The Agenda with the Missoula County Commissioners

Preparing for wildfire: Which areas are at risk and how to protect your home

• Missoula County Commissioners • Season 2 • Episode 15

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Wildfire has been a natural phenomenon in Missoula County forever; however, with climate change and a growing population leading to more houses in fire-prone areas, our community needs to prepare itself in the event of a fire.  

In this episode, the commissioners speak with Max Rebholz, the Office of Emergency Management’s wildfire preparedness coordinator, to learn which areas of Missoula County have the potential to be impacted by wildfire, how people can prepare their homes ahead of wildfire season, where and how a person can obtain burn permits and financial reimbursement for wildfire mitigation efforts, and more.  

Visit the following sites to learn more about how you can prepare for a wildfire: 

Text us your thoughts and comments on this episode!


Thank you to Missoula's Community Media Resource for podcast recording support!

Commissioner Strohmaier:

Well, welcome back to Tip of the Spear with your Missoula County commissioners. I'm Commissioner Dave Strohmaier. I'm joined by my colleagues, Commissioners Juanita Vero and Josh Slotnick. Today, we have a special treat and as we look outside, it is pouring down rain, but it makes one want to warm up next to a hearth. So get in the mood for this. As long as there has been dry, tinder and fuel and lightning, there has been fire on the landscape of the American West. That is something that this landscape that we live in the Northern Rockies in is adapted to and fire is not an anomaly. However, what is a bit of an anomaly is that there are a lot of folks living in these landscapes that burn. And also there are concerns that as we experience the very real effects of climate change, that fire regimes and the ways in which fires and the duration in which fires burn across this landscape will change. So with that, we are delighted to have with us today a special guest, Max Rebholz, who's our county wildfire preparedness coordinator. And he's going to be talking to us a little bit about the work that he does, about how important it is to mitigate your home and property in advance of wildfire and all that that means. So thanks for joining us, Max.

Max Rebholz:

Yeah, thank you.

Commissioner Vero:

Yeah. And before we get into all things wildfire, just tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you came to this position. Tell us about your journey.

Max Rebholz:

Sure. Yeah. I was about to graduate high school and I was reading the book Collapse by Jared Diamond.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Yeah. Good for you.

Commissioner Vero:

Good.

Max Rebholz:

One of my favorite all time books which is essentially about how climate change and rapid population growth and other factors led to the demise of historical societies like Easter Island, the Mayans, the Vikings in Greenland, but that book is more focused on how to avoid committing ecological suicide. But it was the first time I was really interested in more like the concept of ecological restoration and how humans can best be integrated with their surrounding landscapes. So fire was always the most interesting ecological process to me. I knew how significant fires were, both for, you know, restoring natural processes and disturbance event on their landscapes. And so then it kind of seemed like a natural fit for me to attain my ecological restoration degree from the University of Montana. And I got a minor in fire sciences and fire management as well, and was just really interested in essentially how this natural, sometimes portrayed as a scary event but completely necessary for our landscapes, how we better manage on the landscape, and how humans can just better live with fire. I worked for the Forest Service for a couple of years throughout my college. So my college days I worked out of West Yellowstone, Missoula, Missoula down the Bitterroot, West Yellowstone, just outside of Yellowstone National Park. I was working on hand crews down there and vegetation management crews, and then I worked for a private restoration company in Wisconsin. We did prairie prescribed fire management plans for doing prairie land prescribed fire. We also did a lot of river restoration work, dam removals and river kind of reclamation. And then I saw this job pop up in Missoula about three years ago, I think it was, two and a half, and thought it was good for what my original intent was when I was like 16 years old of what I wanted to do.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

That's great.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Did you grow up in Montana?

Max Rebholz:

No, I grew up in Wisconsin, right outside Madison, Wisconsin.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Oh, great. The Missoula of Wisconsin.

Max Rebholz:

Pretty much. Yeah, it's very, very similar. Yeah.

Commissioner Vero:

And what's a prairie in Wisconsin look like?

Max Rebholz:

You know, it's a little bit more just wetter than like the prairies you might see in eastern Montana.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Tall grass?

Max Rebholz:

Yeah, tall grass, milk flowers. Not as rolling, but just more like kind of meadowy, almost.

