Assembly Select Committee on Select Committee on Wildfire Prevention

Okay everyone, good morning. How's the sound? Good. You can hear me? Okay. Excellent. Good to see you all. To kick off the inaugural hearing of the Select Committee on Wildfire Prevention, I want to give a huge thank you to Sonoma State University.

We're on their beautiful campus this morning. Thank you to SSU for hosting this event. So I'm Damon Connolly, and as the representative for Assembly District Twelve, which includes fire prone Marin and Sonoma counties, One of the first acts I took in office was to request for the establishment of this new committee.

Through this committee, I hope to engage a broader group of stakeholders to discuss and collaborate on the challenges, lessons learned and opportunities relating to tackling our wildfire challenges. The goal would be to take those discussions, including today, and translate them into actionable policy to improve the state's wildfire prevention efforts and build resilience in our communities. Wildfires in the past decade have been among the most devastating and catastrophic in our state's entire history.

They continue to be one of California's greatest threats to loss of human life, property, the state's natural resources and ecosystem function, among other factors. The three primary reasons why California wildfires have become more devastating are the climate is becoming warmer, more people live in combustible places near the danger, and there is more fuel. To put it simply, scientists state that climate change is a central factor in creating the atmospheric ingredients that make wildfires like California's more extreme.

Year after year. Warmer global temperatures driven by greenhouse gas emissions have led to droughts as well as more extreme heat waves that last longer. As the climate warms, the fuel conditions on the ground and increasing warm spells create the opportunity for fire.

This has lengthened the fire season, which used to only span the summer months to now effectively being year round. Fires burn twice as many acres and for twice as long as they did in the 1990s. Wildfires are also increasingly happening across large landscapes, often affecting tens of thousands of acres to hundreds of thousands of acres.

The drivers of wildfire vary from region to region across the state. It is important to recognize the regional variability as we explore avenues and develop strategies to improve wildfire resilience. The goal of today's hearing is to get a better sense of what actions the state and local entities are taking to mitigate our wildfire risk.

And let me just say at this point, I know one of the huge issues, because I hear about it nearly every day, is the availability and affordability of insurance related to the wildfire risk. We're going to scratch the surface of that topic today, but I want to assure you, conversations are ongoing and it's one of the main things I'm focused on as your state representative. In fact, I'm running a Bill this year, Assembly Bill 478, which deals with the issues of the risk, particularly to those most vulnerable in our communities, including seniors effectively being kicked off their insurance simply because they live in high wildfire zones or the tremendous increase in prices to be able to even afford wildfire coverage.

That Bill has been pulled back to have some ongoing conversations. As we tackle those issues, we want to make sure that we fully understand the insurance marketplace and how it can best work on behalf of residents and consumers. I'll be engaging with my colleagues at the Legislature, along with the Committee on Insurance, to figure out how to tackle this issue of insurance affordability, availability, and frankly, accountability, particularly to the largest insurance companies in the state in light of our increasing wildfire risk.

So, more to come on that very happy to introduce our speakers today. Chief Frank Bigelow is the Assistant Deputy Director for Community Wildfire preparedness and Mitigation and fire engineering investigations at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. We'll next.

Be hearing from Mike Peterson. He is the Deputy Commissioner for Climate and Sustainability at the California Department of Insurance. Next will be Mark Brown, the Executive officer at the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority.

And then Sashi Sabaratnam. She is a former Wildfire Vegetation Mitigation program manager, University of California Cooperative Extension. Wildfire Vegetation Mitigation Division. And finally, we'll be hearing from John Anderson, who is the Vice President of Forest Policy at Humboldt Redwood Company. I look forward to learning about their work and their experiences in the field.

And without further ado, I would like to begin the hearing. And just to note, we will be hearing from all of our panelists. I'll be asking some questions, there'll be some discussion, and then ample opportunity when the speakers are wrapped up for the public to come forward, comment, express any ideas you have or opinions, and ask questions, and we'll get to those at that time as well. So with that, thank you, Chief Bigelow. Why don't you kick us off?

Can you hear me? Okay. Well, good morning, Chair Connolly and Members of the committee. My name, as mentioned, is Frank Bigelow.

I'm the Assistant Deputy Director for our Community Wildfire Preparedness and Mitigation Division out of the office of the state fire marshal, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. I'd like to recognize this beautiful campus we're on and show appreciation for having this event and for all of those who are in attendance, both in person and online today. I'll start with an overview of the recent wildfires and the destruction the state has experienced in the last few years.

I will also talk about our current fire hazard severity zone process as well as the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection's fire Risk Reduction Community list. Lastly, I will discuss wildfire mitigation measures and give an overview on the home hardening program that we have established at JPA with Cal OES. So, next slide.

And as the chair mentioned, california's wildfire problem is multifaceted and is representative of all those things that the Chair mentioned. A changing climate, our overgrown forest and the health of our forest, deteriorating human ignitions, people trying to do the right thing the wrong way with respect to defensible space and other mitigations, but also population growth, more people moving out into the less urbanized areas. Next slide.

This next picture is representative of what we're seeing out in the forest. This picture happened to come from what we saw in the Central Sierras with the bark beetle kill. But we're now starting to see that on the central coast and in the northern part of the state to the same extreme, which is just adding to the fuel to the environment.

Next slide. Pardon me. So what is this created for us? In the last 20 years, most of you have probably seen these infographics from Cal fire. In the last 20 years, we have seen the most destructive and the largest fires in California's history. And that's due to all of those things that I previously mentioned. Next slide.

So what are we doing? What is California's wildfire strategy to help combat this changing environment and the number of fires and the frequency that we're seeing? Well, we're focusing on in my division, several areas of the three I'm going to highlight today are parcel level mitigations, our community hardening, and our forest health. Next slide. Pardon me.

So the Governor's office convened a group. The Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. This task force has brought together groups from all across the state. Landowners, federal, local, state, tribal, all partners in this strategy. And we developed an action plan. It's a comprehensive action plan that outlines 99 key actions related to four goals.

The ones I'm going to talk about today are focused in goal two of the action plan that really focus on mitigations, looking at, on that circle there, the dark green and the landscape strategies working from the forest all the way into our local communities. But I'm going to focus mostly on our community hardening points today. But just to understand that there is a strategy, there are goals, there are key actions that all departments, agencies, and conservancies are all working towards to come together to combat this important issue.

Next slide. So I'm going to talk about the creation of the Community Wildfire Preparedness and Mitigation division. We are a fairly new division. However, we've been operating under a different name for quite a long time. Next slide. But through Assemblymember Wood's Bill, Assembly Bill 9 of 2021. It did a few things, and I try not to get very wordy on my slides, try to just show pictures, but this is one that warranted having some words on it. I'm not going to read them all to you.

I'm going to focus on a couple of them. The establishment of the CWPM Division. Previously, we had one assistant deputy Director and one staff chief to run all the programs you're going to hear about today.

That Bill allowed us to hire a deputy Director with a direct line to the State Fire Marshal, who is our current acting State Fire Marshal, Daniel Berlant. But it also gave us another assistant deputy Director and two staff chiefs. And that Division of Labor has proved to be very successful in our division for accomplishing a lot of the things that I'm going to talk about.

We also created our Wildfire Mitigation Advisory Committee meeting. If you haven't heard about this, I encourage you to visit the Office of the State Fire Marshals website and take a look at our agenda. This is a fantastic committee that brings groups from all across the state from CSAC, RCRC, League of Cities, the Building Officials, Office of Energy, Infrastructure Safety, California Department of Insurance, and many others together every single month to talk about Wildfire strategy and what each of us are doing.

And instead of working against one another, which we don't in the sense of not aligning but going different directions to get to the same goal, we can vet those things out every meeting to talk about where we can find alignment and move forward together. It also replaced at the bottom, bullet replaced Director with the State Fire Marshal and multiple fire prevention statutes. What gave the acting or the state fire Marshal the authority for a lot of the statutes that we enforce? Next slide.

So what does this look like out on the landscape? This is a great infographic from Headwaters Economics that really shows what this strategy looks like. Taking into account all the things we're going to talk about the fuels reduction, the D space, the utility component in here, and making better decisions for land use planning and our development standards following the minimum fire safe regulations. And building codes and creating green belts. So we have temporary refuge areas for people to retreat to in the event that roads are clogged. It's a great infographic there. Next slide.

So one of the things I really want to focus on on this slide is the fact that we are really focusing on research and how the effects of what this is showing is the structure separation distance. So looking at ADUs, looking at sheds and how far away they need to be away from a home to not impact the structure and burn it down. So we're looking at every single component from the Eaves, whether they need to be enclosed or unenclosed, the gutters, the windows, and you wouldn't think a thing like windows would make that big a difference.

But are they vinyl, are they plastic, are they metal, are they tempered, are they dual pane? What kind of gas do they have in them? The list goes on and on and on of every type of window construction. How big is the window? All of that goes into all the research that we are partnering with the National Institute for Standards and Technology, or NIST, and the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, or IBHS, to show exactly what the building components the amount of heat it can take so that we can inform the public on making better decisions when they're looking at retrofitting their home or building their home in the wildland. Next slide.

So the thing that we need to discern is the difference between hazard and risk. Oftentimes those words get conflated and get used in the same vein when they're very different things. Hazard is related to the physical conditions on the ground or in the air, weather, topography, and ember production.

And these things likely they don't change much over time. You're not changing topography over time. There may be some areas where developments kind of carve out a spot of a hill, but across the landscape, topography doesn't change. And what we can model is the effects of fire against the things that don't change, which gives us the likelihood of a hazard in a general area. But what we can change and what we can lower are our risks. Our risks are through mitigations.

And those mitigations include fuels reduction, defensible space, and home hardening. So you can live in a very high fire hazard severity zone. You could be red on the map, but you could have relatively Low or no risk based on the mitigations you've done, the way you've constructed your home and the way your community is protecting itself. The fire hazard severity zones. Next slide. Excuse me.

So what are they? What are the maps? What you're seeing on the left, the image is the current version of the map that's out for public comment period. Right now these maps are required by law. The sections are up there that govern the reason why we have to do it. And again, they map hazard, not risk. And they're broken up into three distinctly different areas moderate, high, and very high. Next slide.

