Senate Jt Emerg Mgmt Nat Resources — 2026-05-13

At this point let me turn it over to my colleague the Chair of Emergency Management Senator Stern Thank you Ms Chair Be brief and just say thanks in advance for everyone engaging showing up across so many jurisdictional lines These issues are complicated, so I'm really proud of the Senate, not just today, but over the last few days. I want to appreciate the work of our Vice Chair here also, Mr. Sayardo, as well as our Budget Sub-2 Chair joining us here today. honored to have you, Ms. Reyes. Yeah, we'll be looking at the money side of the equation somewhat today, and especially when it comes to how we've been spending and what the future of finance in this sector can look like. And those of you who had to sit through these hearings with me over the last few years will find it yeah, maybe repetitive, but hopefully not for everybody. I do think we still suffer from a disparity in how we've approached wildfire resilience over the past few years, and that's really what I want to try to interrogate today is, you know, we learned yesterday about $40 billion of wildfire mitigation funding has been spent by utilities on minimizing their risk given their very unique liability framework. We understand why so much is being spent there, and we have authorized and helped subsidize much of that. And over here, we will learn today that we've spent not just, yeah, about 1% of that on community hardening. So we have a paradigm where we're chasing not just utility risk, but also forest management in a way that doesn't actually recognize risk to property and risk to communities. And that's the paradigm I think we have to start to change here. So that's where I'll be focused on today and look forward to all the commentary. I'll turn it over to – where should we go, the vice chair? Yeah.

Chair Reyes. Thank you so much, Mr. Chair. As we know, the devastating impacts of wildfires have affected Californians across the state, whether it's through horrendous air quality due to the wildfire smoke or wildfires destroying communities overnight. As a result, the legislature has prioritized wildfire prevention and resilience activities in the budget in the last several years. CAL FIRE's funding, for instance, to perform wildfire resilience activities have grown over the past 10 years from about $100 million in 2015-2016 to almost $700 million in the budget 2015-2016. In addition, the legislature successfully put on the ballot and the voters approved Prop 4, which provided $1.5 billion for wildfire and forest resilience activities. However, the state cannot do it alone. Much of the funding that we have relied on for wildfire prevention and resilience, such as Prop 4 and GGRF are either one time in nature or at significant risk. Now, many of us have already reviewed the 107-page report on enhancing California's resiliency to natural catastrophes, which was in response to SB 254 authored by our Chair Becker. It's very informative. But given the current challenging budget outlook, we all need to think outside the box, just as my colleague has mentioned. We need to find more ongoing, sustainable solutions for communities to truly rebuild and adapt to the new realities of wildfires in California. vegetation management, community and home hardening, prescribed fires. These are all activities that are not just one and done, but require careful planning, coordination and sustained efforts. State funds are just one piece of the puzzle. This will require partnerships at the local, regional and federal levels as well as utilities to truly address these issues. I appreciate the informational hearings on this issue, including the one today. It's important that we talk about these issues.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. To be rephrased, the millions in prevention is far better than the billions in recovery. With that, I'm very interested in hearing what the panelists have to say.

Good morning chairs Becker and Stern and other members of the committee is Brian Metzger from the Legislative Analyst Office Our office was asked to provide a brief overview of state wildfire resilience funding and in preparation for this hearing, we prepared a handout that we will use to guide our remarks today. On page one of the handout, we provide a figure that shows the increase in state funding for wildfire resilience activities over the past several years. From 2018-19 to 2025-26, the state has appropriated about $4.7 billion across a variety of activities, which we break down in more detail over the next couple of pages. Funding peaked in 21-22 at $1.1 billion, with subsequent years of funding ranging from $450 to $750 million. It is important to note that the funding sources for state wildfire resilience activities have changed over time. In 2018-19 and 19-20, it was exclusively from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund at $200 million. In 2020-2021 to 2023-24, a majority of that funding came from the General Fund due to surpluses that the state experienced at that time. And in 2024-25 and 25-26, an increasing amount came from Proposition 4, the climate bond passed by voters in November of 2024. On page 2 of the handout, we provide our first detailed breakdown of the state wildfire resilience funding that is focused primarily on general fund and GGRF-funded activities. This figure does not include Prop 4 funding, which we'll cover on the next page. There are a lot of programs on this table, so I'm not going to go through all of them. We aggregate the GGRF funding into two main programs for forest health and wildfire prevention, as well as fuels, crews, research and monitoring. And that's about $1.5, $1.6 billion. And up until 2025-26, this funding was continuously appropriated for use on a variety of activities with a specific percentage split established in statute. As we will mention later in the handout, the new cap and invest structure under SB 840 changed how this appropriation would be calculated. Proposed trailer billing, which also would, if adopted, remove the current percentage split in statute. You also will note that compared to other programs on this list, notably less funding, about $65 million, has been appropriated for community hardening programs, such as defensible space inspections and home hardening. On page three of the handout, we provide our second detailed breakdown of state wildfire resilience funding, this time focused on the wildfire and forest resilience chapter of Prop 4. Again, there are a lot of programs in this table, but I would highlight that about $600 million of the $1.5 billion available in this chapter has been appropriated. An additional $314 million is proposed in the governor's budget to be allocated across many of the programs with funding remaining. Taken together, $4.1 billion in general fund and GGRF and $600 million in Prop 4 gets you to the $4.7 billion we mentioned at the top. On the last page of the handout, we explain that one-time state funding for wildfire resilience activities will decrease in the coming years. Absent Prop 4, there are few sources of ongoing state funding for this work. The primary source is though with the adoption of the new cap and invest structure, the amount of projected revenues in a given fiscal year will determine if and how much funding may be available for wildfire resilience activities. Up to $200 million may be available, but only after higher priority programs and projects are funded. In 26-27, for example, the governor's budget projects GGRF revenues will only be able to fund about $142 million in wildfire resilience. activities. Also recently proposed amendments to the cap and invest programs regulations would if adopted reduce GGRF revenues by roughly half and likely leave no funding for wildfire resilience activities. The other source of state funding is CAL FIRE operations funding for resource management and fire prevention which supports activities like defensible space inspections. State funding however is not the only source of wildfire resilience funding as you mentioned utilities have collected billions of dollars for fire prevention activities that are largely related to electricity transmission and federal programs have also historically provided funding after a major disaster declaration and that concludes my remarks and happy to take questions

Thank you for the question. That is a very important point about the maintenance after the projects are completed. And our understanding is that there have been efforts in the administration to think about funding for maintenance as a part of grant programs. So thinking about how if we're giving out grants, there could be a certain portion of those grants maintained for maintenance efforts. But in terms of the overall magnitude of kind of how much funding would be needed for maintenance over the long term, We've seen, you know, academic articles and other sources that put it, you know, in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars. But I don't have a specific figure for you right now.

One of the comments made, thank you, Mr. Chair. One of the comments made in the prior hearing was what about having fossil fuels pay their fair share? We know that there was a bill introduced because of climate change and the impact of fossil fuels on climate change and knowing that climate change has a lot to do with these wildfires. Having fossil fuel industry also pay their fair share. Any thoughts on that?

Thank you. I also want to commend you on a very good report. It helps us to look at the numbers and to see what the numbers have been over the years and to see where we are today. Thank you.

I'll just try to tee up the rest of the panel because I know you all hear from Cal OES, from Office of State Fire Marshal, and then we have Patrick Wright waiting on the line with the task force. I guess just to tee that piece up from the LA, I want to make sure I'm reading this right. So if you do it by percentage at least, since 2018, I'm seeing about 1.5% of funds have gone to community hardening and 98.5% have gone to other stuff. Forest sector, economic stimulus, science, fuel breaks, resilient forests and landscapes. Am I reading that right? So about like less than 2% of the state funding has been so far used on community-based things that are sort of property and structure-based.

And do you have any data on the results of the overall funding? I know we do have some data around how the pilot's gone around the community hardening piece specifically, but do you have a sense, like for all these other programs, is there a metric that we use to sort of evaluate performance based on property loss avoided or structural risk reduction versus, my understanding is these are mostly either acreage-driven goals, carbon-driven goals, things other than sort of public safety. Is that a fair assessment?

Yeah, my understanding is that the performance, and this might not be a fire marshal question for the remainder of the panel, maybe it's a bigger CAL FIRE question or a natural resources agency question, but that the performance is judged based on the success, at least for some of the major forest and landscape pots, as well as the fuel breaks piece, that they're basically judging success on suppressing 95 percent of all ignitions at 10 acres or less. So it's not based on how many houses burned down, but it's based on sort of acreage and ignition goals. And I guess that's the question is if there's enough flexibility in statute or in the funding sources to allow for a different kind of metric to drive it. Do you believe that there's discretion to, say, have some of those more community-based metrics even in, say, a fuel break program or a fire prevention grant program or even in Forest Health to say, you know, that is there anything in statute preventing that from being more flexible?

