Solution: Use a voter-approved wildfire mitigation tax to fund on-site home assessments and subsidized contractor work, then issue a certificate that named insurers accept as proof of proper fire mitigation, so that public money buys both risk reduction and continued insurability.
Key challenge: Homeowners in unincorporated, low-density wildfire-exposed areas face non-renewal, but have no affordable way to identify the right mitigation measures, no subsidy to pay for them, and no document an insurer will accept as evidence that the work was done properly.
Context: The Program operates in unincorporated and mostly low-density rural and peri-urban areas of Boulder County, Colorado. It is funded by a Wildfire Mitigation Sales Tax approved by Boulder County voters in 2022, alongside grant funding from the Colorado State Forest Service and Boulder County. It sits alongside Colorado HB 1182, passed in 2025, which requires insurers to account for property, community and landscape-scale mitigation in pricing and coverage decisions, to share the information and impacts with policyholders and the state insurance regulator, to publish mitigation-related incentives, and to provide annual risk scores and classifications.
Solution in practice: Wildfire Partners provides on-site home assessments producing a report with action items, a mitigation checklist and visuals, with the explicit intent of helping homeowners secure insurance renewals. It provides financial assistance to subsidize the cost of hiring a Wildfire Partners Forestry Contractor to carry out the work. On completion the homeowner receives a Wildfire Partners certificate, which Allstate, State Farm (for existing customers) and USAA accept as proof of proper fire mitigation.
Impact / outcome: Certificate accepted by Allstate, State Farm (existing customers) and USAA as proof of proper fire mitigation.
Next steps: This closes the loop most mitigation programs leave open: the tax funds the work, the assessment specifies it, and the certificate converts it into an insurance outcome with named carriers. Two questions determine how far it travels. First, breadth of carrier acceptance - three carriers is a start, and the Colorado HB 1182 requirement to account for community and landscape-scale mitigation gives a regulatory route to widen it. Second, whether the certificate can be made interoperable with the other recognition systems in this repository, particularly the IBHS Wildfire Prepared designation and Australia's Bushfire Resilience Rating, which the playbook identifies under action area 3b as necessary for portfolios and investors operating across jurisdictions.
Organizations involved:
Authoring: Boulder County
Actors: Colorado State Forest Service; Allstate; State Farm; USAA
Implementation partners: Local Governments; Insurers; Regulators & Policymakers; Civil Society Organizations