The zones are determined by using multiple factors. You can see up there fire history, vegetation, topography, and climate. And one of the ones that we included this year that weren't included previously is the use of an ember production and movement model using very discrete weather conditions.

What we've found out in the environment now, there are so many more weather monitoring stations that can give us much better granular detail about how the wind moves on the landscape. And we've included that the latest and wind models in the ember production portion of our model to give us a more accurate portrayal of the hazard. Next slide.

Some of the new updates to the latest version is we updated the burn probabilities and we used localized weather. In the previous iteration, there was a broad swath of weather used across the state. In this iteration, we really focused on the localized weather patterns that happen in the specific microclimates across the state of California and the new firebrand production and transport model using those discrete weather vectors that I talked about.

Next slide. We're currently out for a public comment. If you haven't heard that, you can make a public comment on our website. If you visit the Office of State Fire Marshal website, we encourage you to take a look at the maps. We have a whole bunch of tools on our videos that showed you how we did it, all the data of how we processed the model. We have swipe maps so you can look at before and after all of that's available on our website from the first version we put out on December 16 to the version we have out now.

Public comments we received 1141, 28 of which were comments that did make a change on the map because they went from a wildland to a non wildland classification for a land use or vice versa. But that really only accounted for 0.34% of a change of the overall map. And I'll note that most of that was in the very high that went down to a different level.

So it went down to moderate or it went down to a high level. 67,000 of those acres did. I'll also note that four counties, Imperial, Kings, Glenn and Trinity County saw no change from the first version we put out on December 16 to the current version that's out.

Next slide. So what do fire hazard Severity zones do or govern? Or why are they there? If you look on the left, there's the high, very high and the moderate or excuse me, very high, high and moderate. Along the top you have the different responsibility areas.

So if we focus on the state right now, because that's the maps we're putting out, all of the things apply in all of the zones in the state responsibility area, except for one thing, a Civil Code 110 2.19 for home sales disclosure. When you sell your home, you have to show certificate of compliance and defensible space in the SRA. That's only required in the high and the very high, but every other thing you see up there is required in all the zones of the state responsibility area. Chapter 7a and fire safe regulations and defensible space. Next slide, please. So the Fire Risk Reduction Communities list.

This is a list that the Board of Forestry propagates. They were asked to do so through 420 9.1, and they should consider all of the following things when developing the list, and that list gets updated every two years. And currently on that list there are four cities, three counties, and non city or county agencies, of which there are 25.

Next slide. Sorry, I'm going through this really fast. I got a lot of information and not a lot of time. So I'm going to keep trucking through our defensible space inspections, through the generosity of the Administration, through the Legislature, we've been given additional funding to hire more defensible space inspectors. And I'm happy to announce I got the numbers before this. I wasn't able to update the infographic, but we conducted 376,636 inspections last year, and that's due to bringing on the additional 21 permanent Forestry Technicians of which we got approval for to hire.

So, tremendous effort from the folks out there to conduct defensible space inspections. Next slide. But what does defensible space look like? This is an example of defensible space. And in the essence of time, I'm not going to run through each of the bubbles there, but just keep this vision in your mind when we look at the next slide. Next slide, please. This is what most of us are probably used to seeing.

If I turn your attention to the upper left, where we have a shed right next to our house, or the bottom center where we have the wood right next to our door, so we don't have to go out in the winter and trudge through the mud to go get the wood to bring inside to stay warm. But what this does, unfortunately next slide. Is allow for this to take over in the event of a wildfire, we get ember production that rains down on our homes.

And this is what we see. We have a tremendous amount of heat at the base of the structure where we're keeping those organic or inorganic material or hydrocarbon based materials like furniture, plastics, and those ignite. And when those ignite, they're directly under the eaves. And the next thing that ignites is your home. It's imperative that we have a clean, lean, zero organic or inorganic materials around that. First 5ft of our home embers are what are burning down homes through NIST and IBHS.

Their studies show that up to 75% of homes during a wildfire are burned down by embers. Not by direct flame contact, not by radiant heat, but through embers. Next slide. So home hardening. Next slide. What is home hardening? Home hardening is and I had switched my slides, and I was ready for the next one.

First, I'm going to talk about our California Wildfire mitigation program. So this program also came to us from Assembly Bill 38 from Assembly Member Wood. This required Cal Fire and OES the Office of Emergency Services to enter into a joint Power agreement to administer a direct financial assistance program to offer, up to what we've gone through our cost benefit analysis with FEMA to authorize up to $40,000 per homeowner to retrofit their home for everything, including roofs, eve, siding, windows, vents.

And that program is well on its way. We have submitted applications for Shasta, San Diego and Lake Counties. Lake county received its FEMA money, $22 million, and the other three are going to receive equal amount.

We have two more in the works, Tuolumne county and El Dorado. I'll stress that this is a pilot program. We have developed everything from the application portal, the financial tracking component, the mobile application to do the assessments, developed contractor lists, developed an outreach program, all the tools that a jurisdiction could be successful in implementing this program.

We plan to be what we call Swinging Hammers to retrofit our first homes by the end of summer or early fall. And we couldn't be more excited about this program. We're going to be retrofitting hundreds of homes across those five communities in the very near future. So exciting thing there. So, next slide, and I'm going to skip this one. Next slide, please.

What I will note, you can go to the next slide that we are and one more. We are leveraging hazard mitigation grant dollars from FEMA. So we're essence, in essence leveraging the state dollars against Hazard Mitigation Grant dollars to get a 75-25 match. So where we got $50 million appropriated, we're going to have $150,000,000 to give out for this program. So what is home hardening? It's those things I talked about, roofs, eve, sidings, windows, all of that stuff. This is an example of what you don't want.

Wood shingle, roof out in the Wildland embers, those two don't get along well. Next slide. Vents is what I talked about. The one on the left, two large events. The one on the right, it's hard to see at the bottom. You can see the hole in the gable end event. There's another hole at the second one near the top. Those are intrusion points for embers. You got to maintain those.

You got to maintain a small diameter of those. Next slide. And then lastly, just go in your garage, close the doors during the day and see if you can see daylight. Can you imagine if that picture that you saw of the embers flying at your home and you have that many cracks and ways for embers to get inside. It's an intrusion point. So next slide.

But there are things that we can do that are Low cost. We have a low cost retrofit list. And we also have the Wildfire Home Retrofit Guide that was a collaboration with a Wildfire Prevention grant program and Living with Fire Tahoe.

Fantastic resources for the homeowner to be able to reference and be able to make those upgrades to their home. The one on the left has a little bit more expensive upgrades, but the one on the right are all low cost things that we can all do ourselves, caulking or gaskets or anything else that we need to put on our home. Next slide.

But what's the scale of the problem here's the scale. Everything to the left of the green bar are homes that were built before chapter 7A that need to be retrofitted. Everything to the right, the one green bar, are homes that have been built since chapter 7A.

So we have hundreds of thousands of homes in the state responsibility area that need to be retrofitted, that need to be upgraded to current standards to be more resilient to Wildfire. Next slide. So what are we doing on the community wide mitigation one of the things that Cal Fire is the state liaison for the National Fire Protection Administration's Firewise program.

This is a fantastic program for folks to get involved in the community, to get engaged to have community events, and to focus on fuels reduction and community efforts around their community. Next slide. So we encourage participation in events all across the state. We participate in these. This is an example of a group that was doing just that kind of work on a day where they all came together out in Auburn. Next slide.

The importance too of the minimum fire safe regulations. When we look at a picture like this, you have a single way entry point to a group of homes that have the road widths aren't very wide. Imagine trying to take a fire engine anywhere near that.

Of course that's a walk bridge, but you're definitely not going to drive across it. But it's just to illustrate the fact that we have communities out there that have very single lane bridges that are hard to access, hard to get out of in the event of an emergency. So the minimum fire safe regulations are extremely important as well.

Next slide. The other thing that we focus on beyond is our fuel breaks and getting our Cal Fire crews out and doing work during the times that we can. And also funding wildfire prevention grants to get local community groups out doing fuels reduction work as well.

Next slide. And some examples of one more of what that looks like in the form of numbers. You can see on the left, our direct awards and our competitive grants. The amount of dollars has gone up over the last few years, but so have the number of acres that we've been able to complete. So you can see just a few years ago, in 2015-16 era, we were far below where we are now and those numbers continue to stay steady at a high level. Next slide.

So one of the things I want to say here is that this is a coupled approach for defensible space and home hardening. We can no longer talk about one without the other. They need to be spoken about together as synonyms. They are different in some respects, but they need to be together to be the most effective. Next slide. And then, so this is the final topic, is we're leveraging technology and how we're advancing our technology.

So what you're looking at is an image from the Mill Fire in Siskiyou County where we used our aerial platforms to do some remote sensing to determine where the structures were destroyed by the fire. Next slide. And as we zoom in, you can see where because those homes are lighting up, that's where we can focus our efforts for our damage assessment teams, for post emergency assessments to go out and actually conduct assessment to kind of figure out what happened.

What were those homes constructed of and why did they burn? So we can make more informed building decisions in the future. Next slide. Another shot of how we put those points on the map and then shared that information out using RGIs technology. Next slide. The importance of this map is this is from the campfire from 2018. It just represents the fact that one of the most important things for me respect to damage inspection is in the Creek Fire of 2020 in eastern Fresno County and Madeira County, 17 of my friends and family lost their homes.

And the importance of having something like this at the touch of a fingertip, for somebody to find closure, whether it's positive or negative, to determine whether their home was burned down is imperative. And if they did experience a loss, there's two things that that helps with. One is to expedite recovery. They can contact their insurance company, they can go on our website and show, look, my house burned. They can start the process. And two, it starts for recovery for them.

So if they need resources like from the Red Cross or from any other service group, they can say, look, I need food, I need shelter, I need this, everything's gone, and they can show the proof that that happened. So very important, powerful tool here as well. And next slide.

And then the way that we represent that is internally through dashboards. This is a representation of the Tulare floods that took place earlier this year showing the points on the map. And we also used aerial imagery to determine where the need was, where it was most needed, so that we could deploy resources more effectively.

