” according to an agency statement. “Voluntary compliance is the primary goal of the program. Each parcel owner is provided the opportunity to abate the property prior to the county’s conducting the abatement.”
Properties in four of the five supervisor’s districts were identified by the department as delinquent on payments. They included parcels in unincorporated parts of Corona, Hemet, Murrieta and Riverside, as well as the cities of Banning, Lake Elsinore, Menifee, Moreno Valley, Perris and Temecula, and the communities of Cabazon, Homeland, Juniper Springs, Nuevo, Winchester and Wildomar.
Property owners were billed to recover the county’s expenditures, but the fire department received no response, according to the fire department. A $254 administrative fee was folded into the final bill sent to the proprietors.
The charges would function as tax liens on the properties.
All those who received assessment notices will now have an opportunity to challenge them and ask the board for relief.