Commissioner Vero:

Okay. Yeah. No, I never thought of prairies in Wisconsin, so thank you.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Is there much native prairie left?

Max Rebholz:

Yeah, there's a good amount. I mean, I wouldn't say a ton. That was kind of the goal of that company was a restore that. There's are good amount of native prairie left in Wisconsin. I think it's more known for that southwest corner. And yeah, I moved out to Missoula when I was 17 and then kind of lived out here since then.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

And here you are at 199 West Pine Street.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Right. Right. Over the last few years, we've seen some pretty catastrophic fires, not just in Montana, but all across the west. And of the last couple of years, that catastrophe, I feel like, has taken on a new tenor in that we've literally seen towns and cities burn, urban areas burned, not just the areas nearby. Is the City of Missoula vulnerable the way Sebastopol, California, would be or Talent, Oregon, would be? Are we vulnerable as well?

Max Rebholz:

Yeah. Oh, for sure. A lot of people think that urban areas aren't as high risk than, say, like the more rural areas of the county where the house is actually way up in the mountains in the sticks. But our urban areas are becoming more and more of a vulnerable area for wildland fire. How these community destructions occur typically is fire would happen, sometimes on public lands, but actually new data is showing that most of these wildland urban fire events, they are not fire that started on public land transfer to private land. It's actually started on private land and that causes the community destruction that way. But anyways, it's fire front, fire would happen, it's chucking embers. Embers are landing within the community, landing on nearby homes and things like that. Those homes ignite, and then those homes then cause subsequent ignition from other adjacent homes.

Commissioner Slotnick:

How far can the embers fly?

Max Rebholz:

It's usually a mile or a mile and a half. And, you know, it's not just like one or two embers that causes the damage. It's a blizzard of embers that's hitting the home, burning pinecones, burning tree limbs that can really get lofted way up in the air by the smoke column, land adjacent to the home, cause something that's adjacent to the home to burn then cause the home to burn, and then the neighboring home goes, neighboring home goes. That's kind of how that pattern of destruction typically occurs.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

And in fact, I think what may be lost on many folks, but when you see it, an image like I'm going to describe, it jumps right out at you. Jack Cohen, former fire scientist out at the fire lab here in Missoula, has done a lot of work on the home ignition zone. What that means, mitigations related to it in advance of wildfire, and I've seen a series of photos that he has shown in various presentations of Paradise, California. And what might initially jump out at you in these images are the burnt out hulks or basements of homes and your eye fixates on that, but what you might initially fail to see is that all of the trees surrounding these homes are unburned or certainly not completely devastated or turned to charcoal. And part of the take home message there is exactly what you're describing, Max, in that what you end up with in these urban conflagrations is less of a wildfire than transmission of fire from home to home and less of a wildfire problem than a home ignition zone.

Max Rebholz:

Yeah, absolutely. You can go WildfireRisk.org as well, it's a national website that where you can type in your community that you live in and it'll tell you what your wildfire risk is, your vulnerability score and if you type in Missoula County, on the national scale, Missoula County has a 91% greater risk than any other county in the United States. Wow. So, I mean, our landscapes are meant to burn. Most people know it's a necessary process to maintain ecosystem resiliency. We've had a long history of fires going back to 1910. You know, the Great Burn and how that essentially shaped the fire landscape that we're dealing with today essentially is a large buildup of fuels -

Commissioner Vero:

Wait, you said the sentence that most people know. When do you think most people knew that--

Max Rebholz:

We live in a fire-adapted landscape?

Commissioner Vero:

Exactly. Exactly.

Max Rebholz:

I think just the media does a good job of getting the fire out there. And I think a huge role is people that are working on these fires is public information officers are gaining more knowledge, and they're talking with the media, and there's good fires and bad fires, too, and people are starting to realize that like prescribed fire is a necessary component to ecosystem management, and I think that the media is kind of helping out in just spreading the message of what a good fire is and what a bad fire is.