In conclusion here, California has made multiple investments in wildfire mitigation efforts that have been a crucial part of battling wildfires in the state. And California has awarded nearly $256,000,000 in wildfire prevention grants over the last two fiscal years and funded 249 projects near threatened communities to improve public health and safety while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We also awarded more than $215,000,000 in forest health grants for fuels reduction, prescribed fire, pest management, biomass utilization, workforce development, and forest restoration projects during that same time.

And I'd like to highlight that 95% of all wildfires are human caused. I know we say that a lot, but it means a lot people cause fires. This means that we absolutely need residents and visitors to be extra cautious, both indoors and outdoors, to prevent sparking a new wildfire.

Our public education program informs Californians about the risk of wildfire and fire prevention measures, enabling cal fire to decrease the number of human caused fires and mitigate the damage caused by the fires that do occur. While there has been a reduction in the number of fires this year due to the unusual conditions, the protracted drought has led to significant loads of dead vegetation, and the abundant rain is producing a bumper crop of fine grasses as the conditions continue to dry in the coming weeks, which they are now.

I know it's nice here, and I was pleasantly happy to show up in this outfit. At 68 degrees, it's 108 at my house. So wildfires are becoming more susceptible to burning. We must remain vigilant in the fight against catastrophic wildfires. While climate change is fueling larger wildfires and more severe fires, and resources are under increasing strain, wildfire mitigation measures will only become more critical moving forward. Thank you for your time, Chair, and I look forward to answering any questions.

Thank you. Chief Bigelow. Yeah. Your testimony really underscores the house out approach that we have to adopt, and just to underscore the Legislature and Governor really fully on board with that, how can we empower individuals, homeowners and residents to do what they need to do, firewise communities at the community level as well? Broadening the perspective a little bit. What is Cal Fire doing to increase the pace and scale of forest health projects in the state?

Thank you for that question. So there's been approximately $110,000,000 for Forest Health grants that's been appropriated to us for the 23 24 solicitation. So we have also received additional funding of $50 million for post fire recovery and restoration, $10 million for tribal wildfire resilience, and $5 million for our woody biomass transportation subsidy.

So we are pushing that money out as quickly as we can to all of those grantees to make it a priority that the Forest health be a priority and that we are capturing those carbon emissions and that we are looking at all of the pests and the entomology and the biodiversity of the forest and making sure that our watersheds are clean and protected.

Yeah, and I'll follow up on that a little bit. But as you mentioned, given the amount of grant funding now flowing through Cal Fire each year, are there efforts to streamline the delivery of various grant programs such as aligning application format, timing, et cetera? Yeah, absolutely. That's been a priority of us between the Forest Health Program and the Wildfire Prevention program is we went to a digital application format. It was formerly known as Escivis.

It was bought by a different company. Now it's Una Solutions, and that platform has allowed us to synchronize and be more consistent with the process to make it easier for folks, and it allows us to be in a digital format. So a lot of the information is queryable, meaning that we can run reports and provide more transparency about where the projects are taking place, because they're actually putting where the project is taking place on a digital map, which allows us to then display it more quickly.

But, yes, we are also aligning our solicitation times. So if our Forest Health grant opens, it's maybe one or two weeks later that the Wildfire Prevention grants open. So we're not on this off cycle, and people are wondering when it opens. When it closes.

And I'll just put a quick plug in for one of my bills, AB 388, which would facilitate moving toward a regional block grant program looking at larger landscape level projects. It's moving through the process right now, and we're hoping to get that across the finish line. So you touch on this a little bit, but in your work on fire prevention and forest health, do you also consider multi benefits such as biodiversity, climate resiliency and adaptation, if you can kind of outline that approach and some specifics.

Around that, yeah, certainly. So all of our applications include a brief description of the project's Co benefits. That's a required portion of it. So we grade them on what they've put in there and then look to verify and validate that those Co-benefits really will exist in the project. And some of those include, but are not limited to, reduced fire risk and or facilitated fire suppression. Of course, that's a big one.

But bioenergy and or wood product produced biomass diverted from a landfill, improved air water quality, improved watershed health, protected water supplies, improved wildlife, fish or native plant habitat, reduced invasive species or increased recreation, education or outreach opportunities, workforce development of populations historically marginalized in forestry, the list goes on and on. That those are the things, among others, that we really look for when we're grading those applications.

All right, we're going to move on again to Members of the public. Make a note of any comments you have, and we will have an opportunity at the end to come up and let us know what's on your mind as well. So it looks like we're addressing a technical issue here because our next speaker, Mike Peterson, Deputy Commissioner for Climate and Sustainability at the California Department of Insurance, will be joining us remotely.

Thank you. Chair Connolly, I don't know if you can hear me okay, but this is Mike Peterson from the Department of Insurance.

Welcome, Mike.

Well, good morning, and thank you for having me. I'm Mike Peterson and I serve as Deputy Commissioner for Climate and Sustainability at the California Department of Insurance under the leadership of Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara. I first have a few introductory comments and then about ten slides that will help provide a visual aid to my presentation.

So, to start with, Commissioner Lara is the regulator for the insurance markets in the state of California, which are the fourth largest insurance market in the world. And as it relates to this committee, the overarching approach for our Department and Commissioner Lara has been addressing the challenges posed by climate intensified wildfires by prioritizing reducing risks in California communities. The Department of Insurance has focused on a multi year effort on engaging with consumers, with stakeholders, and assessing new tools for how to improve the risk management that goes along with insurance, to make residential and commercial insurance more accessible and reliable for Californians and to maintain competition and ensure stability in the state's insurance marketplace.

The Department has a very clear role here and that is that we're really focused on the benefits to consumers as the most important piece of what we do. And we strive to increase the availability of reliable insurance from what we call the admitted market, the common insurers that are offering insurance in the state and that will ensure a long term stability of rates and incentivize the accurate recognition of wildfire mitigation efforts. Like many that Chief Bigelow just talked about today, the focus of my testimony will be on the Commissioner's Safer from Wildfires framework, which is a collaboration among the state's wildfire preparedness agencies to communicate home hardening and community mitigation actions to Californians.

I appreciate the hard work and the partnership with Chief Bigelow who just presented and CalFire in aligning the work of the state agencies to reduce wildfire risk throughout California. The California Wildfire Mitigation program is indeed a really strong cornerstone in how we promote risk reduction in all of our communities and reduce the impacts that the wildfires have in our state overall. The wildfire risk reduction is going to be the result of the combined work of entire communities, neighborhoods and individuals to take the actions necessary to make us all safer.

The results of these actions are critical for insurance availability and affordability and reliability in the long run. Insurance has historically been about pricing risk and being a source of resilience, namely funding that occurs after a devastating wildfire. What we are trying to do here at the Department of Insurance is to take specific actions so that insurance incentivizes risk reduction before a disaster occurs, saving lives, reducing losses and bringing down costs.

So I'll move on to my presentation now. So if we could move to the second slide and I'll walk through the Save It from Wildfires program, which was launched in 2021 as a convening by Commissioner Laura, who convened the major Wildfire preparedness agencies in California, including the Governor's Office of Emergency Services, the Governor's Office of Planning and Research, the California Public Utilities Commission, and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, commonly called Cal Fire. In one year's time we met with research experts from the Institute for Business and Home Safety and the University of California consumer groups, insurance trade associations, fire chiefs from across the state, and wildfire safety experts.

Our goal was to establish a list of home hardening and community mitigation actions that were based in fire science and could be applicable to insurance. To understand the effectiveness of certain strategies to reduce the risk of loss to homes and businesses, we met with wildfire risk researchers and just to kind of clarify some of these research groups since not everyone is focused on where wildfire research occurs. The Institute for Business and Home Safety is a research organization that was in one of the photos that Chief Bigelow showed in that they test home hardening strategies in an experimental way.

So how do embers react when you have them flying at home with certain attributes and built a certain way. And so they're able to test strategies kind of more in a direct way. In California, the University of California has researchers across the state that are studying wildfire risk in a broader way, looking at examples from past fires, what seemed to be effective, what seemed to be less effective, and coming up with strategies that may bring down risk for the entire communities.

So, next slide, please. So, after one year of convening, in early 2022, the partner agencies announced the Saver from Wildfires program, which is a consensus of core home hardening actions and community mitigation designations that are clear and consistent, effective and achievable. The actions recognize that we need structure hardening, we need to work outward from the structure to the surrounding property, and then we also need to work together with our entire communities.

So it has these three levels that I'll walk through in the next couple of slides. Next slide, please. Starting at the structure, there were six actions that are in the Safer From Wildfires framework.

A class A fire rated roof, 5ft of ember resistant zone around the structure. This again aligns with what Chief Bigelow mentioned in terms of embers being a major source of catastrophic wildfire in California, and the need to find ways to reduce the impacts of Embers that become close to structures. Third, a noncombustible six inches at the bottom of walls.

Fourth, ember and fire resistant vents. Fifth, double pane windows or added shutters. 6th, enclosed eaves. Some of these actions, like replacing vents, can be relatively economical and be accomplished rather quickly. Other actions, the reality is they take longer. But the key here from an insurance perspective is that to reduce risk and promote safety, consumers need to get started and get some of these actions taken, even if the further actions are going to take longer.

And many local fire chiefs and local fire districts are providing important coordination, encouragement, sometimes even funding for homeowners and business owners to take these actions in their community. Next slide, please. The next theme we have here is to move outward from the structure into the immediate surroundings.

And there, there are three actions. One, cleared vegetation debris from under decks if you have a deck. Two, moving sheds and outbuildings at least 30ft away from your main structure so that there's not a stepping stone to get from the environment to your main structure.

And then three, trimming trees and removing brush and compliant with state and local defensible space laws. Many of these state and local laws have been in place for years. This is an area that has a lot of emphasis in many of our communities, and the better we can do this, the lower we can make the overall risk to the whole community.

Next slide, please. Finally, moving from the individual parcel level to the entire community. There are two community level designations that are recognized in the Safer from Wildfires framework.

