Almost two and a half years after the Marshall Fire, the Community Foundation Boulder County is working to distribute the last $13 million of the $43 million it raised for fire survivors, with a target to fully and swiftly disburse the funds.
“We would love to have it paid out by the end of this year,” Tatiana Hernandez, CEO of the community foundation, said.
The most destructive fire in state history, the December 2021 Marshall Fire caused at least $2 billion in damages in Boulder County. Though the community foundation raised $43 million in philanthropic support, that still didn’t come close to meeting the extensive rebuilding and relocation needs. The need for those limited funds highlighted a lack of federal climate disaster support available to local communities, compounded by widespread underinsurance.
The community foundation dedicated about half the $43 million to help underinsured fire survivors rebuild their homes, with the goal of getting as many people to return to the community as possible.
According to Hernandez, the strategy appears to have helped.
“Our community is recovering at an incredible pace,” she told Boulder Reporting Lab. Of some 1,000 homes lost to flames, the community foundation estimates about half will be replaced by this summer, based on applications for building permits and reconstruction funding.
“That’s an enormous number,” Hernandez said. “If we have 50% of homes rebuilt after two and a half years, that’s directly double the national average in half the time.”
But now, it turns out there’s too much money in the rebuild fund and not enough people claiming it. This is partly because, while many rebuilding were underinsured, about a third weren’t and don’t qualify for the fund. Others who did qualify opted out of their share.
“I have met people in this community who both rebuilt their homes, had an insurance gap but chose not to apply for the fund,” Hernandez said. “They felt they were in a financial position to be able to absorb the cost that their household was experiencing.”
Now, the community foundation is deciding how to use the remaining donations for quicker dispersal. A meeting on April 2 at the Superior Community Center gathered fire-affected residents to talk about rebuilding progress and the wildfire fund’s situation. And it asked for suggestions on where more support might be needed.
The foundation has faced criticism for limiting the rebuild fund to those rebuilding on their burned lots, leaving out renters and those who moved by choice or financial need. One solution for the surplus in the rebuild fund could be transferring more to its “unmet needs” fund, which supports renters and low-income fire victims and has seen higher demand than anticipated. That fund initially received $2.5 million.
Hernandez said that around 190 households have benefited from the unmet needs funding, nearly twice the foundation’s initial estimate. This amounts to about $1.9 million given to families who earn around 60% of the area’s median income, or about $65,000 yearly for a family of four.
“Help the most vulnerable. Help the folks for whom a shock like this is life-changing and disastrous,” is what she’s been advised by rebuilding fire survivors.
Community healing and reflection
Alan Halpern lost his home in the Coal Creek neighborhood in Louisville.
“We lost some stuff that is irreplaceable, and we lost a lot of stuff that was crap we should’ve given away years ago,” Halpern told Boulder Reporting Lab. “This is not the best way to clean out your closet, because generally you want the closet.”
Halpern and his wife plan to rebuild on their burned lot, but have taken their time to design a home that is different from the one they lost. They haven’t yet applied for building permits, nor for the rebuild fund they likely qualify for. Many fire survivors have been in limbo, some due to dealing with the trauma that has paralyzed hard decisions.
“For me, this was an opportunity to really think about what do I want, what do I need, what is the impact I want to have on the planet, and how am I going to make choices to reflect that,” Halpern said of his rebuild.
Halpern said he hopes the foundation funds can be used to help the community heal and that time is spent to figure that out. “A lot of what the community foundation has done, not all of it, has been to respond to asset losses,” Halpern said. “But there is a non-hard asset component to these disasters that I think is harder and squishier to address.”
The community foundation initially focused on people whose homes burned, but after hearing from the community, began providing funds to those who had experienced severe smoke damage, too.
“I think their experience has been far more difficult,” Halpern said of those dealing with smoke damage. “I didn’t have to have a conversation with anybody about ‘How much damage is actually done and how do we repair that?’ A FEMA inspector came out and said ‘Yup, your house is gone.’”
He said it was also time to address “the people who are emotionally devastated, or traumatized or just anxious in ways they weren’t because 1,100 of their neighbors lost their homes.”
The community foundation provided substantial funding to Jewish Family Service of Colorado to offer free counseling to anyone who had been evacuated. Halpern acknowledged this but hopes more will be done.
He proposed, among other ideas, supporting a public memorial. He gave the example of an ash tree that burned in his front yard. At the suggestion of his son, he and his wife turned its remains into a dining room table that provides a sense of closure each time he sits at it. Halpern said a version of this closure might be achieved at a community scale.
“To salvage stuff from the disaster, and work with an artist or craftsperson to turn it into something that marks this moment,” he said, “could be really powerful.”
Leadership, insurance concerns post-disaster
More than two years after the disaster, Hernandez, who started at the community foundation in June 2020, voiced frustration that she had been cast into such a central role as a primary advocate for disaster recovery. “There are local leaders in our community who perhaps should have taken a more active role as spokespeople for our community,” she said.
But what worries her more than local leadership, and is maybe an area the community foundation will someday invest in, is the future of insurance. She wonders how Boulder County will cope if rising insurance rates further inflate housing costs or if some homeowners can’t get insurance at all. Already insurers are pulling out of Boulder’s mountain communities.
“I’m from South Florida, so this is not new for me,” Hernandez said of insurers leaving because of hurricanes, “but I certainly didn’t see it happening in Colorado this quickly.”