Okay. Jump in. Yeah. Let's turn to Senator Kilbolland first.

Why is the general fund not on the table here Thank you for the question Senator Cabaldon I don want to preclude the option of potentially using one general fund for this purpose Our analysis was specifically focused on, based on current law and policy, and also based on the current budget condition that we have, you know, established under the governor's budget, and not necessarily on, you know, tomorrow's May revision or what's to come, that, you know, the availability of general fund is quite limited for particular expenditures at this time. That's not to say that this should live solely within the realm of GGRF, for example. It's just the decision that's been made within the current cap and invest structure as well as within kind of current legislative and administration priorities to kind of look at wildfire resilience spending that way. But certainly there could be different decisions made. And again, we've also got funding coming from Prop 4 that's also providing some additional support. But I wouldn't want to say that general fund is off the table or that there's not a potential for using it for this purpose. It's just based on the current budget condition. That's not something that we've contemplated.

So previously, yeah, prior to last year, the Cal Fire operational budget, or at least that piece of it, was not GGRF funded. Is that right? That's correct. So there was budget bill language that was adopted in 2526 that was contingent on whether the general fund was projected to experience a deficit. There would be a certain amount of GGRF that would be used for Cal Fire's budget. And so in 26-27, $1.25 billion of GGRF is being used for CAL FIRE's operational budget, $750 million of which is coming from the legislative discretionary piece of the cap and invest structure, and $500 million of which is coming from the interest earnings on the cap and invest fund. Yeah.

with you as well. We've seen the study that's referenced in the report and do acknowledge those numbers. Yeah, okay, good. Well, I think that sets the table a little bit for all of us. So,

please go ahead. All right. Well, good morning, Chair Becker, Chair Starr, members of the committee, Daniel Berlant, California State Fire Marshal, and on behalf of CAL FIRE Director Joe Tyler, thank you very much for having us today and a very important conversation, not just on the cusp of the report being released, but as we continue to develop the future of the Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan and how we take and are taking many of the recommendations and many of the points you are making today under consideration and inclusion into the future of that action plan. The report pursuant to your bill, Senate Bill 254, presents an important and timely message for California. As you have already all mentioned, the state's wildfire crisis is no longer solely a fire suppression challenge. It's an economic challenge. It's an insurance challenge. It's a housing challenge. It's a public safety challenge, and ultimately it is a resilience challenge that requires a whole-of-society response. We believe the report correctly recognizes that California cannot respond to a catastrophic wildfire after disaster strikes. We must reduce risk before the next fire is ignited. And this is exactly the direction that Cal Fire Office of the State Fire Marshal's Community Wildfire Preparedness Strategy has been moving towards for years. California is, as you all know, facing a wildfire environment unlike anything in our history. Climate-driven extremes, prolonged drought, historic tree mortality, and decades of fuel accumulation have fundamentally changed the scale and the intensity of the wildfires that we are responding to across the state. Fifteen out of the twenty most destructive wildfires in just the past decade have occurred with just in the past decade. Entire communities, as you know and as many of you represent, have been devastated in a matter of hours. So at the same time, more Californians than ever are living in wildland urban interface areas, and that is where the homes and development meet wildland or open vegetation. And Chair Becker, to your point and to the notes there, we believe that today there are roughly 4 million homes located in California's wildland urban interface. And here's the most important part of this fact. 90% of those homes were built before today's modern adoption of building standards. So that gives us somewhat of a benchmark of the challenge in the community that we face. The consequence of this growing risk extend far beyond, though, the fire itself. Families face increasing insurance costs, loss of coverage altogether. Local governments struggle with evacuation planning and infrastructure needs. Utilities, as was mentioned, face extraordinary pressures to harden their systems while maintaining affordable and reliable energy. And vulnerable communities often bear the greatest burden because they have the fewest resources to prepare and recover. And I very much acknowledge that those of you who have had recent wildfires in your districts understand this firsthand. Now, this SB 254 report captures the reality very clearly. It concludes that California long resilience depends on sustained investments in risk reduction and Chair Stern to your point investments in stronger community preparedness improved coordination across agencies and stakeholders and policies that reduce catastrophic losses before they occur the report identifies several overarching policy pathways and I'm focused really in to the risk reduction into the community space here among those significantly include a commitment to community wildfire risk reduction, expanded mitigation investments and incentives, greater alignment between the insurance market and resilience actions, improved local capacity and technical support, better use of shared data and science, as well as long-term strategies that prioritize resilience over recovery alone. Now, these are not abstract concepts. They are practical recommendations that really mirror the direction that California has been advancing through the state's wildfire and forest resilience action plan. Now, in the next action plan that you see, we have been developing a very focused area in what we're calling the community wildfire preparedness strategy. And this strategy is built around a simple principle. Wildfire preparedness must happen at multiple scales simultaneously. Wildfire, excuse me, that strategy rests really on three interconnected components. First, home hardening. Research continues to show that embers are responsible for a majority of the home ignitions during wildfires. These embers can often travel miles ahead of the fire flame itself, igniting vulnerable components of the structures and again leading to complete destruction in those communities. Now, I will say, though, a moment of pride here. California has been a national leader in addressing that threat. For nearly 20 years, we have had state adopted some of the nation's first wildfire building standards for new construction in wildfire-prone areas. And research and data has continued to show that those homes have a significantly higher chance of surviving wildfires. And so, basically put, our code works. Studies continue to show, though, that demonstrate that even homes built to those modern wildfire resilient standards, while they, again, significantly survive, it's those that were not built to the standard that are remaining to be susceptible. And some of the higher standards include things like ember-resistant vents, Class A roofs, non-combustible siding like stucco or fiber cement, tempered glass windows, enclosed eaves, ignition-resistant construction material, all of which help us improve the survivability. But we have to recognize that the challenge before us, as I mentioned, is most homes that are at risk were built before that standard. And that is why retrofitting existing homes has become such an important priority. Now, the second piece of our strategy is defensible space. This remains one of the most effective and immediate tools available to homeowners and communities, creating and maintaining buffers around structures reduces overgrown and hazardous vegetation right up around them. It interrupts pathways for fire spread. That is something we saw in the LA fires, a much more urban conflagration, but it was those flammable pathways that allowed the fire to travel from home to home to home like dominoes. Defensible space cuts that pathway. And more importantly for us, for our firefighters, it provides a safe operational space during fires to take a stand and protect a community Now at CAL FIRE we have continued Thank you to your support and investments to expand our defensible space inspections public education and local resources statewide We have also increased the emphasis on the ember resistance zone a five safety zone immediately around the building, because science continues to show that combustible materials closest to the home often determine whether or not that structure is going to survive the wildfire. The third piece of our strategy is neighborhood level mitigation. Wildfire preparedness does not stop at the property line. Communities survive together, or they don't survive at all. Programs such as FireWise USA, FireSafe Councils, community fuel reduction projects, evacuation route improvements, shaded fuel breaks, and neighborhood scale home hardening all recognize that wildfire resiliency must occur collectively. Now, Governor Newsom has made streamlining wildfire regulations one of the hallmarks of his administration while maintaining California's nation-leading environmental protections. And Senator Ciarto, to some of your comments about some of the CEQA challenges your community has faced, in 2025, the governor issued an executive proclamation to expedite critical fuels reduction projects while protecting public health and the environment. And through this streamlining process, which just expired on May 1st, projects that are being improved are being approved in little as 30 days, reducing timelines that, yes, often have taken well over a year or more. So far, 383 projects have been approved through this streamlining process and have now been fast-tracked, and we still have more that are under review. The SB254 report specifically emphasizes that community-scale mitigation has to occur across sector coordination. It's essential to reducing our losses. And while CAL FIRE strategy has already reflected that philosophy, we cannot rely on a single solution, and we certainly can't respond our way out of this crisis. True resiliency requires a layered protection across parcels, across neighborhoods, across landscapes. Now, the Office of the State Fire Marshal within CAL FIRE is uniquely positioned to lead California's community wildfire preparedness and risk reduction strategy. Because we're not only able to leverage our statewide fire prevention authorities, our building standards expertise, our wildfire science, our local fire service coordination, but as well our public education, all under one mission-driven organization. And so while CAL FIRE is obviously very focused on wildfires and response, within the department, our office, 365 days a year, is solely focused on fire prevention and community resilience preparedness. The Office of State Fire Marshal already serves as the state's lead agency for defensible space regulations, for enforcement, for education, for wildfire building codes, as I've mentioned, fire hazard severity zone mapping, fire prevention policy, as well as community risk reduction projects. We work directly with local governments, with fire-safe councils, with the building industry, with the insurance industry, with fire-safe councils, and with residents across the state, all giving us that operational reach necessary to translate policy into on-the-ground action. Importantly, the SB254 report calls for an integrated approach that aligns mitigation, resiliency, insurance incentives, technical assistance, and long-term risk reduction. And that's precisely the work that our team at CAL FIRE is doing every day. Through our Wildfire Mitigation Advisory Committee that meets every single month we have established a formal structure to coordinate across the stakeholders and across the sectors We bring together experts from the fire service at the local level, insurance, utilities, local governments, academia, and community organizations, all to help us align our policy and to share best practices and advance statewide mitigation strategies. Wildfire preparedness and resiliency can't exist in silos. It requires connection between state policy into local implementation, combining science with enforcement, scaling preparedness from the individual homes all the way to the entire community. And the Office of State Fire Marshal has both the statutory authority and, again, that operational experience to serve as the statewide backbone for community wildfire preparedness. Now, the scale of the challenge before us is enormous. Again, I don't need to tell you that. You all understand that firsthand. But California is not starting from zero, and I think that's important to understand and recognize. And the recommendations outlined in the report validate much of the work already underway and validate that we must continue that focus to expand the effort. Back to the community wildfire preparedness strategy that I've referenced, we're already working to operationalize it. We're already working to implement many of the recommendations through science-based mitigation, cross-sector coordination, neighborhood scale, resiliency and targeted financial assistance and incentives driven by risk reduction. And Senator Stern, I heard you loud and clear and look forward to talking more about how we do that. But as I've mentioned, and the piece that I think is really exciting from my perspective and from the team, we are updating the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan. You'll hear from the director of the task force momentarily, but we are actively incorporating key recommendations from the report into our strategy and into our work. Now, initiatives that you will likely see in that action plan range from emphasizing regional planning at the county level, wildfire mitigation validation to actually validate that the work is occurring, establishing new community wildfire data standards and metrics. And the report reinforces that, again, resiliency, as I mentioned at the beginning, requires us to do more than emergency response. We have to have a coordinated mitigation. We have to have better risk information, stronger building practices, and investments into those communities to truly reduce the vulnerabilities before the disaster occurs. And that is exactly the direction California is taking. And again, I thank you all for your investments because we are expanding on financial assistance. We are improving risk assessment tools, strengthening model local ordinances, and increasing technical assistance. But as our partners at the LAO have very well identified, much of it has been on one-time funding, funding we are grateful for, funding that continues to matter. But we are charged with having to have a conversation of how do we sustain this. And I'm just going to answer Senator Ciardo's question here. In the latest wildfire prevention grant funds that we made available last week, $70 million through the climate bond, we are prioritizing in our fuel reduction category maintenance over new projects, making sure that the investments you have made over the last several years, that we are maintaining those, not just putting new work on the ground that's critical, not just chasing acres, but maintaining the work and the investment you have made. But most importantly, the report underscores that preparedness must occur at the community scale, and we are working to move beyond just reporting on acres, and that's an important metric. It's been an important metric in the last decade for us to change our philosophy, our emergency response philosophy. Our firefighters focused on responding from one emergency to the next, uh, using, The metric of acres treated helped us really track that work metric of the work that our firefighters were doing. But it also, you know, we have to continue to look at moving away from what I like to call random acts of mitigation. It's great that we're investing in these projects. Don't get me wrong. But when they're not to scale and when they're not interconnected, they are random. We have to focus on using wildfire risk reduction modeling to identify the right mitigations in the right place. And we are piloting tools to do just that, analyzing risk, providing a decision-making planning platform that best reduces the risk while providing the highest return on investment. This platform combines AI, geospatial data, wildfire science, all to prioritize which mitigations and which treatments optimize the resources and measures the outcome across communities and forests and fire-prone landscapes all at the same time. But here's what's really important to note, that even with modern tools, sustaining and expanding this work will require continued partnerships and investment. Wildfire resiliency cannot be achieved through one-time funding or through isolated projects. It requires long-term commitment, sustained collaboration, and shared responsibility across every level of government, the private sector, and the public. It is not just on the state to do it all, but I do view that it is our role to provide the tools and the guidance to support the private sector and communities to bring funds and continue to do this work. Now, California has an opportunity to lead the nation in demonstrating what true wildfire resiliency looks like. Not just simply responding and reacting to disasters after they occur, but actively reducing risk before catastrophic fires strike. Not just rebuilding with the same vulnerabilities, but building stronger, safer, and more resilient communities. And not just treating wildfire preparedness solely as a firefighting issue, but as a comprehensive resiliency strategy that protects lives, homes, economies, and the future of the state. So in closing, again, I want to emphasize the SB254 report. It provides an important roadmap for California's future. Our community wildfire preparedness strategy, and I say ours, but it's really important to note back to the Wildfire Mitigation Advisory Committee, Our strategy is with our local, our other state entities, our federal, our tribal, our private sector partners. But that work and that strategy is working and it's helping many, many in putting the recommendations into practice through home harding, defensible space, neighborhood level mitigation, technical assistance, financial assistance, incentives. We are moving California from a model of response to a model of resiliency. And just last week was our wildfire preparedness week. And it was a perfect time to ensure that we showcase that we are ready for fire season and for the peak of the fire year, but more importantly, to talk about these steps that homeowners need to take so that California is prepared, not just for this year, but so that we're building a safer California for generations to come. So I thank you for the time, and I very much look forward to your questions after my colleagues.