The first is that neighborhoods can form a firewise community that has also been talked about by California, so I won't get too far into that. But in addition, cities, counties, and local districts can be certified as a fire risk reduction community, which is a designation established in state law and implemented by the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection. So this is the overall consensus list of home and community Harding mitigation actions that are included in the Safer from Wildfires framework for those communities facing wildfire risk.

This framework can be used to focus efforts on the actions that went through and became consensus from the five partner agencies. And really, our attempt here is to try to create alignment across the state agencies so that insurance incentives, grant funding, communications have as much consistency as possible. We're working to create further alignment with local fire chiefs who are doing critical work in their communities.

And the more that these efforts can be aligned, the clearer the communication and the more impact funding can have to reduce risks in our communities. So once we had this framework, our next step is that as the insurance regulator, Commissioner Lara made this most impactful to insurance consumers and the public by creating a regulation to require insurance companies to reward the actions in Safer From Wildfires in their pricing of insurance. So Commissioner Lara, under his authority as an insurance commissioner, went through a regulatory process and finalized the first ever regulations by A-U-S.

State to require homeowners and commercial insurance companies to provide incentives to policyholders who take home or business or community hardening actions that are in this framework. This process included public workshops, incorporated the work of our state agencies, and in addition to the wildfire mitigation incentives that are built into that regulation. The regulation also helps provide risk communication because it requires insurance companies to provide consumers with their property's risk score, how they're scoring that property in terms of wildfire risk, and then also a right to appeal that score if there's a discrepancy that the consumer feels like has not been resolved.

In terms of timing, the regulations were finalized in October 2022, so that's last fall, and insurance companies had to file new rate filings by April 2023 in order to comply with those rules. The rules state that the insurance companies must incentivize risk reduction for each and every action on this list. That means the more work you do, the more you can save. Next slide, please.

This regulation is also one step in what has been a four year effort to encourage home hardening related to insurance. In 2018, only 7% of policyholders had access to any incentive for home hardening in their policy. By 2021, that number had grown to 40% of policyholders.

And this new regulation that was finalized last fall will ensure that 100% of policyholders have access to incentives. So on an annual basis through your insurance policy, there'll be an incentive to harden homes and mitigate communities moving forward. One key here is that for a home or business or community action that's in our regulation to be accessed by consumers, you will have to get that directly from your insurance company.

And so the benefit will be is that this will be consistent across all insurance companies. So as a consumer shops around for insurance, they can have confidence that each of the insurance companies will reward similar actions. And so your investments in risk reduction will be transferable depending on who your insurance company might be.

This will give, I think, some confidence for consumers to get started on these actions and just to know that every insurance company writing residential or commercial coverage is required to provide those incentives. Companies will also be competing for the business of Californians, and that's going to include how the insurance companies incorporate their risk mitigation into their pricing. So different companies will have slightly different approaches in terms of what percentage discounts may be within their rate plans and that'll be competitive.

And so there may be options that are better for one homeowner versus another depending on how the insurance company frames their rating plan. Next slide please. Sorry, one more. Next slide please. Perfect, thank you. So how do you access the incentives? The first step is to talk to your insurance company.

But we also have an outreach and education team that's working in communities across the state to assist consumers with the questions that they have generally, but also on this issue specifically, as you can see from this slide, there are several hundred events that are happening each year that are able to connect with thousands of Members of the public. We have point persons for each region of the state to make sure that the questions that get answered are relevant to your region and into your area. And so I do really encourage you.

There's probably an event coming up near you or someone who will respond to your questions as it relates to wildfire safety. And beyond that, I also want to emphasize that the multi agency effort towards wildfire risk reduction is just a really important part of making saber from wildfires as effective as possible. Insurance pricing will be one incentive, but there will also be state and local grants that can help neighborhoods and homeowners achieve many of the actions.

In this framework, many of you may live in wildfire prone communities and are seeing the wildfire risks and risk reduction actions happening hand in hand. Firsthand, some of these actions are not going to be new, but there's now what is new is that there are wildfire mitigation regulations that are making risk reduction actions more clear and consistent and require that insurance companies provide incentives for those actions. And that should increase the adoption of home hardening throughout the state, which will help save lives and properties and bring down the cost of insurance.

So with that, I'm happy to answer questions about the wildfire and safety mitigation that's going on in the insurance sector, and I appreciate the chance to speak today. Thank you very much, chair Connolly.

Thank you, Mike. Great testimony. Just for the audience, we have waters in the back. Please help yourselves. So, a couple of questions, and really glad to hear that California was the first in the nation to adopt a wild fire safety regulation. Have other states followed suit on the idea that we really should be incentivizing and rewarding residents who are doing the right thing by stepping up and hardening their homes, managing their vegetation and the like? What's the larger landscape for that right now?

Thanks very much for the question. There's two main components that other states have started to pick up on after California made this regulation final, the first of which is that the wildfire situation, especially in the Western states, can feel overwhelming to communities who are trying to figure out what action to take. And so just the clarity of having a focused list of home harming actions that you can take if you're an existing home, not a new home, but if you're an existing home is something that many of our Western states have shared with their consumers and kind of created that communication that helps clarify what actions to prioritize.

In terms of the regulation itself, there are two states, Oregon and Colorado, who've taken an interest in this. Every state has a different process for getting to an incentive. And so, because these regulations that we've passed in California are so recent, those states are still considering their best path forward to it. But I think that there is a general sense among state regulators that rewarding consumers for taking risk reduction actions is going to benefit the sustainability of insurance markets in the long run.

Great. And with the understanding as I mentioned in my opening, this is an ongoing conversation that we're having, but was hoping you could maybe comment on it. Is the Department of Insurance exploring other efforts to alleviate the challenges posed by our wildfire risks most notably around availability and affordability of insurance.

Yes, wildfire issues have been a major challenge the last five years. And so I think in addition to the regulation that incentivizes risk reduction, we also work very closely with Cal Fire and Cal OES in terms of communicating risk to the public. Commissioner Lara each year has advocated for state funding for risk reduction, both at a community level and through the California Wildfire Mitigation program.

And then our community outreach efforts really attempt to help people understand their insurance policies and the wildfire elements that are in them. And so it really is a multifaceted effort to try to communicate risk and bring down risk as effectively as possible, because that's the straightest path towards better insurability, is to be able to manage risk effectively within communities.

Great. Thank you, Mike. Next we have Mark Brown, Executive officer at the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority, something we're very proud of that's come into existence and is immediately, I think, making a huge impact for communities. So, welcome, Mark. We're anxious to hear more about your agency.

Well, thank you very much for the invitation. I'm very pleasured and honored to be here. Chair Connolly, we really appreciate the invitation. Members of the public, thank you for being here, and we are always happy to share our story about what the MWPA is doing for Marin, but we need a different slide presentation, please. There we go. That's the slide presentation. Thank you.

So today we will be sharing the story of the MWPA and what we're doing for Marin. And if we can go to the next slide, please. As mentioned, my name is Mark Brown. I'm the Executive officer for the MWPA. But prior to coming to the MWPA, I spent 30 years with the Marin County Fire Department, last serving as a deputy fire chief, spent 15 years on a Cal Fire incident management team as an operations section chief, and I've been assigned to some of the most devastating fires in the state's history. I've been evacuated from my home twice.

I had the glass fire tear through my neighborhood. So I have seen the change in a wildfire environment. I've personally experienced it both as a professional and as a resident. And every time a fire ignites, our public and our firefighters are behind in the race. The fire has a head start. So we need to find a way to give our firefighters a chance to succeed by giving them a little bit of a head start.

And we need to keep our residents safe and give them a little bit of head start for evacuations. Can we start the slide presentation, please? It looks like it's confused about which projector that the presentation is on, but if you can go to slide three, I'll move through for the sake of time with the two slides up, please. Next one down.

There we go. Thank you very much. So after the 2017 fires, and as Chief Weber from the Marin County Fire Department put it very well, the only thing separating Marin from Sonoma was the lack of ignitions. In Marin. We had the same exact conditions. Had we had an ignition in Marin, we would have had the same situation.

So we asked all the fire law and land management agencies from Sonoma County down into Marin. We asked them questions. We asked them, what were you doing before the fires, during the fires, and after the fires, where did you succeed and where did you have challenges? And with this, we came up with a packet of lessons learned.

Seven pages of action items. And what was clear was that there was no single agency charged with making sure those action items occurred, nor was there funding for that. And that's when a JPA of our 17 Member agencies came about and a tax measure with ten cents per square foot of building space, providing us $20 million a year to take these actions on.

We had broad community support, more than a 70% yes vote. And we recognize that climate change is a key driver. And we feel that our actions are not only contributing to wildfire safety, but it's also contributing to our part to help improve the climate change. We also understand that every single person in Marin, whether they're public or private, has a role to play. Next slide, please. And I hate reading slides to people, but this one, I think, is important enough to read to you.

The Marine Wildfire Prevention Authority communities are informed, prepared, fire adapted, resilient, and capable of withstanding a major fire limiting loss of life and major property damage while protecting our rich environmental diversity. That's our vision. That's where we are trying to go. And I want to have you focus on the last sentence, and that is while limiting loss of life and major property damage. And shout out to Mr. Sabratinum for insisting that we did not promise that we would eliminate all of that, because that's impossible. So what we are trying to do is minimize that.

But we are also taking into account our rich environmental history. Next slide, please. Through our strategic planning, we have created five goals. I'm going to start with the middle one first, and that is reduce risk to homes. I'm starting with that one because we have adopted a house out approach. Far too many people look at the wildlands and say, that is the problem.

But we're asking people to turn around and look at their homes and look at what they can do at their homes, whether it's home hardening or defensible space, and have them recognize what they can do. We are improving our evacuation systems and our notification systems and protecting and hardening our evacuation routes. We are reducing wildfire fuels so that as a fire approaches our communities, they will have less intensity, create fewer embers.

And those are the embers that are creating the structure loss. And we have just about a $1 million public education campaign. California has very smart residents, and just going and telling somebody to do something doesn't work. You can't just go, we're the Fire Department. We want you to do this, do it. That doesn't work.

