Overgrowth issues in our urban/suburban Parkway would be ideally handled by a regular maintenance program that keeps the situation in check so that extreme measures with a very dangerous potential downside (like controlled burns accidently igniting fires on the many wood-shingled roofs of homes lining the Parkway and severely degrading air quality) do not have to be resorted to;.

Also, the illegal camping by the homeless, from which several fires have reportedly begun, has to be reduced substantially.

However, the Parkway has been running a maintenance deficit every year for several years and overgrowth control has not been done (let alone substantially reducing illegal camping) creating the dangerous situation we now have, of tinderbox vegetation and the consideration of potentially dangerous alternatives.

On a scale of 1 to 10 we could grade various attributes of the parkway and determine an overall score to establish its value. Then if the burning lowered the score too much burning could be denied for that time period/year.

For instance, beach erosion might be rated a 9 one year and and a 5 the next. If burning was being discussed during a 4 erosion year, then lowering the value of the parkway further by burning would not be permitted.

It seems to me that these decisions really need to result from some sort of quantified judgement scenario to establish the parrkway’s value to the communities that it passes through. After all, establishing hard and fast policies for a living thing (the parkway) is bound to fail

Just thinking out loud.