Commissioner Vero:

And yeah, because when I was a kid, it was like fires had to be out and Smokey the Bear and it was just a different, I mean, granted, I was a child, but that's how I thought about fires. And I didn't appreciate the concept of prescribed fire or living in a fire-adapted community until I was, my gosh, beyond college. And so, yeah, I think media and -

Max Rebholz:

I think that's a big one, just for the common folk maybe, but people in Montana are well versed to, you know, living in an outdoors and being outside a lot too. And they see, you look at the historical photographs, I think those are the most powerful ones of down in the Bitterroot in particular, I think it was like Lake Creek. But there's a photo from like 1905 where it's just an open massive park-like standard Ponderosa pine, and then throughout this major fire exclusion era, you look at that same photo of 1995, and it's just chock full of yellow and Ponderosa pine and Doug Fir and just didn't resemble what it should look like in a historical context.

Commissioner Vero:

Yeah, Slotnick has this great image of Smokey the Bear, like head in his hand sitting on the picnic bench.

Commissioner Slotnick:

So what the question that is coming to my mind on this, I think about that fire exclusion era. It seems like right now when we have these big fires, they're so hard to put out. I'm thinking about Rice Ridge a couple of years ago, basically impossible for humans to put it out. We just await a change in weather, and then to hear about this fire exclusion era, how were we able to put fires out back then and we can't now? It's hard for me to wrap my mind around. Was fire on a different scale? The sort of conventional wisdom is that for years we put every fire out so fuels built up and then climate change made everything dry out, temperatures got warmer, and now we're in this general tinderbox situation. It's hard for me to wrap my mind around a time when we could put fires out when we had less technology than we do now.

Max Rebholz:

Yeah, no, it's getting increasingly difficult. I mean, manpower is a big one. Amount of people, I think, just, yeah, it's a complicated situation. There's a large buildup of fuels. These landscapes that typically burned, you know, every five to 25 years, sometimes even a shorter duration, we haven't had a fire in Pattee Canyon, for example, since 1977. That's an area that typically will experience fire on the order of every five to 25 years. And so now you're talking, you know, 40, almost 50 years without having the fire in that drainage. And that's one little local example. If you paint that picture across the entire west, that's sort of why these massive fires are--it's an era of mega fires that we're dealing with now.

Commissioner Vero:

Strohmaier and Slotnick, you guys are philosophers. I mean, I think there is an element of attitude or national attitude towards what was possible in the thirties and forties, and mankind could tame, bend, harness the wilderness or nature in a way that, yeah, doesn't really serve us now.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

Yeah

Commissioner Slotnick:

I think you're on to something with that.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

I think that is exactly right. And even in some of those earlier eras, there were voices who recognized that indigenous peoples, Native Americans, burned, but it was seen as an act of less than civilized people doing that. So it was seen as an anomaly that should be vanquished from the face of the planet. But you're absolutely right, this sense of "man against fire," and I use that term intentionally, because one of the training videos that I watched when I first started with the Bureau of Land Management decades ago was titled "Man Against Fire." There was this sense of this is our duty to exert control over nature, and we did a pretty good job of it. In fact, you talk about photos, I've seen a photo of teepees along the Clark Fork River over here. And in the background you can see Mountain Jumbo, and it does not have anywhere close to the amount of tree vegetation and tree cover as you do today.

Max Rebholz:

Yeah. I think it was like an historic prairie, you know, historically is deemed as a prairie land ecosystem. Now it's full of Ponderosa, Douglas fir.

Commissioner Slotnick:

So what would you say to folks who live in Pattee Canyon?

Max Rebholz:

As to how to prepare for a wildfire?

Commissioner Slotnick:

I would say prepare's one thing, I guess in my mind, I think for preparing they're like,"we're going to get out," because it's not that deep into the woods. But to hear them say, "well, you know, this area is overdue for fire," kind of makes it sound like it's supposed to burn. But wait a minute, I can't be living where it's supposed to burn. I'm supposed to be living here. There seems to be two forces pushing up against one another. What would you say to someone who lives up there?