Thank you. Good morning, Chair Stern, Chair Becker, committee members. Thank you very much for having me here today. My name is Robin Fenegg and I'm the deputy director for recovery at Cal OES. I also our state hazard mitigation officer tasked with overseeing FEMA hazard mitigation assistance program and how we implement that in California First I want to provide a brief context on the AB38 pilot structure that informed our early home hardening efforts Through AB38, which was passed in 2019, the legislature tasked the California Wildfire Mitigation Program, or CWMP, Joint Powers Authority, with funding pilot projects that provide neighborhood or community-wide benefits against wildfire. Chief Berlantz and my respective teams work together to support these communities, tackle challenges, and capture best practices. The CWMP JPA is not the subrecipient for the FEMA or AB38 grants. Naming the local entities as the subrecipients allows us to understand those barriers, assessing and managing grants, while also allowing the program to adapt to the unique needs of their communities. Moreover, the legislature mandated specific criteria to evaluate risk and prioritize by need. with social vulnerability criteria built into the bill language. The JPA ranked counties using those criteria and worked with local experts to identify the communities that best met those criteria within the communities in the counties, as well as the groups to specifically manage those programs. Additionally, the intent of this funding was to match with FEMA grants. At the time, it made sense for us to leverage federal funds. We didn't have any reason not to, and up until then,

Mr. Wright. Can you see me?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. Delighted to be here. I apologize. I could not be there in person with you. It turns out I'm actually in Nebraska with all of the Western states and the Forest Service leadership trying to discuss how to deal with some of these same issues to better align our efforts and to deal with the many changes that are underway at the federal level. I'm now going to share my screen and walk you through just a short set of slides to give you a sense of where the task force is going, where the state is going, and then end with some specific thoughts in response to committee questions on how we're trying to work with regions to better prioritize and report on the benefits of projects. As many of you know, the task force is not able to advance.

I see that, but it's not advancing. Oh, it doesn't matter.

I cannot.

There we go.

Great. Thank you. Well, we really appreciate all of those presentations, and we'd like to dive in now. Any questions? Can I start with bringing you back up, Mr. Wright? And just to kind of dive back into the previous point, you know, I don't know if you want to – there's a couple slides I guess I want to focus on.

will have risk reduced from this whole range of projects No we don have information quite down to that level The biggest challenge we have right now is at the landscape level we have tremendously good data on the condition of vegetation throughout the state down to the three-meter level. And we also have sophisticated fire models that track fire as it moves through vegetation. So our predictive capacity at the landscape level is very high. The challenge that we have at the community level, and certainly Chief Berlant can talk about this, is we're now getting there. But the challenge to date has been to get that parcel-level information. Who actually is doing home hardening? Who is doing defensible space? And how do you track fires as they progress through the community? Not vegetation fires, but structure-to-structure fires. Great advances are being made in each of those areas every day, which is why you heard from Chief Berlant that Cal Fire is committed to working on a new set of metrics and models for the community level that will be able to match what we've done at the landscape level.

