Planning for Fire, Not Just Fighting It: Impact on Maintenance, Cash Flow, and Reserves in Wildfire-Prone Communities
By: Gary Porter FMP, RS, RRC, CPA December 2025
In many wildfire-prone regions, board members and property managers talk about risk in terms of evacuation routes, insurance renewals, and emergency alerts. Gary Porter, founder of Facilities Advisors, sees something else woven through every conversation about fire: the ongoing decisions about maintenance planning, cash flow, and reserve funding that quietly determine whether a community is resilient—or simply lucky.
From his perspective, wildfire risk is not just a public safety concern. It is a building-safety and financial-planning problem. And those are problems you can measure, model, and manage.
Wildfire as a Maintenance Issue
Porter’s work in reserve studies has always emphasized that buildings fail long before they “fall down.” The same logic applies in wildfire country. Communities at the edge of forests, canyons, and open space don’t just need good roofs and fresh paint. They need a maintenance plan that recognizes that embers, heat, and smoke are as real as sun and rain.
That means thinking about wildfire in very practical, physical terms: roofs that resist ignition, siding that doesn’t invite flame spread, decks and railings that don’t act as fuel, and landscape choices that either break up fire paths or accelerate them. To Porter, these are not “extras” or optional upgrades. They are common elements that belong in the reserve study, just like paving, elevators, and boiler systems.
If a component must be repaired, replaced, or upgraded at predictable intervals—and if its failure could compromise the safety or long-term viability of the community—it belongs in the plan.
Maintenance Planning in a Landscape of Risk
For Porter, a good maintenance plan in a wildfire-prone community starts with a clear inventory of components, not a vague sense of risk. He pushes boards to ask concrete questions such as: How many roofs will need Class A fire-rated replacements within the next five, ten, and twenty years? Where are the vulnerable building-to-ground connections, wood fences, or attached structures that create “fire ladders” up to the units? How is vegetation managed along roads, slopes, and property lines—and what does it cost to maintain defensible space year after year?
Those answers become line items, not side notes. Instead of waiting for a fire department inspection or a frightening news report, Porter’s approach is to translate wildfire risk into specific components with useful lives and realistic replacement costs.
The result is a maintenance schedule that recognizes wildfire mitigation as recurring work—clearing brush, trimming trees, cleaning gutters, maintaining fire-resistant surfaces—not a one-time project that disappears after a single “fire-safe” initiative.
Cash Flow: The Hard Conversation
Once that work is identified, the question becomes: how do you pay for it?
Porter has long argued that the most honest way to talk about community finances is through cash flow, not wishful thinking. His reserve studies model the timing of expenditures against projected owner contributions, showing whether a community is headed toward stability or toward special assessments and deferred work.
In wildfire-prone communities, that cash-flow modeling takes on added urgency. Vegetation management, roof replacements, and siding upgrades may come in waves, especially if a community was built out within just a few years. If the plan ignores those realities, the board will be forced to choose between two bad options: raising money in a crisis or postponing critical work.
Porter’s perspective is that neither of those choices is acceptable when the stakes include both safety and property values. A realistic cash-flow plan does three things. It front-loads essential mitigation work where possible, rather than endlessly pushing it into the future. It spreads costs over time in a way owners can bear, using long-term projections rather than year-to-year guesswork. And it identifies funding gaps early, so boards can adjust contributions, communicate with owners, and seek alternative funding sources before an emergency.
Reserves Built for Extreme Events
The heart of Porter’s work is reserve funding, and wildfire reshapes how communities should think about reserves. Traditional reserve studies focus on predictable wear and tear. Wildfire adds the possibility of sudden, catastrophic damage layered on top of that baseline.
Porter does not claim reserves can or should replace insurance. But he does push boards to consider how reserve planning can reduce both the likelihood and the severity of losses. Upgrading to fire-resistant materials may be more expensive up front, but can lower long-term risk and potentially affect insurability. Investing in better access roads, signage, and lighting can improve emergency response and evacuation. Building in a realistic allowance for post-event clean-up and minor repairs can help a community recover faster from near-miss events—embers, smoke damage, spot fires—that fall below insurance deductibles.
In his view, reserves are not just a savings account; they are a strategic tool. When boards align reserve projects with wildfire mitigation priorities, they turn financial planning into risk management.
Governance, Communication, and Course Corrections
Porter’s experience with boards across the country has led him to a simple truth: numbers alone don’t change behavior. Governance and communication do.
In wildfire-prone communities, he encourages boards to use reserve studies and maintenance plans as communication tools with owners, not just regulatory checkboxes. He urges them to explain how specific projects—roof upgrades, siding replacement, landscape changes—tie directly to wildfire mitigation and long-term property values. He also stresses the importance of revisiting their studies regularly, especially after major fire seasons, code changes, or insurance shocks, and being willing to adjust contributions and priorities.
For Porter, the reserve study is a living document. In a world of changing wildfire behavior, that mindset is critical. A plan that made sense ten years ago may no longer be adequate. Communities that treat their reserve study as static are, in effect, planning for a past that no longer exists.
From Vulnerability to Intentional Preparedness
Wildfire-prone communities cannot eliminate risk. But in Gary Porter’s framework, they can move from passive vulnerability to intentional preparedness—one maintenance decision, one cash-flow projection, and one reserve contribution at a time.
Viewed through that lens, wildfire is not just a terrifying “what if.” It is one more environmental condition—like salt air, snow load, or high wind—that must be built into the way a community maintains its buildings, funds its future, and protects the shared value every owner depends on.
Gary Porter, FMP, RS, RRC, CPA is the CEO of Facilities Advisors International and has prepared reserve studies for associations since 1982. As a Facilities Management Professional (FMP) he has training in all phases of facilities management. As a valuation expert he has testified at trial more than 50 times. As a CPA he also focuses on the numbers. Gary is the author of seven books on financial aspects of community associations totaling nearly 5,000 pages and is also the author of more than 400 articles. He has been published or quoted in The Wall Street Journal, Money Magazine, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, The Practical Accountant, Common Ground, The Ledger Quarterly, Timesharing Today, Hawaii Building Trades, and The Florida Community Association Journal. Gary is a past president of CAI (1998) and was a founding member of the CAI California Channel Islands Chapter in 1979. 47 years as a CAI member. He resides in Las Vegas, NV. Facilities Advisors provides reserve study and maintenance planning services to associations nationwide.