Southern Marin firefighters reach milestone on home inspections

The Southern Marin Fire Protection District has completed fire risk home inspections from Sausalito to Mill Valley.

The assessments include properties that fall within the state’s recently expanded fire severity zones in the region.

“As of September 2025, we’re happy to report that the district had completed 100% of those wildland urban interface inspections on properties,” said Marshal Nau, deputy fire marshal, at the Sausalito City Council meeting on Tuesday.

“We also had an update to our local response areas from the state,” he said, referring to the hazard maps. “This enhanced and changed the layout of our fire severity zones, primarily in the city of Sausalito, but also in the city of Mill Valley and other areas. With that, we added over 150 properties.”

Nau’s remarks were part of a special presentation on the district’s preparedness and vegetation management efforts during the past three years.

In 2023, the district began digitizing and posting online inspection reports for individual homes. In Sausalito alone, it inspected 3,283 properties during the past three years, including 825 to date this year, Nau said. Across the entire district, 4,000 properties have been inspected this year.

The district leaves door hangings and sends notices to homeowners, Nau said. In Sausalito, 65% of property owners have looked at their online reports.

“So, as of this year, we have blanketed our entire district for the first time to be in that digital platform,” he said. “That digital platform helps us with a number of things, not just providing information back to our residents, but it also gives us the ability to use the data … (to) inform ourselves for future projects and precise allocation of funds.”

Nau and Fred Hilliard, a division chief and fire marshal, also described vegetation management programs that are available for free to homeowners. Those include follow-up inspections and sending crews to remove flammable trees such as junipers.

Council members praised the report and the vegetation management programs.

“Since the last slide showed property right outside my house, I want to say to everybody this really works,” said Vice Mayor Steven Woodside. “These services are available. They don’t cost anything. The chipper programs, etc., the inspections, they are extremely helpful. They will save lives and property if people take advantage.”

Councilmember Ian Sobieski said he’s received “a bit of pushback” from people who are concerned the district’s inspections could raise their home insurance rates. They also worry that the digitized reports could undermine property values “if they chose to not to remediate something” and it becomes part of a real estate disclosure, he said.

The fire officials said the home assessments are not readily available to the general public because the district verifies property owner identities before forwarding the report. They also said insurance companies don’t request data from the district but use their own modeling and measurements.

Nau also said the district is beginning a new cycle of home inspections, which it hopes to complete in two years — not the current three-year cycle.

“Now that we’ve finished, we get to start over,” he said. “We’re trying to bring it down to two years. We believe that we know exactly how to do that.”