Is that correct?

Obviously, we want to reduce fire risk to everyone, both communities and landscapes.

No, I don't think so. I think our goal is to try to align community work with landscape work. And as you've heard from Daniel and Cal Fire, they're about with us to launch a comprehensive strategy that is focused on community preparedness, particularly at the county level. We're going to be aligning that with a landscape strategy that focuses more on the regional and subregional level. They both go together.

And so the question is whether you can start to reform your administration of these other programs to make community safety the driving metric and what restrictions you have on doing so.

under current law. I think that's very much what's happening now. As I tried to show in some of our brief graphics, we're prioritizing high hazard zones, as you see from the...

landscape. Well, no, actually, I think the highest risk area from the landscape perspective, if you can go back to the previous slide that shows the high hazard zone is the Sierra Foothills area that is extremely vulnerable to fire. And so at the landscape level.

I don't know who's in charge of them. I think you need to go back a little more.

keep going there we go that other one the one you just passed there we go so I see

wildfire hazard potential doesn't actually weight potential property loss correct

increasingly sophisticated tools of course that do both of those things as we're planning and prioritizing projects yeah no i appreciate it and some of it may be that the statutory direction is

Because it seems like the lack of weighting of home and community safety,

Okay, so we're a little short, right?

Senator if I could I know it was rhetorical but I absolutely agree that that is the number one challenge and really has to be the first step for us of implementing the community strategy It has to be figuring out our common set of data to really understand because I use the number of 4 million homes That's what we know physically is in the wildland-urban interface. What we don't know, though, is how many of those homes on their own have been retrofitted, how many of those homes have had work done on them. And so really the first thing that has to be done here is ensuring that we have a common set of data and then being able to pull it together to truly understand where is the greatest risk. Your points are all valid about the maps that show hazard. Don't necessarily incorporate where are the communities that have the greatest impact, and that is what you will see when the action plan is released. has got to be step number one for us, making sure we're aligned on the data and then crunching it all together.

Can I jump in?

Because some will answer a little bit of a question. What's the fastest way to reduce risk to the homes?

Yeah, that's a great question. Defensible space reduces the ember collection right around the edge of it. Fuel modification. Correct.

So to me, that's, you know, I hear some great plans, but plans aren't what's going to reduce the risk. The risk is done at the ground level where we actually get the projects done. And so that is where I think my colleague is also concerned about is, hey, this other stuff is great,

Yeah, correct. With the recent especially ember resistance zone, we all adopted. Right, because now we're looking at ember cast as opposed to what we had before, which means the fuel modification area, the defensible space area, is different. And we've expanded, as more homes are in high-hazard areas, requirements to maintain defensible space in communities that maybe traditionally did not maintain or have local defensible space ordinances. Correct.

In late 2025 through May 1st of this year, we accepted applications through the California Natural Resource Agency to streamline projects. So far, 383 as of today projects have been fast-tracked in less than 30 days. We are still, the team is reviewing several hundred more. But it is important to note that that was through an emergency proclamation that has concluded. And so as Patrick alluded to as well and probably policy conversations for you all as well of how do we take the lessons learned from that streamlining and determine whether they should be implemented as ongoing fixes Because here what I don want to see happen I don want to see the mitigation money

I appreciate that. For the other committee members, I'll just mention, though, we even accepted applications from projects that were not funded. So we encouraged applicants to apply for the streamlining, even if they didn't have the money in the bank, to make sure that the streamlining CEQA was approved. And now as we release fire prevention dollars or soon-to-be available dollars they're awarded, they'd have the CEQA documents all ready to go. And so your points are valid. I just want to stress that even projects not funded. In the bank, they should have been streamlined already.

I look forward to working with our vice chair on extending the governor's executive order and finding a way to codify some of those elements from the VTP.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to join the panel here. When we did our modeling, we performed the mitigation modeling kind of in two different ways. One where we did a kind of randomized approach to just selecting structures and mitigating this one mitigating that one and as expected you kind of get this slow decrease throughout California if you just kind of applying the Random acts of mitigation Random acts of mitigation Quote the chief. Yes. Exactly. Yes. So then we prioritized based on communities and based on areas where we were able to segment and say, here's one area, here's another area. Actually, just as you called me up, I texted my lead modeler to say exactly what is the definition of that area so we can get that back to you. But we prioritized areas and we said if we actually were to mitigate these in order, which is admittedly a little bit of an extreme example because you don't mitigate just one community and then move on to the next. But we said if you were to carry this out, how does that change the overall effect of the mitigation? And the reality is if you're able to really hyper-prioritize your highest risk areas, then you can significantly reduce the overall exposure of California much more quickly than with those random acts of mitigation. Now –

Right.

So we accumulated this not just by the number of structures exposed, but the modeled average annualized loss within a community using a suite of wildfire models. Understood.

But, yeah. Yeah, I would say we at Cal Fire are very much aware of those modeling efforts, as you saw from some of the examples I showed you from Stanislaus and Placerville. That's exactly what they're doing. They're modeling different treatments around those communities to try to figure out which exact locations give you the biggest bang for the buck. And it turns out that there's a mix. In some cases, you need to treat right adjacent to the community. In other cases, you need to supplement that with treatments further away from the community because you've got really dense forests that are going to provide a wick for fire to come right into the community. So it's really an all-of-the-above strategy, but there's no question that it's a community-first strategy in both our landscape resilience strategy and our community strategy.

What that's getting at the what economists calculate as an avoided cost, which is looking at the value of those properties and the reduced risk of those properties being consumed by fire. But I don't have all the detailed economics on that, but there are standard ways of calculating those things now that we and others are using. OK. But it's not necessarily your statutory directive to do so.

partnerships to scale up and do that work themselves. So while you might argue we don't have a specific mandate to do that, that's exactly what we're doing. That's the key focus of our strategy across the state at the community level and the landscape level to give local and regional agencies the tools to do exactly that. Look, I appreciate that there's a sort of regional focus,

So right now we're the sole state funder of, say, Tuolumne or Shasta.

presentations, but please, it's yours. The floor is yours. Thank you, Chair Stern. Thank you, Senator.

Did you run through? Yeah, let's keep going and then come back. Yeah, well, thank you for that. And I was pulling up an email from a good friend of mine that, and I quoted from that at a previous insurance committee hearing. but you know for this it's just a friend writing you know a lot of what you just said so this system set up to appear to help but all they want to do is you know cut corners pay out as little as possible find loopholes make us relive the pain i mean this is his experience and i said the pain is real and long unfortunately hasn dissipated in a year probably won for a long time so i sure that is similar to many feeling many of in your network so thank you for being here thank you um let's go through mark do you want to we'll go turn to mr

Really terrific. Thank you.