Max Rebholz:

Yeah, I mean, I think the whole idea behind viewing Pattee Canyon as a fire adaptive community or pushing the needle so it becomes more of a fire adaptive community is so humans can safely coexist with wildland fire. Just understanding that you're not going to be able to suppress every single wildfire out there as we've seen lately. And the fires are growing with longer intensity and duration. Number one would be harden their home. Steps that you take before fire season are critical. That includes if you have a wood shake roof, replacing the wood roof. If you have wood siding, either install metal skirting around the siding of your home, install a five-foot wide non-combustible zone, implement a lot of those home ignition zone practices, and then depending on what your ecosystem type is up there and what aspect and all that you're facing, you implement some mitigation plans. There's lots of programs available locally, mitigation programs such as like Bitterroot RC&D and United Way of Missoula County, where grants will help pay for them to hire a contractor to help pay for that work to clear out some of the underlying brush and prepare the site to do a prescribed fire on it. And then at that point, those grants will pay for 50 to 75% of the contractual cost to hire that contractor. The remaining 25 to 50% comes from the homeowner, and that can be in the form of either log sales or their time burning slash piles and chipping away vegetation, or just they can do that hard match as well. So there's a lot of programs out there. That would be the first step I would take is look into those programs, get risk assessment done to learn about how you can defend your home from an ember shower--

Commissioner Strohmaier:

How does that process even start? Say I live up the Rattlesnake or Grant Creek or Pattee Canyon or you name the spot in Missoula County and I don't have any great sense of what is my risk or vulnerability? Where does that person begin, and maybe how do you--what is your daily work look like and how do you fit into that?

Max Rebholz:

Yeah. So how they can get a hold of a risk assessment is a couple of different ways. So number one, the best way is probably going to the DNRC's website. DNRC has a request, a wildfire site visit button, on their webpage. Click on that, fill it out online, and then that request will get sent to me and another person at the DNRC, and we'll filter it out to either the fire department or myself will go out there and do it, or the Forest Service, basically who's ever available and qualified to do that risk assessment.

Commissioner Vero:

What's the timeline contact to when someone's out on a person's property?

Max Rebholz:

It's usually like a week, I would say. Just depends on their schedule and my schedule or other people's schedules. Yeah, I'd say like they reach out and in the week we can do it.

Commissioner Vero:

Great.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Yeah, I would say, so Dave lives on Pine Street just a few blocks from here, but certainly less than a mile from the trees that we're looking at right now that are in Hellgate Canyon. Is Dave's house in danger if those trees go up and the wind blows right and there's embers flying a mile west?

Max Rebholz:

Yeah. So we had some modeling done from the 2018 Community Wildfire Protection Plan. Rocky Mountain Research Station here in Missoula produced a wildland urban interface map that basically puts a buffer around a populated area, a mile and a half buffer, that could be impacted from an ember shower.

Commissioner Vero:

So it's all of western Montana?

Commissioner Slotnick:

Yeah, that's what I was going to guess. It's pretty much everywhere, right?

Max Rebholz:

That WUI map, though, showed that the only area that wasn't considered to be within the wildland urban interface was the Southgate Mall and a little strip of Reserve Street.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Everywhere else?

Max Rebholz:

So downtown Missoula, it could, in theory, experience an ember shower and cause destruction to downtown Missoula.

Commissioner Slotnick:

So everyone who doesn't live at the mall, which is most people should think about hardening their houses.

Max Rebholz:

Absolutely. Yep. Hardening their homes. It's not a bad idea to consider preparing for evacuations and thinking about, you know, what you might want to take in an evacuation.

Commissioner Slotnick:

That's a powerful message, Max. I think a lot of people who we all know who live in the City of Missoula, not necessarily out in the county, would think, "oh, there's no way my house is going to burn in a wildfire. I live in an irrigated lawn surrounded by other houses and asphalt and driveways and stores and such."

Commissioner Vero:

It's like the folks in Boulder thought.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Exactly.

Max Rebholz:

Yeah.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

Well, and then actually on a day like today, where it is raining, even though it's hard to think about fire and smoke, this is probably the time you ought to start thinking about what will you do when things eventually dry out and if there was a fire, because when the smoke column is billowing, it's probably not the greatest time to be treating your home. Which reminds me, when the Rice Ridge Fire was burning up in Seeley Lake, I distinctly remember traveling up there and here's a multi-thousand-foot tall smoke column in the background and here's a home with a huge stack of firewood right up against the house. It makes you wonder, what does it take to really have it sink in that I need to be doing something different than what I've done in the past? Because what we typically do is we privatize the benefits of being able to do whatever you want with your property, but then socialize the costs such that when all hell breaks loose, get those retardant bombers flying even though I might not have lifted a finger in advance to do anything within my home ignition zone.