What we need to do is we need to educate the public so they can understand the risks and they can understand what they can do to make themselves safer. And then we provide grants for our residents to help with home hardening, defensible space, and we also provide low income senior tax exemptions. And what it's important, I think, to recognize is that no one has really started to create true measures of success that are validated.

We could say how many miles we treat, we could say how many homes we inspect. But if we can't analyze what risk reduction we are creating, how do we know if we're succeeding? So under each one of our goals, we are actually digging in and creating objectives and measures of success so that we can actually measure what risk reduction we are providing for our residents. Next slide, please.

Just a quick look at our budget, which averages about $20 million per year. 60% of our budget goes to our cross jurisdictional projects because we do know Wildfire does not respect any jurisdictional boundaries, right? So we have Wildfire detection, evacuation program improvements, vegetation management, grant management, both bringing grants in, but also distributing grants to our residents and public education. The next piece, I think, is probably our most important one, and that is our defensible space home evaluation program.

I think at the end of our ten year lifespan for the tax, which we obviously hope to renew, we look back at our successes. We will see our defensible space evaluation program as our number one success. And then our fire departments are also closely connected with their communities. They know what is needed best in their communities. So 20% of our budget goes right back to our Member agencies so that they can institute programs that follow our core programs within their communities. But they have to show to us that that is a step above what they were doing prior to Measure C.

It can't supplant anything they were doing prior to MWPA being formed. Next slide, please. I really feel that the MWPA is a convener as part of our role, and that is bringing people together, land managers. And I really want to emphasize this relationship. Marin is lucky to have an organization called One Tam, and that is all the large management agencies that have come together under one umbrella, and they are looking at the forest health issue. And we know now forest health equals good wildfire prevention.

So the MWPA is side by side with One Tam in developing their forest health strategy, as well as a regional priority plan of projects. And one of the things that we're analyzing is not just the forest health. And the data we have for the forest health is enormous and it's guiding where our one tam agencies are doing their projects.

But we're also analyzing flow path or the paths of travel that the fire wants to take through our wildlands. And if we know where the fire is going to burn with the most intensity, we can place a strategically placed large area treatment or a splat in that location to help interrupt that fire flow so that as it approaches the community, the intensity goes way down. Our Marin residents, through our inspection program is the number one way we engage civic leaders.

And I don't just look at civic leaders as our elected officials. I look at them as our people who are firewise community leaders, people who are active in their community and provide leadership for the rest of their community to follow. First responders is an obvious one. And then the developers and business owners. If we are going to succeed, it's not going to be because of the public entities. It's going to be because of a private public partnership.

We need to engage with our private businesses in order to succeed. And I think we've been able to show a successful model on where that works. And actually, I'll be able to address that here in just a little bit. Next slide, please. And we are driven by science. We have a very detailed community wildfire protection plan that has fairly current LiDAR data could do to be updated now that it was 2019 that we got the LiDAR data.

But it's very extensive data that we were able to create a partial level risk assessment so we can identify the highest priority areas and focus our efforts in those areas. Now. Next slide. Great example here of our wait there we go. Of our house out approach by using our parcel level data, that allows us to focus where we're going to bring in our inspectors. We're inspecting just about everybody, but this house makes us be able to identify the priority areas to help the residents harden their homes and create defensible space.

Next slide. And this is an example of our private public partnership. We helped fund the development of our defensible space evaluation software and it's turned out to be a very good partnership that's increasing our public private partnership. We have 80,000 or so inspectable parcels in Marin last year and the year before. We inspected just over 33,000 parcels each year. That's a great volume.

But if no one takes action, what good is it? What we're really happy about is 60% of the people who received an inspection took some form of action. Now, they may not have done everything that we asked them to do, but at least they took some form of action and they're improving the community resiliency. We also have created a direct connection to the insurance business and home safety. Insurance Institute of Business, home Safety, IBHS. So much easier to say. And their wildfire prepared home designation.

With the residents permission, we can export our data to the IBHS for them to evaluate whether or not that property meets the Wildfire Prepared Home designation, which they can use for discounts on their insurance. And additionally, we have programmed into our software all of the Safer from Wildfire discount items. So we are inspecting and noting both positively or negatively whether or not those items are present.

So when the discounts become available, we'll be able to email or mail our residents or when they receive their report, they'll get a list of items that they can ask their insurance companies for a discount. Next slide, please. And then we have a resident grant program that was funded to the tune of $800,000 last year and we have $800,000 going into it this year.

We have $1,000 for defensible space and $5,000 for home hardening grants. Most of the home hardening grants are a matching grant. However, a few of the items we feel are so important, we don't require a match.

Vents, gutter guards and garage seals, we don't require a match for that because we just feel that they're so important. And one thing that we really appreciate about our grant program is that and we think the numbers are a little bit higher than what I'm about to say. But for every $1 the MWPA is providing in these grants, the residents who receive the grant are putting another $2 towards it.

So we're getting a good return on that investment. That doesn't even count the money that people are putting into their properties who didn't ask for a grant. Next slide. And in chipper days and what I want to talk about with chipper days, similar to the grant program, is when our residents receive their Defensible Space Evaluation Report. That report will list the items that are available for grants and they can just click on the button. The data for their inspection automatically goes into our grant portal.

They fill out an application for the grant. Same with chipper days. When they receive their report, it lists what days the chipper days are available in their community and gives them a link to be able, in order to sign up last year, over 3000 pickups, which is the equivalent to over 1000 dump trucks hauling material.

But that also connects to what are we doing with all this biomass and how can we use it more effectively. So we are also partnering with the Marine Resource Conservation District for a study that was funded by the Governor's Office of Planning Research on how best to utilize that biomass and how we can use it for whether it's green energy, building products, creating mulch, so on and so forth. In 2023, we're even picking up steam and have far more pickups with chipper days than we did last year.

Speaking of return on investment, if a resident asks for a chipper to come to their house. That's about a $300 expense on average. Our residents paying between 200 and $220 a year for the Measure C parcel tax. So one chipper day is a total return on investment. If they can get discounts on their insurance, continued returns on their investment, it doesn't even consider the increased safety that they have. Next slide, please.

And again, public education is so important, but I feel the bottom left square with our inspectors. Meeting with a resident on their property is the best form of public education. And we also host a wildfire festival called Emberstomp. Last year we had 2000 people attend. This year we had 5000 people attend to come learn more about wildfire safety and what they can do to make themselves safer. Next slide.

And then evacuation routes clearing. We know that none of our communities were designed for every car to hit the road at the same time. And that's what happens during an evacuation. And we know traffic jams are going to happen. So we need to make that environment tenable or safe. Safer probably a better word.

While they are on a road that's being impacted by fire, that is the same road. And I would argue actually that road is safer day to day driving, let alone during a fire. Next slide. We have instituted an evacuation risk assessment. It is evaluating every roadway in Marin. It is evaluating the wildfire danger, the traffic infrastructure, how many cars in that road actually handle communication networks and human decision making.

And it's creating a risk rating for every road. But not only is it creating a risk rating, it's telling us why it's risky. And if we know the why, then we can build a project to help improve the safety for that route. Next slide. Of course, prescribed herbivory is one of our big projects. I know that some people are concerned about grazing, bringing in non native species, but what we've actually been finding is grazing is causing a return of our native species and we've been very pleased with that finding.

And then here's one of our biggest projects. Next slide, please. We are in a process of instituting 22 shaded fuel bricks throughout our communities. And basically we're increasing the defensible space by one to 300ft along our wildland urban interface boundary. We engage with the communities about basically how we're designing it and how we're going to implement it. And then the big question is, what does success look like? Well, under major fire conditions, we're not looking for those fire breaks to stop the fire, we're looking at them to change the fire behavior.

Chief Bigelow talked about embers coming in. Well, if we can decrease the Ember production right up against our homes, then we have a greater chance of homes being defended. So by creating the shaded fuel breaks, when long distance Embers land in the shaded fuel break, there's less material for them to create new high intensity spot fires that create even more embers close to our homes.

And as the main fire approaches, flame lengths go down, rates of spread go down, our residents have more time to evacuate and under safer conditions and our firefighters can actually succeed. They don't have to go through head high brush to put a hose lay and they have open land to put a hose lay through. Where we builded them right along our community boundaries.

We designed them using the best available science and data. We construct them mostly with hand tools, removing the dead and down on the forest floor, removing non native vegetation and then limbing up the native healthy trees so that we remove the ladder fuels vertically, but we're also creating horizontal separation so the fires really do decrease in intensity. And the most important part, I think though, is how do we maintain them once we build it? We've created infrastructure and we must maintain it.

And with the Measure C parcel tax, that allows us the funding to be able to come back and maintain. And the grass models will come back every year. And when we get into the brush, it's going to be every three to five years and in heavier timber, it'll be every five to seven years that we'll have to have a return treatment.

Next slide. Here's a map of our Greater Ross Valley shaded fuel break. It's 38 miles long. Thank you, Cal Fire. We received a $3.25 million grant to help Fund that project and we're on time. We wanted to be able to finish this in three years. In the first year we were able to complete 16 miles. Next slide. We're also using our best available science.

This is a picture of the Devato shaded fuel break, a 60 miles network that we are starting work on August 1. And we can't do it all at once, so we have to use science to pick where we are going to work first. And we did have a fire impact the Greater Ross Valley shaded fuel break last month. It was a low intensity fire. It was on a moist day. The fire probably wasn't going to do much regardless of the shaded fuel break or not.

But what I looked at that was the success of our modeling and predicting where our highest priority areas were. The first fire that was in the area of the Greater Ross Valley shaded fuel break happened to be where we did our work based on that modeling. And with that, I'll take any questions.

Thank you, Mark. Great presentation. So does the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority coordinate with other governmental entities on the grant program specifically to leverage other dollars? You mentioned the Cal Fire $3.2 million grant. If you can elaborate on that. And I really want to underscore, at least as things stand right now statewide, the MWPA is fairly unique in bringing local jurisdictions together. But how is that translating in terms of other levels of government as well.

