By Brooke Frickleton, Deputy Legal Director & Staff Attorney

In the first week of August 2026, three wildfires — Old Trails, Fairview, and Autumn Lane — tore through the unincorporated fringe of Spokane County, burning more than 11,000 acres, destroying or damaging an estimated 850 to 1,000-plus structures, and forcing nearly 67,000 people to evacuate.* The Old Trails Fire alone ignited near Airway Heights, jumped the Spokane River within hours, and swept into Indian Trail and Five Mile Prairie, burning more than 3,600 acres and damaging or destroying 694 structures. Amid the destruction, the community’s response has been genuinely inspiring: public schools opened day camps for displaced families, and neighbors organized food and boot drives for the wildland firefighters working around the clock on the fire lines.

This is now the most destructive wildfire event in the county’s history, devastating the same unincorporated areas where Futurewise has spent more than a decade challenging the county’s expansion of low-density development into rural, wildfire-prone land.

Futurewise’s opposition to outward growth in these areas goes back to 2013, when Spokane County expanded its Urban Growth Area by 4,125 acres into Five Mile Prairie and Palisades — the same Five Mile Prairie the Old Trails Fire swept through this August. Futurewise and neighborhood groups appealed that expansion to the Growth Management Hearings Board, citing inadequate public notice, landslide-prone terrain, and insufficient roads, police, and school capacity; the Washington Court of Appeals upheld the ruling against the county in 2015.

Futurewise returned to the Growth Management Hearings Board and then the courts over Spokane County’s 2020 Comprehensive Plan, challenging its deficient capital-facilities element. In 2022, the Washington Court of Appeals held that the County had to inventory and plan for publicly owned capital facilities across its entire planning area, not only within urban growth areas. These fights were not originally framed around wildfire, but the throughline is direct: every acre added to a fringe unincorporated growth area is an acre added to the wildland-urban interface.

By 2025, wildfires had become explicit in Futurewise’s case. Comments on the county’s 2046 Comprehensive Plan update warned that large areas of unincorporated Spokane County sit in the wildland-urban interface, that wildfire risk is worsening, and that mitigation should include directing growth away from the WUI fringe. These comments were submitted more than a year before Old Trails, Fairview, and Autumn Lane proved how dire these risks are.

The county’s own Climate Vulnerability Assessment had already found Spokane County ranks higher than 82 percent of U.S. counties in wildfire risk and that residential development is expanding into high fire-risk areas, citing the 2023 Gray Fire and Oregon Road Fire, which had already burned 20,000 acres and destroyed more than 300 homes before this year’s fires even started. That data has not yet translated into binding policy. Futurewise is preparing to submit comments on the county’s draft Climate Element arguing that its wildfire policy, CE 8.2, only directs the county to “promote” fire-resistant materials and “identify strategies” for reducing WUI development pressure. This aspirational language that does not restrict new construction in high-hazard areas, adopt a WUI code, or bind the county’s own Community Wildfire Protection Plan into enforceable development regulations.

Citing the Growth Management Hearings Board’s August 2026 ruling in South Sound Bird Alliance v. Thurston County, which held that “vague general policies without clear, action-forcing implementation measures” fail the Growth Management Act’s resiliency mandate, Futurewise’s forthcoming comments will encourage the county to consider code revisions such as as: WUI code prohibiting new residential development in high and extreme hazard areas, mandatory defensible-space standards, and required undergrounding of power lines in high-risk zones — a direct response to Avista’s recurring shutoffs in wind-and-slope-prone Indian Trail.

Spokane County’s 2026 Hazard Mitigation Plan, released just a few months before the fires, is a genuine step forward. But a hazard mitigation plan identifies risk and funds preparedness; it does not stop new subdivisions from being approved in the highest-hazard parcels it maps. Closing that gap is exactly what Futurewise’s advocacy on comprehensive plans and specifically climate elements is pressing for.

With the 2046 Comprehensive Plan still pending, the county’s choice is now unavoidable: keep directing growth outward into wildland-urban interface land its own data calls high-risk, or direct it inward, through infill where the fire, water, and safety infrastructure already exists.

*Futurewise’s Deputy Legal Director, Brooke Frickleton, lives in the City of Spokane. While she was not personally displaced, she knows people who were and others who lost their homes.