As the Chairman of the Board of Teller County Commissioners and the Chairman of the Teller County Wildfire Council, we applaud our residents who are able to mitigate their own property to assist in keeping all of us safe. We also appreciate neighbors helping neighbors, something that has been done for over 125 years in our county. Our fire districts work in consort with our Fire Warden/County Sheriff Jason Mikesell on safe and standardized practices recognized by Colorado's Division of Fire Prevention. The County even purchased an industrial chipper that is used throughout our county and, when appropriate, fire permits for prescribed limited burning on private property are issued by the Sheriffs Department. These activities are either covered by the fire district's insurance policy or the private homeowner’s policy.
Teller County and its leadership take the life, health and safety of our residents as our number one priority and, despite our best efforts, have had numerous costly fires in the past few years requiring state and federal assets at the cost of millions of dollars. Over half of Teller County lies outside a fire district and 56% of this county is federal land under another jurisdiction.
The Sheriff was clear in his letter, this issue is non-negotiable and the BoCC stands firmly with our Fire Warden on the letter just issued. At a time when private property owners in our county are losing fire insurance daily or cannot obtain fire insurance for new construction, we cannot have an organization putting our county at risk with nonstandard practices or misleading information and our citizens now have the same information we have.
Commissioner Dan Williams