Safety Element

What is the Safety Element?

The Safety Element, a chapter of the General Plan, focuses on reducing the potential short and long-term risks resulting from fires, floods, droughts, earthquakes, landslides, climate change, and other hazards.

This Element identifies and describes each hazard and includes goals, policies, and actions to guide the planning and decision-making process. Examples of Safety Element policies include discouraging building on earthquake faults, in flood and very high fire risk areas, and ensuring essential public facilities are maintained during natural disasters.

In Newark, this part of the General Plan is currently included as a component of Chapter 9: Environmental Hazards.

Download the adopted safety element

Why did we update the Safety Element?

The Newark Community Development updated the Safety Element to also incorporate climate adaptation and resiliency strategies, as required by California Senate Bill 379. The Safety Element Update was developed with community input, climate adaptation and resiliency strategies to fulfill this mandate.

Timeline

When local governments in California update their Housing elements, they are also required to prepare an update to the Safety Element. The Safety Element timeline of events ran concurrently with the Housing Element update.

Why is this important?

In recent years, wildfires have been increasing in frequency and intensity across the San Francisco Bay Area, while extreme heat events have broken temperature records and become longer in duration. These trends are expected to continue, which will result in placing more communities at risk of harm. To address these new climate trends and resulting environmental conditions, the Safety Element Update will identify steps that local communities can take to reduce the risks posed by wildfire, flooding, extreme heat, and other climate impacts.