Good morning, Senator Becker, Senator Stern, Senator Cerato, Senator Perez. Thank you for having me today. I direct the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University. Today I am speaking in my personal capacity, but many of the things I'm going to say are really influenced and informed by the superb team that supports me at Stanford. At the highest level, this problem is one that has changed enormously in the last quarter century, and we need to recognize that. It's due to climate change. It's due to lots of land use and fire management decisions we made over 150 years. But because of climate change, the problem is going to continue to get worse. What that means in practice is that events like the L.A. firestorm in January of last year or the correlated wind events in 2019 that caused Camp and Woolsey to occur on the same day are much more likely now and even more likely in the future than they have been in our history. And that really means we need to change what we doing We need to change our approach to fire management in fundamental ways I think we heard today a lot about how we need to maybe adopt a different balance in our fire investments in the state. We've spent about $6 billion mostly so far on fuels reduction, but I think we heard from the prior panel, from Chief Berlant and from Patrick Wright, that that focus is shifting and that is appropriate in my view. Five years ago, I was arguing for that kind of a balance and I'm heartened to see it happening today. But what is missing? I've long been an advocate for risk targeting of expenditures. I think we are moving in that direction and we hear that from all the voices in state government. I would just urge that all of you continue to push that focus. It is not okay in this context to peanut butter the money around. We need to focus on where the expenditures will be most valuable. Typically, that requires using fairly advanced fire modeling tools, and I would agree with some of the former panel that those tools are also developing, particularly with respect to the risk of urban conflagration, the urban fires, like we saw tragically in Altadena in January of last year. I just recommend, if you're interested, to take a look at a paper that Nancy Watkins, who was on a panel yesterday with me, and Dave Winokur, who was the fire chief in Orinda and Moraga, recently retired and now works for the Western Fire Chiefs Association, just authored. Happy to share that with you if you're interested about how to develop a risk-targeting framework for the state. But we're moving in the right direction. We just need to go further. I'd also reinforce something that Mark Brown just said, which is it and sort of shifted a little bit. We need a clear answer, I think, from the state about what it expects from local government and homeowners as a cost share on community mitigation. This is not something that the state can afford to do alone. It also creates a set of benefits at the parcel level, at the local level in terms of preserving property tax value, and at the state level in terms of mitigating the insurance crisis that we face and the electric utility affordability crisis that we face. So there's benefits at multiple levels. There should be contributions at multiple levels. the local ask however needs to be tailored so that the locals and homeowners have skin in the game like i said but also aren't locked out because of property values low density or both notably where i live in marin county the work that mark brown is doing and i would just reinforce what he said they are hitting their stride you see it if you know what to look for on the landscape in terms of fire management you see it now in the last year or two and i've i've as a resident and a taxpayer have been wondering, when will I start to see the work that Mark is doing in my day-to-day? And I would just say it is visible and increasingly visible and sort of emergent at both the community scale and the landscape scale, hiking on the lands that Marin is lucky to have for us to recreate, but especially in and around the communities. And it's really exciting to see. We need to make that kind of success available, not just to the Marines. And another successful example is actually is in is Montecito that did a ton of work before the Thomas fire and was very successful in the fire protection effort. Obviously the mudslides that happened later were a terrible tragedy but but they did not lose structures because they did the work before and that's another but those places Marin, Montecito what do they have in common? Money. That's what we need to make a program work for Siskiyou County not just Marin and that how the state as a whole will derive benefits in terms of affordable energy and affordable and available insurance So a question not necessarily, I think, well addressed. I very much appreciate the work of the 254 process. And I think they stayed away from this question because it's kind of a third rail. But I'm going to go touch the third rail now is where do we get this money at the state level? I think, as mentioned earlier, cap and trade is a less reliable source for lots of reasons. I'm not going to weigh in on the changes that are happening at IRB, but they are changing. Things are changing, and we need to be real about that. So where could the state get more money? I think we need to get it from a place where risk and wealth impact how much people pay. Like the property values at risk need to be factored in. And the logical place there, I think, would be a fee on insurance policies that was then spent in a very careful and regulated way, probably with a lot of governance from insurance companies that know a lot about risk, maybe hiring Andy Neal, maybe he's still sitting behind me, people like that to help target the money. Also, probably from the electric utilities that know a lot about where the risks from their system are or are not, so that we make sure that the money is spent well. But, you know, we need to find a source that's stable and long term because it takes a while for these programs to really gain momentum, as Mark Brown just described. Finally, and I'll close with this, I think we need to talk about changes in firefighting strategy. As was mentioned by Chair Stern, currently, Cal Fire judges its own operational success by containing 95 percent of fires at 10 acres or less on initial attack. Now, I think there are places in California where that strategy makes 100% sense. But it may not make sense where we don't have structures at risk, where we are talking about truly wildland fire, and there, Cal Fire faces a similar obligation. They're going out right now in the early season and putting out everything because that's the job. That's the mission they've been given by the legislature and how they interpret their statutory mandate. I think it's a reasonable question to ask whether that strategy makes sense in the context of a wildlands that is fire evolved and where we have been fire suppressing for 150 years since the Native Americans were extirpated from their lands. The how we change strategy to allow a little bit more moderate to low severity fire to occur in the shoulder seasons when it's safe to do that, I think is a complicated question that's going to require a lot of engagement with Cal Fire leadership because they have to be bought in. This is not something that can happen by direction. Firefighters and firefighter culture are thick, and I want that culture to be maintained. I value the work that those people contribute enormously. But we also need to recognize the context we're in and, frankly, recognize the wisdom of the firefighters. I'll just end with one example of this. When the Dixie Fire was burning back a few years ago, firefighters were making enormous efforts to contain that fire. It resisted those efforts and burned all the way to the east side of the Sierra. A few years later, Park Fire ignites for reasons that are, you know, exemplify why we will never ignite, eliminate ignitions, right? A person having a mental health episode stole his mom's car, lit it on fire, and dumped it in a ravine. How are you going to stop that? So, Park, what did CAL FIRE do in trying to contain this monster of a fire? They directed it into the Dixie Fire burn perimeter, right? So they steered the fire toward the black, the fire that had occurred a few years prior. We need more patches of black on the lands. in the wildlands. We need to build a moat around communities as best we can, as Mark Brown is working on in Marin. And we need to do that for all Californians, with locals taking the lead, because they do know the context. They know how to work with their communities to get actual things done on the ground at scale. Thank you very much. I'm happy to take questions.

Yeah.