Max Rebholz:

It's kind of a challenge at times to get people to want to be proactive and do the work. It can be tough to get that message across. But I think a really powerful tool that's been working well is neighbors are influenced by their neighbors and they listen to each other. And that's been really huge in Grant Creek, Elk Meadows, in Frenchtown, Double Arrow, out in Seeley, Clinton, Wallace Creek now is just takes one or two kind of community leaders to spread that message of, "look what I'm doing, here's how I'm preparing." And then, you know, no one wants to be the bad neighbor. So they kind of take on those actions on their own, too. It needs to happen on a grander scale, though.

Commissioner Slotnick:

So, it's springtime right now. People are trimming their trees and have piles of slash and things they want to burn. Some folks live in city limits. Some people live out in the county. What are the rules and regulations for burning your yard waste or tree limbing waste if you live in the city or in the county?

Max Rebholz:

Yeah. So in the city, if you live on greater than an acre and you're not burning leaves and grasses and things like that, you must live on greater than an acre, you may qualify for a burn permit, but the Missoula Fire Department will need to come out there and inspect the site, make sure it's good to go before you burn, then you activate it on the day that you burn. Also, with fires in the county or within the city, you can have a cooking fire in the city of Missoula, but a bonfire, you still need a permit for that. If you live outside the city limits and you're trying to burn slash, if you live outside the air stagnation zone, and you can find this information on MCFPA.org and the City of Missoula's website as well, if you live outside that zone, then you still need to get a burn permit and can still burn general outdoor debris sticks and slash and things like that. And you can burn leaves and grass if you live outside that air stagnation zone. But you still need a burn permit.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Where is the air stagnation zone boundary, generally speaking?

Max Rebholz:

It's kind of a hard one to describe.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

It's right round your property in Target Range, Josh.

Max Rebholz:

It's essentially the Missoula bowl. Yeah, like the valley land in Missoula, Rattlesnake included, Grant Creek, areas of the Rattlesnake, areas of Grant Creek, and also, like, Seeley Lake, too.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Does it go out to as far as Frenchtown or Lolo?

Max Rebholz:

Not that far, but if you have under an acre in the City of Missoula and you're trying to burn sticks and things like that, can't do it. You have to go to the Garden City Compost or the compost site.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Which is not a bad option at all. They turn it into compost. It's a good thing.

Max Rebholz:

Yeah, for sure. And if it's done with the intention of fire mitigation in mind, we did have an agreement last year, and we're trying to work on it this year, where after you got your home assessed, you got a coupon where you can take in your stuff for free.

Commissioner Slotnick:

That's great. Another good reason why people should have their homes assessed.

Commissioner Vero:

So, give us some common comments or the common questions you hear. I mean, you hear from a broad range of folks. I mean, whether it's agency representatives, higher ups to low-level staff, and then a variety of private property owners all across the county. So, lay it on us. What's the key take home messages or myths you need to bust.

Max Rebholz:

With the public, visiting with homeowners and residents in the WUI, it's kind of a common narrative of they invite you out for their risk assessment to look at all the surrounding trees and forested landscape, and they're kind of surprised that we focused really hard on just the home itself and talking about things they can do to the home itself. I think people are shocked when, you know, I'm not recommending to remove that tree that's ten, 15 feet away from the home and I'm telling them that you should replace your wood deck or install a metal angle flashing or screen all your vents with am eighth-inch metal screen. Kind of going through that home ignition zone checklist. It just totally shifts their mind. Even when, you know, I go out and visit and do these home risk assessments, I usually come out with just examples of photos. It's just a great storyteller. Go out there and show them photos of Paradise and show them photos of Colorado Springs, Waldo Canyon, and then I think it kind of clicks at that moment, and they're like,"okay, I'm not really concerned about that one Ponderosa pine that's ten feet away from the home. I'm more concerned about how I can retrofit my deck to a survive an ember shower," because the deck is, in reality, a higher ignition source than probably that Ponderosa pine would be, besides the needles that fall from the Ponderosa pine.