Well, first of all, let's talk to partnership within our local areas and the evacuation ingress egress risk assessment is a good example. Our public works entities, our community development entities, they have tremendous responsibilities due to Senate Bill 99 and Assembly Bill 747, and that parcel level or the evacuationgress risk assessment is helping them and is providing them information for their safety element. And then we are also partnering with sea level rise folks, because many of our evacuation routes are through areas that will see sea level rise.

And even on a non rainy day on a king tide, some of our evacuation routes do get flooded. So we're able to partner with them and we're seeking grant money for that. I think one of our biggest partnerships that will bring in more grant money is with our 110 partnership and bringing in forest health monies, both state and federal forest health monies.

And then we do want to leverage the monies that are available for home hardening grants and make it so that the MWPA is recipient so we can turn around and push it out to our residents and make it easier on our residents. Great. And as you noted, coordinating fire preparedness projects across 17 different distinct local agencies sounds like a tall order for any organization. How do you balance all the different inputs that you were receiving?

I wish I would have said this earlier, but the strength of the MWPA is the strength of our Member agencies. We have tremendously talented people in all 17 of our Member agencies. Sometimes it is difficult to corral them into all one distinct direction, but we are guided by our strategic plan, and then we put that into our five zones so it's a little bit more manageable.

Instead of thinking about all 17 at once. We have five zones and so we can focus on that. But one of the things I do appreciate with the 17 Members is that local codes and ordinances differ from jurisdictional boundary to jurisdictional boundary.

And it's frustrating for residents that their neighbor has one set of guidelines that they have to follow compared to another as the different fire codes go through the process. So by having Members on each of the councils, they can see the benefit of having a standardized code. And so that's one of the things we're working with our Member agencies to help reinforce the idea.

Standardized codes and ordinances. Yeah. And you know, the MWPA itself came about because of lessons learned. And I recall those days as a Marin County supervisor where our neighbors to the north in Sonoma County suffered through such catastrophic wildfires.

There was really a concerted effort to unpack that and really work together as communities. And then taxpayers stepped up to fund this new agency, if you will. I imagine now MWPA itself in the experience may yield important lessons for other wildfire preparedness initiatives across the State and communities. .

Do you find there are opportunities to share those lessons learned with others? And what is the status of other jurisdictions adopting a model like this? And how would you encourage that? And Chief Bigelow, you can weigh in as well after Mark on this one.

I do want to say the work that we are doing is not novel work. It's work that a lot of other communities are doing. I feel that our governance model is what is novel, and the fact that we have dedicated funding behind it that cannot be siphoned off or anything else other than wildfire mitigation is one of the other novel items.

I love the model we created as a Joint Powers Agreement, but I'm not necessarily convinced that is always the best way for the other communities to go. It could be through a memorandum of understanding or for larger communities, it may be that they institute a similar program within their jurisdiction. But to me, I think the most important part is having that dedicated funding and dedicated staff that can concentrate on wildfire mitigation year round. To me, that's the key.

I have to agree. The dedicated staff and the dedicated funding, as I mentioned in my presentation through Assemblymember Woods, legislation that prioritized the creation of our division, the delegation of labor and the amount of resources that we've received from the Legislature. And. It has made a tremendous difference for us and having the ability to implement all the things that I talked about for years. We did have big visions and big hopes and dreams, but we didn't have enough people to implement it very shortly ago. We had 13 people in our office in 2016 doing all the things that I talked about.

Now we have 63, and that's just in our office. That doesn't include the additional staff that our Cal fire units, our 21 operational units, and our contract county partners received. So the implementation of these things are now happening and we're starting to see the fruits of that labor, as you saw, in a defensible space number.

So, yeah, dedicated staffing, dedicated funding is making a huge difference. And having these cooperative collaborative ventures like our joint powers authority with OES and these collaborative ventures, that's the way that we need to keep proceeding is through one voice or multiple voices, but one message.

And Mark, do you want to just quickly comment on governance structure? Who oversees MWPA, how's it structured?

You bet. So 17 Member agencies, like you mentioned, each of our Member agencies is either a fire district or a council that has an elected Member that's on our board. Then we have a 17 Member operations committee that is populated by fire chiefs and town managers.

So we get fire expertise and public governance expertise. And then really, where the rubber meets the road is our advisory technical committee. It's 17 Members again, and these are the people that are designing the projects our Operations Committee sets the strategy for our work plan.

And then our 17 Member agencies at the Advisory Technical Committee create the plan. My staff and I help support the creation of that plan and align it with the strategy that created by the Operations Committee. And it comes up to the board. So it really is our subject matter experts making the plan and then we push it up through the process.

Great. Thanks again. All right, we're going to move to Sashi Sabaratnam. Welcome, Sashi.

Hearing chief Bill. Oh. Thank you very much.

I really enjoyed hearing Chief Bigelow's presentation and Mark's presentation, and I'll be interested to hear what John has to say here, too. I'm advising a Department of Defense Wildfire technology transfer program right now, and I just want to acknowledge that there's a lot of acknowledgement that California is the gold standard on this. The work that we're doing here in California is really leading the nation in terms of wildfire resilience and that type of risk mitigation.

So if we move to the next slide so this is my background. I'm going to be talking to you about some of the great work we've been doing here in Sonoma County. There is so much underway here in Sonoma County.

There are a number of FEMA grants that bring together the landscape treatments and near home interventions. There's a potential insurance pilot. There is the work of the North Coast Resource Partnership on woody biomass aggregation and figuring out how to make use of that.

So there's a lot underway. But what I'm going to talk to you about today is some things that we've actually accomplished and finished on the local level here and how that fits into the picture. Next slide, please.

So those of us here are talking about what's going on at the local level, and it's really about local level solutions supported by these state and federal plans. And these bullets here are from, as Chief Bigelow mentioned, the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan, which is a really well considered, comprehensive plan that stays at the right level. It recognizes that wildfire mitigation and forest health have to be considered together.

It acknowledges the importance of regionally tailored strategies and actions, and it highlights that there are multiple ownerships where this work is actually going to happen. Next slide, please. Going the other way.

Oh, there we go. So 40% of the forested land in California is privately owned. Sonoma county is a great exemplar of that because it's closer to 90% and almost entirely, that is, in small parcels of under 100 acres.

So that means that small private landowners really need tools and information to manage their land. So to that end, we last month put on the 2023 Living with Fire Forest Conservation Conference. I think some of you in the room will recognize our own Cal Fire Chief Marshall Turbeville there delivering a lecture on forest management.

So it was a hands on conference. We had 120 landowners representing thousands of acres. It was at Santa Rosa Junior College Shone Farm for a day of hands on workshops and then a second day of field tours around the county.

There are a few folks in the audience who attended the conference, and I do want to recognize the Santa Rosa Junior College Wildfire Resilience program, which is a really innovative workforce development program that's coordinated by the brilliant Brianna Boaz, who I believe is watching the hearing today, and her incredibly dynamic team. And they did a great job in helping us put this conference together. But this was a way to really connect the people whose land needs to be managed with the technologies, tools, data and community collaboration that's needed to really actually make an impact.

Next slide, please. So another thing that we did, and I'm actually really pleased to see that a number of the people in this group are actually in the room here. So with all this interest in wildfire vegetation management, it brings up a lot of concerns of stakeholders in the environmental and climate activist community.

So what we did was we put together a group of these activists which included groups from like Sierra Club, Forest Unlimited, the Sonoma County Climate Action Network, who were really concerned about all this work that all of a sudden is going on. And the purpose of this group was to really understand what the concerns of these stakeholders are and to make sure that all of these voices are included in the conversation. It's really important to have different voices involved in the community conversation because ultimately it's through consensus of all those different voices that any action is going to happen on the ground.

And one of the big takeaways from my point of view, was all of these different activist groups, it's not a monolithic group, they don't all have the same concerns, but they all care about how this is happening and making sure that there's accountability and that there's data being used and what the level of intensity is. And when we talk about increasing pace and scale, what do we mean by that and how quickly are we doing those things? Those decisions really can only be made at the community level and by consensus of all these different community voices. This is just one section of that, but it is really important to make sure that all these different voices are heard.

Next slide. And then finally, my master's thesis research work. I did some original qualitative research with Sonoma County landowners and agencies and looking at how technology can be helpful in building community consensus around wildfire vegetation management.

So one of the things when I went into it was thinking, well, really all we need is we just need better tools, we need some one great piece of technology will just solve everything. And really what I learned is that information is almost never the problem. If you're trying to figure out how to if you've got a persistent problem, there are reasons why it's like that.

And there were probably good reasons why it was like that. And now we have different concerns and different values that we want to focus on. How do we make those changes? It's generally not because people don't have the information.

It's because that connection has been made to how do I then change what I'm doing to fit into this new paradigm? So building that consensus at the community level is really just the absolutely critical piece and technology is a really important part of that. But we talk a lot about making sure we have a research based approach, a science based approach. One thing that we tend to skip over with that is you cannot do any of that without local knowledge, with the people who are going to be actually impacted, whose land it is, who actually have to do this work.

So that was really what I learned from this effort. So next slide. I just did kind of a quick high flyover but we can obviously talk about a lot of different things that we're doing here in Sonoma County.

But if I'm going to direct the committee's attention to anything, these are the kind of three things I thought would be important to look at is number one, local knowledge is critical. The State Wildfire Action Plan really does exquisitely hold that these solutions have to be regionally tailored and in fact, they have to be tailored to the local community. At the community level, overcoming inaction is really more important than finding the best, the one best way we can get very sucked into looking at data.

Data is really important but it can befuddle more than it helps if you are not really focused on, look, we just need to get started here. So what do we need to do to overcome inaction? That's really where we need to start because from there then you can build and MWPA, whose board I served for a long time, is a great example of what you can do once you have gotten started. But if you don't have a base to build off of, you can't do those 2.0 and 3.0 strategies.

You have to really start from zero. And then the third one is really the one I would just would love to see some attention to is that state agencies and in alignment with our State Resilience plan, should support local solutions and not create barriers. And one of the biggest challenges to getting some of this work done is the just landscape of different state agencies, whether it's regional water quality board or air quality board or coastal commission or whatever it is.