Senator Perez. Go ahead. Certainly. And just want to thank you all for being here today and being a part of this discussion. I've been grateful that we've been having our committees come together so that we can host these hearings. The SB 254 touched on so many different topic areas, and it's hard for us to even weigh in without kind of also weighing into other jurisdictions because there's so much of this work that's inextricably linked. What we're talking about here touches upon energy and utilities. It touches upon insurance and natural resources, emergency management, and I think that's important to highlight. You know, as I was thinking about some of the issues that we're speaking to today, this issue of mitigation, of reducing risk, wildfire mitigation, and how critical it is. And our, you know, report, too, that we have here, the background, discusses, you know, some of the need for us to incentivize homeowners to be able to make those investments. I represent Altadena. I have many constituents who are going through the rebuild process right now. And as you could imagine, it's incredibly expensive to do home hardening. You know, folks have lots of questions about implementing zone zero. You know, people are trying to do what's right in order to make sure that their homes are fire safe in case another disaster happens. But one of the biggest questions I get asked is, if I make all of these investments, am I going to receive insurance coverage? And that is, I think, one of the biggest challenges that we continue to face in trying to incentivize folks to invest dollars into making sure that they are home hardening. why would I invest upwards of $100,000 into doing home hardening if I don't have a guarantee that I'm going to receive insurance coverage? In addition to that, the whole goal of us doing this kind of home hardening, and the report even talks about this, is it's not just to have a single person harden their home. We want entire neighborhoods, entire cities to participate in home hardening, especially in areas that have very significant fire risk. But we're not seeing people do that because they need to see more incentives, more benefits in order for them to do that. And so I point that out because I think it's a really critical component to this discussion that people that are even going through the rebuild process of building their home from the ground up are asking themselves these questions They making a cost analysis and they are looking for something beyond just small grants in order to incentivize them to make that decision to home harden. I know the SB254 report itself also talks about the need for us to tie insurance coverage to hardening. It points that out as an issue that the state needs to address. And so I speak to that because I think it's one of the missing puzzle pieces when we talk about fire mitigation, when we talk about ensuring that entire communities, not just single homes, entire communities are home hardening. The other piece that I wanted to speak to is, you know, I know the report also talks about the need to create a local disaster recovery framework to pre-identify community recovery priorities and partnerships and creating a plan for post-disaster recovery with expedited decision-making processes and key staff roles and responsibilities. We actually worked on legislation on this issue area last year. It was SB 782, which created an increment financing district and allowed for communities that have faced a disaster to create a local disaster recovery district. So the county of Los Angeles has already utilized my bill, and what it does is it bases the funding for this based off of future property tax revenues and generates a bond based off – so the county, for example, is basing their bond off of projected property tax revenues 45 years into the future. because we know that Altadena is going to be rebuilding, but we need the dollars, the benefit of those dollars right now so that we can begin that process, which I think is really important and critical. As we discussed some of the wildfire mitigation processes, investments that we need to make into communities, I think it's really important to highlight the different ways that fires start, How the Palisades fire occurred, which was my understanding, is there was an area where there was a fire. That fire was not fully put out, and so there were still embers. It continued to burn, and then ultimately we saw this larger fire begin to develop over time. Altadena was a very different situation. We saw 110 mile per hour winds cause sparks from to jump to a decommissioned line, which ultimately, that was owned by SoCal Edison, which ultimately caused the fire. And so that's a very different scenario, right? And given how close that equipment was located to single-family homes and residences, many of which had not home-hardened, and many homes that were very, very old, it created a situation where you had this kind of massive fire. In addition to all of the weather dynamics and conditions, us not seeing rain for almost 10 months. So I understand and want to underscore, you know, it is certainly important for us to do brush mitigation, for us to make sure that we're addressing our forest. That is also, I think, a challenge for certain areas. But in a more densely populated area in Los Angeles, you're going to see some nuance there in terms of how we reduce risk. And in Altadena for example the needs there in order to reduce that risk was more related to equipment that was owned by utilities rather than us making sure that we were clearing our forest And so I just want to point that out. But would love for any of the committee members to just speak to how we get to that point of encouraging more of our communities to harden. so we're not just having single-family homes and that we're seeing neighborhoods and entire communities get to home hardening, how you see insurance playing a role with that in addition to the state's grants programs. My board of directors have tasked me to put a lot of energy and focus of my time into helping solve the insurance crisis because if members of people who are paying in the Marin Wildfire were losing their homeowner's insurance because of wildfire risk, that how could Marin Wildfire be considered a success? And so we've been working very closely with CDI, with the insurance industry. I had residents asking me, Mark, why aren't you selling what we're doing in Marin harder to the insurance industry? And we had been passively letting the insurance industry know what we were doing, but we were being very cautious with the parcel-level data because a lot of our residents were afraid that our inspections would drive non-renewals, that our inspection data would get into the hands of the insurance industry, and that would cause the non-renewal. No insurer has ever asked us for our data. They get their own data. Plus, we have it protected. But I did take on that suggestion, and we reached out to Mercury, being one of the more aggressive insurers in high-risk areas, and said, I would like you to come into Marin and see the type of work that we're doing. And they told me that their number one goal is to get people off the California fare plan. Inverness is an area that we have 36% of our properties are on a California fare plan. Mercury has a very reasonable list of requirements to come off the California fare plan. So this is where our data that we have was able to come into play. Eight to 900 homes within that zip code. But 200 to 300 of those homes were one or two items away from meeting Mercury's requirements. So we got Mercury's contact information, shared that with our Firewise communities out there, and put them in direct contact with Mercury. As of today, we have three properties that have been pulled off the fare plan that are now insured by Mercury. We have two more that are coming. So within the next month, we're going to have five properties. Mercury is now asking where else in Marin can we do this type of work with you? And I have CSAA asking me when can we come in and do the same thing? So we went from residents having a California fare plan and a wraparound policy at $10,000 plus a year, now paying an admitted carrier at about $3,200 a year. So they're realizing close to $7,000 a year on a return on their investment. So the $10,000, $15,000 that they did to become compliant with what Mercury was asking for, they get that back in two years. And so we feel that that type of model is really going to invigorate. And that's also where our Ember Ready program is. Our Ember Ready program has developed a subsection. They're calling it the Community Adaptation Program. Because as everyone's been talking about, one house being resilient doesn't protect the community. It takes the community being resilient. So our Ember Ready program is going to Firewise communities and going, okay, we want to help you make your community resilient. And you can't tackle it all at once. So we have one community that focusing 100 on removing all vegetation from zone zero We have another community that said you know what our number one goal is vents So all they tackling right now is getting their vents done And then we start each community will say okay now it time for us to take on that next step And when I mentioned the Ember Ready program to Mercury, that we're working at that community scale, that really started to pique their interest. So I think that's the type of work that's going to bring this all together. Anyone else like to comment on the question? I just say I think what what Mark is saying and Senator Prez, what you obviously already understand is that, you know, there are huge spillovers between for a single parcel doing something both negative and positive. Right. If they do the right thing, actually, the houses downwind of them in a fire will benefit. They're in the shadow of that house that's hardened. If they don't do the right thing, they can be like a Roman candle in a neighborhood and showering embers on everybody else. And so that emphasizes the importance of local government action and empowering the locals to do the thing that they need to do and to figure out the politics around this. Obviously, the politics of Zone Zero, we've seen in the Board of Forestry conversation, are complicated. The science is pretty clear, and that's difficult. I recognize for everybody sitting on the dais. But the local governments and local leaders are best positioned to start to move their communities as a whole in the right direction. Will we get to 100% everywhere? Probably not. But this is sort of like I think about this as like safety in our cars, right? When I was a kid, my parents did not make me wear a seatbelt in the car. And we'd crawl all around the big Oldsmobile station wagon, back, front, who knows. and then we put on seatbelts and then airbags and now collision avoidance at some point autonomous driving perhaps right will be the way that we get around in cars every step makes us safer does it mean that lots of people don't die in car accidents no it means that the odds of dying in a car accident are much lower it means that if you get in an accident going 30 miles an hour you're going to be fine today whereas in the old days you would have probably been killed and that's where we need to be moving with fire safety, like where the state is providing that overall push and local governments are stepping up with a cost share, their dollars, and also their knowledge of the politics of their community to get them as far as they can go, does that mean that the insurance industry will care? I think we have to be honest here that it may mean that they care. It will mean in some places that they care. But also, this risk is one that is very difficult to understand and price. And in the riskiest places, it is going to be hard to insure people with private insurance. I think that is just a reality. What we need to do is get the less risky places, the more moderate risk places out of the fair plan so that we can better manage that core extreme risk population and have places like Pacific Palisades, perhaps like Altadena, fully mitigated and with superbly capable fire services so that on a bad day, that combination of mitigation and skilled fire suppression can work. Let me ask one question here, because we've been talking a lot about kind of data collection programs and data collection programs with FireSafe organizations and others. You know, should the state have a coordinated data collection program with FireSafe? communities to achieve kind of the fine-grained risk analysis that everyone's talking about? I'll give it to you. I believe so. And ideas unite, details divide. And how that data is structured, how that data is collected, what granularity, that's where, so there's a lot of momentum and a lot of support for the data commons. Patrick Wright made a really good point, though. The real big stumbling block is the parcel-level data and whether or not agencies are going to be willing to share that parcel-level data to the data commons because of protecting their residents' data. And agencies like mine are going to need to be willing to be collaborative with it and say, all right, if the state standard ends up being different than the way we're collecting data, we're going to align with that state standard. And I think it's going to rely on that type of flexibility. It's also bigger than the state, though. I think we need to look at the western United States creating the same type of data standard. That will be the first thing. If we can establish a data standard, then we can start collecting, collating data under one clearinghouse. I would strongly agree that a data commons is important at this point. We need to be creating information and then guarding privacy in a way that's appropriate, but creating the information so that the insurers and especially the CAT model users can actually price into premiums and prior to that be factoring in in their underwriting the good work that's getting done. And that requires collecting the data. It's also, and we've got to be honest about this, there's a lot of places that are unmitigated in California. Otherwise, this committee wouldn't be having this hearing today. And collecting better data is going to make that more clear. It's going to emphasize the need to do more work, not necessarily at first, you know, the need to or the desire to pat ourselves on the back for what we've done. Right. And, you know, of course, again, back to Ms. Chen's comment, there is the insurance link on all this part. And you talked, it was interesting to hear your experience there in Marin. But the 254 report also goes into that, right? And that's the 1.22, I guess what you talked about. You have to tighten the link between risk reduction and insurance. So it's very, very clear. Okay, now unless you have anything. Senator Rubio. Hi. Hello, everyone. You know, thank you. I love seeing some of the folks that have been before my committee in, you know, sharing your thoughts and ideas. You know, and I shared that yesterday. Some of my thoughts around the fact that I, you know, my heart breaks every time I see a fire, which has been happening more and more commonly in the state of California. My heart breaks every time I visit it, you know, and I have every time a community burns down, I go and meet with stakeholders and those impacted. And I feel very strongly that we are at a crossroads where we need to really figure this out in a way that's meaningful. You know, everything that I've heard from Senator Perez and right now, you know, we're talking about, you know, how maybe a community has one house that maybe did the home hardening that was prepared. And the reality is that one home may not save an entire community. And, in fact, the whole conversation was about creating, you know, incentivizing, you know, entire neighborhoods to home harden so they can be prepared. but you know for me I guess the frustration is that it not a new concept in fact I think you guys know this Last year I had a bill that was going to specifically create a home hardening commission or committee that will bring stakeholders together because we wanted to standardize those home hardening suggestions because it also means different things to different people different areas have also different considerations, whether it's the high-risk areas or down below in the inland, you know, communities. Because the one thing that I did realize, and I think it wasn't just done by myself, in fact, it's through some of the hearings that I've had. And I think Michael Ware has been part of many of the committees, and I, you know, I do take this information very seriously. And with the insurance commissioner and other stakeholders, you know, that's, I think that the issue here is, again, When you talk about home hardening, it means different things to different people. So this committee that I still plan to push forward at some point was to bring those stakeholders together from firefighters to the insurance commissioner to the insurance industry because they have to play a part if we're to solve this issue. Yesterday I talked about how a lot of the times I hear is local pushback. Locals are getting in the way of some of these efforts. Right. So we need to also bring local municipalities to be part of the process because they're so different in so many different ways. But the goal was, you know, how do we standardize something that works across the entire state of California and not ice in isolation? Because, you know, I know that in Marin you have these fire safe communities and I think you've had them for a while. But again, you were talking about how one of the insurance industries has standards on how they can bring people to be insured if they only do X, Y, and Z. And my goal would be to, again, standardize that for the entire state because then everyone, let's just say Altadena or Pasadena is rebuilding their – not Pasadena, I'm sorry, Palisades is rebuilding their communities. I mean, the ideal would be to have those standards already outlined so as they're building, you have them already understanding what the benefits are. And quite frankly, if I wasn't in this committee or have been chair of the insurance, I don't even know what – I wouldn't even know what home hardening is, right? And so, you know, I had that bill last year, and it didn't make it. But here we're talking about what we need, and what we're talking about is what I had last year that didn't make it. So at some point, we have to really figure out who those stakeholders are that could sit with us. Because, again, what you heard yesterday is my frustration because they're not new concepts. They're not new ideas. But I think it's now a time where maybe we figure out how to bring all the stakeholders together. And that was my goal. Everyone has to pay a part. And I think I shared that yesterday. It's not necessarily anyone's fault, but, you know, climate change is a real thing. We're seeing a lot more devastation just based on climate and other issues. But I want to thank Michael because I've had you many times, and you're always so amazing in terms of the information you bring to the table. And this committee or commission that I wanted to create, I wanted to specifically have science-based welfare data because I've also invited industries that are creating a little bit better structures because they're testing the science on what can repel fire, what is, you know, a better material to build with right Including you know yesterday I think I heard Senator Richardson talk about how she does a good job in her home but then she sees around her and all the people have all the brush And again I would like to see a standardized list of items that families can do so that we are not talking about that one structure that didn do their job and then the fire jumped around But again, I want to put it out there because I do want to continue to have that conversation. It died last year, which was so important to me that we continue the conversation because it's not just about saving lives, saving structures, but ultimately this is not going to get better. We already know based on the science that I've heard many of you speak about, it's only going to get worse. And so I hope that I can call each one of you to engage you once again because we don't want to see anybody lose lives. I'm right next to Altadena, so it is a little bit personal to me. I'm not in Altadena, but I'm the neighbor, and we had so many of our friends and neighbors evacuated. I was there time and time again, visiting, touring, and it's really difficult to see that continue to happen. So I really just want to, you know, put it out there because there is a few ideas that have already been here. In fact, in 2020, I proposed an IMAP idea that would help track every person that got on the fair plan early on so that we can see on a map where the fair plan homes were being consolidated so we can at least have a sense of where people were being dropped from their insurance. and that we as a state could step in and immediately tackle the issue so that we didn't overpopulate the fair plan. That bill died as well. And I venture to say had we had something like that in place, we would have been able to catch those that continue to be dropped so that we could find solutions early on. But the problem is also the fair plan. It used to be the insurer of last resort, and now unfortunately some of our families don't have another option, And now it's so overpopulated that that at some point is going to break. And I want to just set these issues out in public because, again, I know I've heard all these conversations, but they're not new. And I think we have an opportunity to really let's go revisit some of these ideas that were left on the table that could work. And I'm not saying they're perfect solutions or ideal solutions, but I think instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, we probably need to go back to things that maybe didn't seem as useful or perhaps as prominent at the time when we didn't have so many fires. But now it's time to maybe do that. And I ask the chair that maybe we can have a separate meeting where we can bring these ideas to the table in a more specific, strategic way. Because at the end of the day, we could have 10 communities with 10 different standards of home hardening. But what we want is to have those standardized become credits so that we can take it to the insurers because unless they also know that the risk is minimized, it's difficult to put it on them when we're not doing our part as well. So I just feel everyone has a part to play. But lives need to be saved, and that's where my heart is right now. But just thank you for letting me share some of the ideas that have been on the table that I think we could expand on. I appreciate you bringing not just your heart but your head because you've had experience here. And I side with your frustration about our inability to solve that piece. I mean, we actually passed a law in 2020, I think, that I wrote, SB 63, which Cal Fire is no longer here. But under Section 4291.5, right now the Public Resources Code, Cal Fire is assigned, the director is assigned the role of establishing a common reporting platform that allows defensible space and home hardening assessment data and that they shall compile that data under Section C2 So the shall, right? What does shall mean? And have we done that yet? It seems like we've still got a ways to go, but, you know, it's one thing to pass a law and another thing, I think, to get the work done. And so that's where I'm at with you, maybe revisiting some of these things that we can strengthen because, you know, when you've been here long enough, you've heard most of the ideas, but it's getting everyone to the table to see the value. I know the IMAP idea back in 2020 just seems so primitive, right? But now in retrospect, something that could have alerted us to areas where the fair plan was overpopulating, that would have given us an inclination that we needed to tackle that immediately. What's happening? Why are they being dropped? Can we step in as a state to see if we can mitigate some of those issues? And I think the fair plan would have stayed a little bit. We could have contained it, but now it's a little bit far gone. But I like the fact that you're bringing your bill because there's a lot of good things that we've done. It's a matter of just revisiting and trying to see if we can do better and making sure that they're working. Yeah, and look, this haunts me, a bill like that, because that data, if it had been properly collected and we had oriented our fire mitigation funding, would have seen the urban conflagration risk sitting in Ms. Chen's neighborhood. Right. And all those funds that we pushed out the door, millions, billions of dollars, none went to getting you guys some mesh on your vents, you know, or clearing out some of that underbrush or dealing with Bougainvillea or, OK, you have a neighbor with a tricky, you know, shingled roof and you have older home construction. None of that was there. We got some funding out to the San Gabriel Valley over the past few years through the conservancies. But if you look at the vast majority of your fire zones, Ms. Rubio, Azusa, Duarte, those hillside communities, those are the next Altadena sitting right there. I don't mean to be alarmist about it, but it's not as if you're alone here. It may feel like you're alone some days, but you're not because all those foothills throughout all those superpopulated areas are not at the front of the line right now. They have to go compete because they don't have acreage. You're not going to cover a bunch of acres by doing, you know, dealing with mesh, right? That's not going to get you there. And I want to add one more thing, if I may. And I'll go to Vice Chair afterwards. You may not remember this, but Sangiro Valley was not included in some of the funding that we were pushing out. And you may remember how loud and vocal I was about including the Sangiro Valley. I was, you know, really loud. and because of how loud I was, we were able to get, I think it was $12 million for the conservancy when it was originally left out. And so those $12 million I was very proud of because I know we had the Bobcat fire. We had so much that we needed to do. And, again, the funding is there, and so now it's time to revisit how do we do better and making sure that we are using it in the most strategic and positive ways so that people don't have to go through this. But, yeah, thank you for pointing that out. Thank you. And it's nice to have a panel of people that work in the real world and can bring us their expertise in what they're doing. Because, you know, we have covered a lot of ground today. And what you see is when you're talking about prevention, the best way to prevent or to not have a recovery process is to not allow a catastrophic incident to happen in the first place. So it all starts with the prevention aspect, and that's what we talked about a little bit earlier. And there are a whole lot of facets to that. We could talk about just the prevention stuff and have hearings on that all day long. But then you move into the response. And I heard you mention the need to have robust responses to today's climate. And I can tell you for the last 30 years that fire departments, in a lot of respects, are unable to handle some of the hazards that we have out there. When you talk about reserve apparatus, that's what two-thirds of the workforce can come back and get on and go to a fire on. And just because there is a vehicle sitting in a fire station doesn't mean that you have response capabilities. That thing has to be equipped. It has to be able to be used. And in many cases, they're just old fire equipment that we keep for years and years so that we can say we have reserve fire apparatus. and and so that's an aspect that really has to be examined is what is our response you know and then the recovery the recovery is all about the coordination between actually