Commissioner Slotnick:

But that's such an important message. I think that's the nugget right there.

Max Rebholz:

And so I think that myth is starting to get busted a little bit more and more. Photos are a great example of when people see that and like, "oh wow, there's nothing else that burned around. That golf course didn't burn at all," and they see the homes.

Commissioner Vero:

I'm thinking of all the material that I have on my deck. Flammable fabrics--

Commissioner Slotnick:

Yeah, me, too.

Commissioner Vero:

Ooh, yeah.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

Yeah. Going back to the Rice Ridge example, it might have been on that same trip that I was up there to Seeley, and a little bit embarrassed to say this, but I stopped by our Missoula County satellite office and was horrified to see a complete coating of pine needles on the roof of our very own facility. We were able to get after it and take care of that. But it's a county wide issue, and it's an educational process, I think, for all of us.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Max, before we close, could you give us any nugget of wisdom, anything interesting you've come across in a book or an article or podcast you want to share? It doesn't have to be about fire. If it is, that's great. It can be about anything. What kind of lit your brain up lately?

Max Rebholz:

The Richest Hill podcast. I just checked it out, and that was like one of the best ones I've listened to in recent memory. I love that one. I was reading a great book. It was a fire book. It was called Between Two Fires by Stephen Pyne, except I lost it on an airplane.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

Oh, jeez.

Commissioner Slotnick:

Oh, somebody get Max that book.

Max Rebholz:

I know I only made it like 200 pages through, but it was just fascinating, just kind of laying out the groundwork between where we were, where in the whole fire suppression era, you know, where we were come 1910, 1911, the policies that shaped it and essentially how we got to where we are now and what can be done moving forward to make sure we don't make a lot of the same mistakes that we in reality are currently making.

Commissioner Slotnick:

What are some of those mistakes?

Max Rebholz:

I know the county is working on trying to implement the WUI code and trying to get that going, and I think that's one of those things that really can't happen soon enough. Just all the old construction that we have in this town is really susceptible to fire, and it's really tough to get people to fork over the money, that cost, to implement that work. And that's actually one of the things that's tough with these grants, is that the grants that are available to help homeowners prepare for a wildfire, they really only address the vegetation component. If you want to remove some trees in your property and some understory ladder fuels, there's numerous grants and organizations available throughout the county that can help you get that work done. But if you want to do a project where you're looking at retrofitting your deck for a wildfire, install screening, install a non-combustible zone, replace a roof, to my knowledge, there hasn't been really any grants available or any programs available to help address that.

Commissioner Slotnick:

And that's what we got to do.

Max Rebholz:

And in reality, that's the most important thing that you can do.

Commissioner Slotnick:

What you said was so good, I just want to repeat it. The most important thing you can do.

Max Rebholz:

Yeah, the most important thing you can do is harden your home, more so than cut a tree.

Commissioner Slotnick:

And unless you live in Southgate Mall, that means everyone in the city of Missoula and everyone in the county in Missoula.

Max Rebholz:

Right. And I'm not saying forest management isn't important by any means. It's just both are important. And as a private landowner or homeowner that lives basically outside Southgate Mall, everyone should be considering what they can do to harden their home.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

And I think that's a super important point, that there are perfectly good and valid and important reasons to do landscape scale treatments and vegetation management, but that's predominantly for ecological restoration purposes. That's not necessarily going to save your home. And I think we've confused--I have not read the book that you mentioned, but it sounds like a good one. But I suspect that Steve Pyne probably is hitting on some of these points as far as confusion of the rationales behind why we do what we do.

Max Rebholz:

Yeah, it's an exhausting amount of detail of where we were before. You might be really into it, but it's a bit of a slower read, you know, just diving through all the different policies it goes into and it's alot.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

Well, clearly it's come to a screeching halt with you since you've lost the book.

Commissioner Slotnick:

So we might remedy that for you as a thank you gift. Well, thanks.

Commissioner Vero:

Thanks so much.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

Thanks so much.

Max Rebholz:

Yeah.

Commissioner Slotnick:

I really appreciate it, and thanks for all the work you do for our county.

Max Rebholz:

I appreciate that. Thank you so much.

Commissioner Strohmaier:

Thanks, Max.