All of whom have important missions that they're looking at, but many of whom don't really understand the picture that we're looking at here in terms of forest health and wildfire resilience. And in implementing their mandates, they tend to create barriers in their zeal to fulfill their missions. If we can really direct those agencies to be more collaborative and solution oriented and really allow the local community to come forward with what they know needs to be done on their own land and find ways to help those things happen that are within their missions, that's really a vision for the future that I would love to see.

So I'll just leave that with you and thank you very much for having me.

No really great information and I was struck by the forums you were able to put together. What do you see as some of the next steps following those discussions going forward?

Well, what was great about that, and again, a bunch of those folks are actually here, so maybe some of them will come up and tell us. But my goal was to make sure that they had a channel to interact with policymakers in a positive and a collaborative way. And I think that really did happen and that might be evidenced by the fact that some of them are here.

So it's a long game. All of this is a long game. We're all here.

We're here on this land. We all care about it, we have different values. But since we all care about it and we're all going to still be here, we need to have that conversation and we need to fight it out with each other and we need to come to some kind of consensus and it's not just one battle and then moving on.

It's a series of decisions. So I know that group is continuing on and continuing to meet, but I'm always for let's bring everybody into the tent and have the conversation.

And I think your three main points were well taken, in particular, wondering how can the state better support local efforts from your perspective.

I think in each of those agencies, there are the superstars within each of those and they tend to be the ones that are most connected to the local community there. There are a lot of superstars in Cal Fire LNU that I can point to there that are doing an exceptional job and with some of the other agencies. And I definitely want to call out the Resource Conservation Districts.

So the Resource Conservation Districts are agencies that are designated from the state to really look at resource conservation issues in a particular area. So they really have that local expertise, they have a local board and they are really empowered to help work on those issues in a very locally directed way. So supporting the RCDs is, I think, one very direct way that the state can help and then just figuring out how to resolve these kind of challenges among the different agencies that are going to get in the way there.

I think it might be actually now hearing more about Chief Bigelow's new organization there. It might be about empowering them to do more of an education campaign among those state agencies so that they understand. Well, I'll give an example without naming the area where there was an emergency vegetation management initiative that happened in an area because there were a number of fires that were happening, like 100 a year in this area, and so they wanted to remove some of the vegetation that would have caused some of those fires.

And it was in the built environment, it was not a wildland area. And they were told by the regional water quality board that they had to do one to one replacement of those trees, which sort of defeats the purpose and that the regional water quality board was also really concerned about the impact of grazing. And so instead they wanted them to use a masticator which in fact has significantly more impact on the land.

So there was some education that they needed that had they had that, they maybe wouldn't have imposed rules that were going to just really not be helpful at all and know they think all the intentions are good there, but it could be working with Chief Bigelow's organization to help educate those agencies.

And in terms of your point on local knowledge and the importance of that, how do you get the word out that such resources exist for homeowners? And do you see a lot of demand from homeowners at this point for resources to reduce the risks?

Yes, and again, it's very different in different regions. The problem before Marin County or Napa County is really different than the problem before Sonoma County. There's a fair amount, the more rural you get, the less desire you have for people have for the government to come and intervene and tell you what to do.

So the research has shown that people who live in high hazard areas, like high fire hazard areas have, as you would expect, a greater tolerance for that kind of risk. We're all Californians, when you go to other states, people go, oh my God, aren't you terrified of earthquakes all the time? And we go, no, I mean we know what that's like. That's what it's like to live in a high fire zone area too.

So it's less about do you know you live in a risky area? Yeah, I do. It's more about, okay, well so what you need to do is really look at that first hundred feet or really that first 5ft around your structure and see what you can do there to overcome some inaction there. So the way that you can overcome those type of barriers is really by empowering community champions and neighborhood champions within that area and have it go out from there.

And that is something that takes a considerable amount of time and effort. It's very slow, but if you are able to do that over a long period of time, it lasts because it comes from inside. It has to come from inside.

Well put. So last, but certainly not least, we're going to hear from John Anderson, vice President of Forest Policy at the Humboldt Redwood Company. Welcome John.

Thank you, Chair and other committee Members if they're online. And thank you all for being here as well. I'll wait for this.

Here it comes. OK, my name is John Anderson, I'm a registered professional forester. And while we've talked a lot about trying to protect communities, I'm going to be talking mostly about forest management.

The companies I work for own 440,000 acres of forest and to quote an insurance company since we've been in business for 25 years. So we know a little bit about fuel reduction and making fire resilient forests. We've been at it for quite some time.

Um, this picture that I have on the on this slide, the top picture there is, I didn't put on there just because it's a nice looking forest. That is one that we thinned in 1999. And lightning fire came through in 2008 and burned this forest.

And I took this picture about four or five years after the fire. So how did this forest survive a wildfire event when we see so many that are going to ashes? This is going to be the gist of my presentation. So, first of all, it would be beneficial for us to go back in time and let's look at what the forest looked like before European settlement to get a sense at what did Mother Nature consider as a fire resilient forest.

So if we can go to the next picture or next slide, let's go to a place we're all familiar with, yosemite Valley. This is from 1866, and you can see the trees are rather well spaced out. We had lightning fires that just did what they were going to do.

They spread. We had Native Americans doing their burning. And these fires were common.

So they weren't the big catastrophic fires that we've seen today. They are Low intensity fires that, like I said, were rather common. But with the hundred or so years of fire suppression that we've had here in California, we created Smokey the Bear and said all fires are bad.

We have a different look at Yosemite Valley if we can go to the next slide. This is from 1961, and you see the significant increase in number of trees going back to the first slide. We had an average in California, about 50 trees per acre throughout the state.

And today we're looking at three to 400 trees per acre, depending on where you are in the state due to the lack of fire. So now what we're looking at today is forests that have so much competition. We've had droughts now, and we're starting to see significant losses of these trees.

If we can go to the next slide, please. The last count in California was about 140,000,000 dead trees. We saw some pictures from Chief Bigelow in that regard as well.

So this is all due to the overstocking, competition, drought, and the significant need. And we need to get back to these historical conditions. So how do we reverse this trend? First, I want to get to the million acre goal that we have here in the state.

We have an agreement between the state and federal partners to reduce fuels on 1 million acres by 2025. That's 17 months from now. We got a lot of work to do if we're going to get to that goal by 2025.

Cal Fire has been doing a great job on their Fuel Reduction projects web page. They have a goal of treating 100,000 acres of this. They're 72% of the way there.

Now, they did complete over those many acres last year, but we have lots of other projects trying to get to that 500,000 acres that the state has in their goal. The problem is that we don't have a single location that shows where all these projects are going on. With Fire safe Councils conservancies to be able to gauge, are we getting close to this 500,000 acre goal? We don't have that yet.

So the Governor's Wildfire and Forest Resiliency Task Force is working on an interagency tracking system so we can see where all those are happening, what the costs are, what the actual treatments are, see where the gaps are so we can identify priority areas. So I'm hopeful that's going to come online very soon, especially before 2025, so we could see if we're close to a 1 million acre goal. In our minds, this tracking system ideally would go back to 2017.

So we can see a five year rolling average of, hey, how close are we getting better and better every year? Are we getting closer and closer to that goal? And Cal Fire staff has told me that they plan to use acres that are done under timber harvest plans. That's about 100 and 5160 thousand acres throughout the state. And while they do reduce fuels, that's true.

We've had timber harvest plans since 1974 when the Forest Practices Act was passed, and the wildfire situation has only gotten worse. So if we are really going to have truly meaningful acres, we need 500,000 acres above and beyond timber harvest plans. Let's not grab that 150,000 acres just to meet that number goal, we need meaningful acres.

Next, I'm going to touch on prescribed fire and how important that is in our forested environments. If we can go to the next slide, please. So forest thinning is important, but it is much more effective when it's married with prescribed burning.

And here you see a picture of the Bootleg fire in eastern Oregon. And I want to stress, this is eastern Oregon, very dry, Low humidity, and this fire happened on a red flag day. So you see the thinning in the bottom portion of the that's right in the bottom portion of the photo wasn't so effective.

It was in my very first photo that was closer to the coast in the redwoods. So one size doesn't fit all as far as what the results of the treatments are. But certainly even under these very intense conditions, you see the middle section of that photo showing how beneficial prescribed burning is with thinning.

We simply cannot just walk away from our forest. Now close the gates. Say, boy, we've lost too many from wildfires, we should just leave them alone at this point.

If we do this, we're protecting our forests to death. One of the problems with prescribed burning is the very few burn days we see out of the air quality management districts. They need to open that up to 100 plus days a year.

It's very difficult to just have a few burn days and expect to get to a 500,000 acre goal of the state. And even more difficult is that air quality management districts tell us when the burn day is, a day before or sometimes the day of the burn. And the logistics going around these prescribed burns, scheduling fire engines and water tanks and crews and preconstructing fire lines and finding out the next day, no, that's all off.

That's just untenable. We need like a week in advance for these air quality management districts to give us some advance notice of when burn days are to occur. And one of our speakers here oh, it was Sashi, talked about the smaller landowners and tools that they need to manage their land for fuel reduction.

And one of those that we've used on our lands is called the Forest Fire Prevention exemption. And it is an exemption from the timber harvest plan, which is about a $40,000 permit. It's like 300 pages long.

It covers the most strictest rules in the nation that we have here in California and even the globe. And I have yet for anybody to challenge me on that. And I'll even go out in a limb and say they're the most restrictive rules in the intergalactic universe when it comes to forest management right here in California.

So the Forest Fire prevention exemption takes all those rules into play, even though it is an exemption. But it has about a ten day review versus a timber harvest plan, which is like 120 day review. So if we can go to the next slide.

This is an example of prior to work under a forest fire prevention exemption on our land, clearly ready to burn. But we did an exemption on this portion of our property. It requires 60% canopy retention.

It requires an increase in the average stand diameter post harvest. So you have to maintain the larger trees and you have to reduce all the fuels down to nine inches. That's pretty Low, nine inches on the forest floor.

If we can go to the next slide, this is the same location after those treatments. You can see clearly, under normal burn conditions, we would have a fire that would drop to the ground in this portion of our forest. Red flag warning days.