Good afternoon, Chair Spector, Stern members. Paul Mason with Pacific Forest Trust. I want to make three brief points. I mean, this panel and this discussion today was really robust and obviously focused largely on communities and reducing the level of loss we're seeing right there. I do want to highlight that out in the broader wildland areas and the state responsibility area is an area where the state does obviously have responsibility under the statute for good reasons. It's where our water comes from. It's where we have statutory constitutional responsibilities for wildlife. But it's also what oftentimes carries these big destructive fires into communities. And we have the campfire rolling into Paradise or the Tubbs fire into Santa Rosa or the Dixie fire that took out Greenville. These are large, you know, these are not fires you're going to stop just by doing home hardening and defensible space. The second point I want to highlight is I'm really thrilled that Mark Brown was here talking about the work in Marin County because the focus of the hearing today is not going to get solved at the state level. It's going to require engagement at the local jurisdiction, by homeowners, at the real local responsibility area. There's things that the state can do, and there's some good bills out there right now that Senator Becker and Senator Zallen are both pushing on that I think will really help there. But fundamentally, the locals are going to need to drive on those local actions. Last point is that the loss of a stable source of funding from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is a terrible body blow to our ability to have a sustained effort here. And the legislature really needs to figure that out this year, whether it is reprioritizing that $200 million as a top priority for GGRF or some other ongoing stable source of funding. Thank you.

