Utah's Wildland-Urban Interface legislation — HB 48, and more recently HB 41 — requires local governments to define and maintain WUI boundaries, but the legal text doesn't hand anyone a workflow for actually building those boundaries in GIS. This project, first presented at a quarterly UGEM meeting in 2025 and expanded for UGIC 2026, is that missing workflow: created with the Unified Fire Authority and built to help other jurisdictions maintain compliance rather than reinvent the process from scratch.
How the boundary was built
The boundary draws on statewide wildfire risk datasets — structure exposure, burn probability, and suppression difficulty — layered with USFS WUI and intermix classifications. Local street centerlines and parcel boundaries refine that raw risk surface into a boundary planners and building officials can actually apply: administratively practical, not just risk-accurate. Data sources include Millcreek, Salt Lake County, the Utah Geospatial Resource Center (UGRC), the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), USGS, and the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands (FFSL).
Built to be reused, not just presented
The 2026 version is a full refresh of the original HB 48-focused talk: it adds HB 41 coverage, updates to the Utah Wildfire Risk Assessment Portal (UWRAP), additional supporting datasets, and clarifications that came out of the workflow actually being used in the field since the first version. The goal each time is the same — give planners and GIS staff in other jurisdictions something they can apply directly, not just a case study to admire.
Deliberately separate from the state fee program
One point worth being explicit about: this workflow is entirely separate from Utah's state High-Risk WUI fee program. It's focused specifically on local and county WUI boundary mapping for jurisdictions maintaining HB 48/HB 41 compliance — a distinction that comes up often enough in practice to be worth stating up front.
First presented at a quarterly UGEM meeting in 2025; expanded for UGIC (Utah Geographic Information Council) 2026.