The Roundtable is a coalition of individuals from state and federal agencies, local governments, environmental and conservation organizations, the academic and scientific communities, and industry and user groups, all with a commitment to forest health and fire risk mitigation along Colorado’s Front Range.  The Roundtable’s focus area encompasses 10 Front Range counties: Boulder, Clear Creek, Douglas, El Paso, Gilpin, Grand, Jefferson, Larimer, Park, and Teller.

Members of Roundtable share the following values:

RESILIENT COMMUNITIES
Respect for human safety and well-being requires that we recognize community protection from fire as a priority. This means that we consider not only how best to thin overgrown forests where they abut residential areas, but also the best means of ensuring that future residential development avoids high-risk areas.

HEALTHY LANDSCAPES
Because a crucial aspect of human well-being rests on the right to reside in and visit healthy ecosystems characterized by resilience, integrity, and biodiversity, an equal and connected priority is the maintenance of healthy and sustainable landscapes. In this semi-arid locale, the importance of forests as watersheds serving our population centers confirms that issues of fire management affect every resident, tying the state of the forests to the well-being of urban and suburban communities located well outside of the forest environment.

COLLABORATIVE STRATEGIES
The mixture of public and private land ownership along the Front Range demands collaborative strategies as a way of addressing and reducing the distrust and misunderstanding between and among citizens and governmental entities that have significantly complicated the implementation of comprehensive fire management. The FRFTP Roundtable’s goal is to foster a sense of shared risk, as well as shared responsibility, for developing productive, practical and sustainable solutions.

ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL FACTORS
The Roundtable further recognizes that economic, social and ecological health are necessarily interdependent. Therefore the Roundtable has approached the problem of forest fire with a framework that reflects these three concerns: the ecology of the Front Range forests; economic challenges and opportunities for treatment of the forests; and policy and procedural realities at the federal, state and local levels.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
The Roundtable understands, too, that the effectiveness of its work depends on its ability to engage with and be informed by local communities and interest groups, and therefore accordingly adopted community engagement as the fourth element of our work.