Kim Stone of Stone Advocacy on behalf of Consumer Watchdog. Thanks to the chair and members for a really enlightening committee. And when you, Senator Stern, were asking about the available state money and how many homes that translated into hardening, I think that really brought home the problem of investing in home hardening and if there is sufficient state money to do that or not. And one of the solutions that Consumer Watchdog has proposed is to reward homeowners who do harden their homes by requiring insurance companies to offer them commercial insurance if they do that, either on the home level or on the community level. And just want to offer that again. That was Senator Perez's SB 1076, which unfortunately didn't move out of committee, but is nevertheless a really solid idea. The idea is alive. Yeah, thank you. And Consumer Watchdog also urges fair and prompt payment of insurance claims and urges the legislature to not bail out utilities if they are responsible for burning down communities. Thank you very much.

seconds there, but go ahead. Good afternoon. Thank you, Chair and members for this important hearing. My name is Brooke Rose, and I'm commenting on behalf of the Wildfire Solutions Coalition, organization of over 80 organizations across California working to fully fund wildfire resilience. The coalition strongly supports the development of funding and financing strategies to reduce wildfire risk to communities, natural landscapes, and infrastructure across California. We also want to highlight Strategy 3.2 in the SB254 report, which lays out the essential role of state government in funding risk reduction. The governor's January budget proposed the second smallest investment in wildfire resilience this decade. The coalition urges the legislature to maintain the $200 million from the greenhouse gas reduction fund for wildfire resilience, which is currently the state's only ongoing investment in wildfire risk reduction. California right now cannot afford to cut wildfire funding. Thank you so much.

Good afternoon. Michael Jarre with the Nature Conservancy. I would like to echo the comments from the Wildfire Solutions Coalition and also urge the legislature to not pit investments in local fire prevention, ignition reduction, beneficial fire, and forest health against home hardening and structure hardening. Wildfire resilience is built by stacking layers of risk reduction on top of one another, which requires concurrent investment in hardening and defensible space, community protection, and landscape restoration. The coalition believes there are essential policies the legislature should act on to not only increase state funds for home hardening and structural hardening, but to also incentivize, finance, and leverage private investment in the same. The state should also continue supporting proven oversubscribed programs with shovel-ready projects that will save lives and reduce the devastating impacts of wildfire. Thanks for the time.

Thank you so much for hosting this hearing. Melissa Sparks-Crans with the League of California Cities here to talk about the local government perspective. We do strongly support a welfare risk reduction legislative package this year. we do believe the legislature has introduced a handful of bills that are hitting on these very topics in the 254 report already. I just want to bring attention to a few of the comments made today. You know, we would support a strong statewide certification program for home hardening through CAL FIRE that really helps us provide uniform standards. We would support the codification of the governor's executive order to expedite fuel management that you've brought up today. We're also working on legislation this year to require OSFM Cal Fire to provide us the fire hazard severity zone designations every five years. Up until last year, local governments, cities, counties, and fire districts have not received those maps in over 15 years. What tells us in those maps, what that tells us is what spreads a fire in our community, the environmental conditions that spreads fire. And that is directly tied to fire code, building code, and to defensible space mitigations. So we have to have that information at the local level before we can talk about standards and holding local governments accountable We want to be accountable We here to protect our communities safely and safety So we really appreciate the discussion today

Good afternoon. John Kennedy with the Rural Counties. First of all, I want to say I'd like to align my comments with Paul Mason, Michael Jared, Melissa, and many others. This can't be an either or when we're talking about funding. We need funding both for wildfire fuel reduction in the forest context and also for home hardening for a number of reasons. Happy to have more discussions on the SRA fee as someone who helped negotiate that deal back with the previous cap and trade reauthorization. Have lots of thoughts on that and approaches there. So strongly support risk targeting as we're looking at funding and funding disbursements. and really strongly supportive of your interest in the permit reform codification of the governor's executive order. Melissa, CSAC, the League, our CRC, and I know some of my friends in the IOUs have been strongly supportive of that as well. I think that's one of the low-hanging fruit concepts that we should pursue. As you're contemplating the STIC approach, I would urge a lot of caution. we have a lot of very low-income communities, a lot of very low-income homeowners in the rural part of the state, even the urban parts of the state. And so home-hardening may not be a choice, especially when we're talking about $50,000 to $60,000 per household. So thank you.

Welcome. Mr. Chair, members, Brady Van Ingram here on behalf of Southern California Addison. I want to speak briefly about the state's streamlined permitting process. I think a couple of my other friends before me spoke about it as well, too, and I think what you're hearing is there's a pretty common consensus to see the EO extended or codified moving forward. Edison received approval under the proclamation to utilize the streamlined process to address portions of its FEDS management program. This enabled more timely execution of route line clearing, dead and dying tree removals, and structure brushing that has historically been subjected to lengthy permitting delays. We see it as a valuable tool in addressing our wildfire risk reduction, and we urge the legislature to codify this language so Edison's vegetation management activities continue to be formed in a way that best addresses risks and supports grid reliability.

Good afternoon. Brandon Ebeck here on behalf of Pacific Gas and Electric. For the sake of time, I'll align my comments with those from Edison and the local governments in support of the executive order. Thank you.

Greetings, Sharon, members of the committee. My name is Marquise King-Mason. We've been in these for two days now, so I'll keep it brief. The state needs durable progressive funding sources for wildfire prevention but ones that are not built primarily off our electricity rates California ratepayers have paid billion in the last half ticket for wildfire prevention over four times that prevention investment from the state budget These costs discourage electrification and regressively fall on low-income households. California needs a solution to prevent wildfire, but electricity customers should not be the ones who put up the brunt of that.

Good day, Chair and members. Caitlin Leventhal on behalf of the California State Association of Counties. We are deeply concerned about the report options that would effectively insulate utilities from accountability and the corresponding real-world impacts those options would have on utility systems, safety, and survivor and community recovery. We are supporting a package of legislation proposals this year that would meaningfully advance fire mitigation and risk reduction and respectfully urge the legislature to prioritize these policies that help move the needle to prevent catastrophic wildfires.

Bill Ward, PumpPod USA. Senator Stern, very passionate beginning statement you made. It's really great to have someone who knows exactly what the ramifications are when you do it. and also Senator Ciarto because of his expertise in fire. So that being said, there is a third rail that I want to talk about. I think that the state, whether it's CAL FIRE, whether it's natural resources, has got tunnel vision on vegetation mitigation and the capabilities of risk management. It's all valuable information. It's all valuable what they're accomplishing, but there needs to be a dual track for response mitigation. Senator, you put forth with us SB90 last year trying to accomplish community protection and community-wide protection and community-wide hardening. There needs to be something, and Senator Stern, you used the word cover acreage. Each one of the helicopter dip tanks that we make and that are deployed all over the state cover 15,000 acres. That covers the whole community while other people are trying to get their home hardening and parcel hardening and so on and so forth done. And the part that I wanted to mention is that we just found out just today that the attempt to match your bill in the assembly, 1853, was just dequeued by Cal Fire because they call it suppression. It's installed before the fire is happening, just like goats, just like the vegetation mitigation. So that's something if we can try to fix that and get that done, that would be much helpful.

Good afternoon. Chloe Shea with California Environmental Voters. We greatly appreciate this conversation and the emphasis on communities suffering from rising energy infrastructure insurance and recovery costs from climate disasters but we cannot overlook the role that the fossil fuel industry plays in this issue Ratepayers, taxpayers, and frontline communities cannot continue to absorb these climate costs and safety risks alone, while oil and gas companies continue to profit and avoid accountability. California is nearing wildfire season, and these risks are becoming increasingly salient, so we have to examine this issue holistically. We urge the legislature to evaluate mechanisms that require major corporate polluters to help support wildfire liability costs, resilience investments, disaster recovery, and insurance stabilization efforts. Thank you.

I just want to make sure that that's realized. Understood. Yes.

And, of course, your legislation, SB 879. Can't forget that one. Don't worry. I won't. We won't forget it. Thank you all for your comments today, for your participation. And this is just the beginning. So just ask you all to stay engaged as we develop some solution sets here. We're not going to walk away from this. With that, I'm going to just take the privilege of adjoining this hearing.