Kind of all bets are off at that point. That's why I say there's no such thing as a fireproof forest. But this certainly is a fire resilient forest.

So if the goal is to meet 500,000 acres a year, this is a great tool. The problem is it's limited under statute to 300 acres per permit. And it also limits you to 600ft of road construction to get into the forest.

So that's one thing that I think Future Bill could certainly address is here we have this 500,000 acre goal, but we're telling landowners, hey, only do 300 acres at a time, so let's expand that. It clearly is a good tool. And every acre that a private landowner can thin out their forest and reduce fuels is an acre that the taxpayers don't have to spend through the state of California to do this type of work.

Also, I want to touch on next permanent streamlining in California. I talked about that timber harvest plan. That's one of three duplicative state permits we have to get to be able to thin out a forest.

So we have to go to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and get a permit. We have to get a permit from the water quality control board. Both of those agencies review the timber harvest plan and submit their comments to it.

But they have their statutory authority to require permits, so they require them. And so I've really been involved in the last few years on how do we synchronize the review of those permits. The Wildfire and Forest Resiliency Task Force has been on this, but it's been dragging on, I'm going to say.

So if we can go to the next slide, I wanted to show you kind of what our current process is. And I don't mean for you to read all this. The whole point is here it's a spaghetti bowl of a mess.

The left hand side is our timber harvest plan review process. The upper right is the Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the lower right is the water quality permit process. And all that needs to be done before we can thin out our forest.

And we've had a number of directions from two governors and legislation and even the task force itself saying, hey, we're going to streamline this process. So in 2012, we had AB 1492 that put a 1% tax on lumber so that we can help Fund the agencies to review fuel reduction projects and timber harvest plans. But also said in 2012, we're going to synchronize the review of permits.

We're here in 2023 and haven't seen this. Brown in 2018, newsom in 2020 said the same thing under Executive orders and the task force put in their action plan by December 2021, we're going to synchronize permits. And then Senator Laird in SB 456 said, by January 1, 2022, the task force shall complete their permit synchronization plan.

So we've had tons of direction here. And so I'm glad to be newly involved in the permit synchronization working group on the task force. And believe me, I'm going to try and put a fire under this effort.

So if we can move to the next slide, please. I wanted to touch on sequoia exemption and what the Governor did in 2018. You may recall he gave a sequa exemption to 35 fuel reduction projects across the state.

They were successful. All the environmental regulations that go along with those projects were adhered to. It was just a permit process, was much more synchronized and streamlined through the sequel process or the lack of the sequel process.

So if that was a success, we have this goal of 500,000 acres. Why don't we expand this to 200,000 acres annually in the highest fire threat areas in the state? Let's get some work done. Now, a lot of people are saying we need to be doing a lot more than a million acres a year.

We have 33 million acres of forest in California in too many years. We're losing millions of acres of them. And we can do the math here and see that, boy, if this keeps up, we're going to regret not doing something sooner rather than later.

Okay, next slide, please. Again, if we're going to be moving towards a goal of 500,000 acres, we're going to have a whole slew of material. Some of this we can use send to sawmills, but a lot of this is subcommercial vegetation.

We can burn it in the woods, we can send it to landfills. Neither are great options, but that burning in the woods is pretty much what happens now unless you're near a biomass facility. A lot of the criticisms around biomass facility are the so if we can go to the next slide, please.

I was glad to see a study by the Placer County Air Quality Management District that looked at a comparison between pile burns in their emissions and the pile burns in a biomass facility. And what they found was in biomass facilities, a 99% reduction in particulate matter and black carbon, 95% to 99% reduction in carbon monoxide and VOCs, and 40 to 70 reduction in nitrous oxides. So not only can we reduce our emissions by sending it to a biomass plant, we also can reduce fuels in the forest while we're doing it and have baseload 24/7 power for the grid, which we know this time of year is more and more an issue.

If we can go to the next slide, please. So we know that biomass costs more than wind and power, but the benefits of burning thinning material in a biomass plant along with the risk reduction that come with it, make that an excellent investment for this state. We got to do it one way or another anyways.

50% of the premium for biomass is attributable to getting the material there. But if we can we talked about some of the Members here today talked about the transportation subsidy. Typically, biomass facilities pay for their materials such that they can bring in material from about a 30 miles radius around such a facility.

That transportation subsidy will help us get out more to a 50 miles radius around these facilities that encompasses 5 million acres. If we can get a five mile circumference around these biomass plants, and if we can create even more. Biomass, let's say 100 biomass facilities that'll take thinnings off of 75,000 acres annually.

So we're really talking about significant improvement there. And we have a number of idled biomass facilities. Now that given the right contracts, we can get up and running.

$200 million is really what we need to cover the transportation costs. If we're looking at 500,000 acres a year relative to the cost of one wildfire, maintaining a vibrant biomass facility in California, in our mind, is cheap insurance and needed to support fire resiliency work for the long term. Next slide, please.

So a couple of questions for the agencies. I just wonder, hey, what's the plan for the next twelve months? I've talked about a number of deadlines that have been missed, and so we'd just like to see what's the goal for the next twelve months? Can we have a concrete answer to what will be accomplished? And number two, if the sequoia exemption can come to fruition, can we get to that 200,000 acres? Is there constraints, is it permitting? Is it money? I suspect it's both, but it'd be great to hear from the agencies their opinion on this. Next slide, please.

Just wanted to thank you for the opportunity here today. If we could have that next slide. Okay, I'll just continue.

I'm at the end anyways, but it showed a picture of really beautiful redwood forest. And again, I didn't just put a picture up there of beautiful redwood forest. It is a picture of redwood forest that has burned and it'll burn again.

And I really look forward to working with all the agencies, conservancies and others to try and maintain what was in that picture, which is really a wildfire, resilient forest. I did show you one other picture, so you had a glance at what that might look like. And like I said, if we can take on some of the things I mentioned here today, we can make a real dent in the impacts that we've seen across the forest.

And I also like to mention, I love talking about this a whole lot more in the woods than doing it here inside of a building. But I attempted to bring the forest to you. But if you ever have an opportunity, our company has a policy of taking anybody anywhere in the forest that they'd like to go.

We have lands here in Sonoma County out by accidental too. So if you have any interest and would like to see some recent fuel reduction projects, be happy to take people out. That goes for anybody here as well.

Thank you for the opportunity today.

Thank you. John, I've got a couple questions for you, but I was hoping we could get your questions back up on the board. You posed a couple of questions for the agencies, get that slide back up.

And perhaps if by agency you meant Cal Fire, we happen to have someone here from there.

Didn't mean to put Frank on the spot? Yeah, I would say number one, I think Frank mentioned the 99 task of Wildfire Resiliency Task Force, and I think their staff is very much go getters. They're not just about having meetings, they're about results and getting stuff done. And they actually have a web page, they call it something else.

It's kind of like an Excel spreadsheet, but it shows where every one of those 99 tasks are at and the success that they've had, which ones are still in development and they're still working on. The wildfire situation has been going on for a long time now. And so it'd be great to know, hey, what do we have planned for the next twelve months? I know we've got this 500,000 acre goal coming up in 17 months.

So are we going to be three quarters the way there in the next year or so? And what other improvements can we expect around permit streamlining and some of the things that we've been working on for.

Some time with you, John? So Cal Fires Forest Health grants have such a large minimum size that it takes a lot of aggregation to get those kind of projects together. That's something that I know that there's a desire to put more of those projects together, but maybe that could be additive in your answer on that. Chief Piccolo.

Exactly. So I was just trying to pull up the exact date of the next regional meeting. But you go on the Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force website, sign up for the next meeting both virtual and in person in Northern California. But what we are focusing on behind the scenes as a part of that meeting is to answer that very question is to look.

Okay, so a couple things I think I'll start with. The Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force is putting together at the next regional meeting a summary of that.

So we started in Southern California with the investments, how much money has been put into this problem. Then we went into the Central Coast to talk about what is being done, what are we doing now? The next meeting is really going to focus on the planned acres and then putting all that together in a summary so that we can show everyone what we have, what we've done, and where we're going and how we're going to meet or if we're not going to meet. Our goal based on the projections of the planned projects with active projects.

So that very question is going to be answered at the next regional meeting.

Excellent.

As far as for project streamlining with relation to SQA, of course, I think that we could all say that in no way do any of our departments or our agency want to circumvent environmental review in any way. We all care about the environment just as much as you. I live in a very wildlife prone area.

The last thing I want to do is mess it up or introduce something to a waterway that shouldn't be or bring in an invasive species that's going to take over. None of that is our goal or objective. We have through our Vegetation Treatment program, environmental Impact Report, or VTP Eir, was a broad coalition of groups that came together to help streamline, in essence, the sequa process for Cal fire projects because they're redundant.

Oftentimes we're doing the same things over and over across different parts of the state, understanding that there are flora and fauna things that we need to look at. There are different waterways that we need to look at, there are different archaeological concerns that we need to assess individually on each project. But a lot of the other things are just boilerplate.

They're the same thing we do over and over. And to have that constant redundant review of the same verbiage over and over doesn't make sense. So the VTP Eir has helped streamline that, but I think that there are other areas in that program that we could look at that would help us do that as well.

And thank you. You're welcome. The next meeting is August 29 in Sacramento from one to 04:00 P.m..

Great.

Thank you. John, how do you take into consideration environmental impacts when undertaking the kinds of projects you're talking about?

Well, yeah, so I mentioned the forest practice rules being the most stringent, and that's about a 400 page book of two font. I exaggerated on the font a little bit, but it's pretty small. So that takes into account, boy, a huge list of potential impacts and mitigations that must go into any forest thinning.

And so, for instance, whenever we want to do a thinning project on our lands, the very first thing we have to do two years in advance of doing any thinning is start hooting for our spotted owls. We need two years of surveys to find out where they are. And so that starts really the beginning of putting together one of these permits to be able to thin out a forest.

And in the process of those two years, there's amphibian surveys, there's raptor surveys, there's botanical surveys, there's a geologist that comes out to look at make sure anything thinning projects don't impact negatively on slope stability. Just about all of our foresters are trained archaeological surveyors, so they're out there surveying for historic sites and Native American sites.