In the wake of the January 2025 Los Angeles fires, Blackaby initiated work with the Berkeley Fire Department on a "Zone Zero" ordinance requiring homeowners in high-risk areas to maintain a 5-foot ember-resistant barrier around their homes. The ordinance passed unanimously by the full council in June 2025 and took effect January 1, 2026, applying initially to approximately 1,200 homes between Grizzly Peak Boulevard and Wildcat Canyon Road and near Panoramic Hill.
Berkeley joined San Diego and South Lake Tahoe as among the first cities in California to implement Zone Zero standards ahead of a statewide rule that the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection has repeatedly delayed. The ordinance has been cited by wildfire experts and officials elsewhere as a model for local action in the absence of state movement.
Blackaby secured a $1 million CalFire grant to help low-income households and seniors pay for required landscaping changes, is working with a private donor to subsidize metal fence and gate replacements, and authored a tax credit mechanism allowing homebuyers to redirect a portion of the real estate transfer tax they pay at closing toward home-hardening and vegetation management. A working group including ordinance critics has been convened to review the Wildlife Urban Interface Vegetation code, and the city is organizing neighborhood workshops and enlisting UC Berkeley landscape architecture students to develop sample designs.
A recall effort led by a neighbor opposed to the ordinance was filed in early December 2025. As of January 2026 it had not cleared the newspaper publication requirement and would need signatures from 25% of registered voters in District 6 (approximately 2,578 people) within 90 days of doing so.
The Berkeley hills fire risk is documented, severe, and local. This is a Priority 1 (P1) public safety problem the city has legal authority to address. Blackaby identified it, worked with the Fire Department to develop a technically grounded response, built unanimous council support, and moved ahead of state inaction rather than using state delay as cover for local inaction.
The recall opposition does not diminish the score — it tests it. A council member who retreats from evidence-based public safety work because some constituents dislike the landscaping implications is doing the opposite of governing. Blackaby's public response has been to convene critics in a working group, open the scientific question of noncombustible vegetation, and continue implementation. That is the correct posture: responsive to process concerns, not to the underlying pressure to abandon the policy.
Blackaby did not address a public safety mandate by asking Berkeley taxpayers to fund it. He secured $1M from CalFire — external state money — for low-income compliance assistance, recruited a private donor for fence and gate subsidies, and structured a tax credit using the existing real estate transfer tax rather than a new levy. This is the fiscal creativity that P1 problems require: identifying the problem, building the policy solution, and finding the funding outside the general fund.
The approach also demonstrates understanding of the equity dimension — the compliance burden falls heaviest on fixed-income households, and the funding mechanisms specifically target that gap.