Senate Standing Committee on Natural Resources and Water

Our IT personnel will put you back on mute when you are done. Once recognized to speak, please make sure you can be seen on the screen. State your name and then you are ready to address the Committee for Today's hearing. We will be hearing all of the panels of witnesses on the agenda prior to taking any public comment.

Once we have heard all the witnesses, we will have a public comment period for those who wish to comment on the topics of today's agenda one of the effects of climate change on California is an increase in the frequency intensity of wildfires throughout the state. This increase, coupled with drought, decades of fire suppression and other factors, have significantly raised the risk of high intensity and catastrophic wildland fires statewide as we've seen.

In 2020 and 2021, 9 of the 20th largest and seven of the 20 most destructive wildland fires in state history occurred when almost 7 million total acres burned. The 2020 August complex fire in Northern California, the largest fire in California history, burned over 1 million acres just by itself, that's 1% of the state's land area in this one fire.

Over the last few years, Wildland Fire has destroyed tens of thousands of people's homes, including in my district in Orange County, caused billions of dollars of insured losses, destroyed or damaged lots of prime habitat, and tragically resulted in the loss of lives for hundreds of people. Thousands of firefighters are deployed to battle these fires, often for multiple weeks at a time.

Additionally, millions of Californians end up exposed to unhealthy air quality due to wildfire smoke, so improving forest and landscape health to provide resiliency to and reduce the risk of wildlife unfired is of paramount importance. This is just as true in the Conifer forests of Northern California as it is with the coastal scrub and chaparral of Southern California, although of course the methods of firefighting and suppression vary between the two.

In recognition of the need to combat wildfires, the Newsom Administration signed a shared stewardship agreement with the US Forest Service in 2020, committing to the shared goals of fuel reduction treatment of 1 million acres annually, 500,000 acres each between the state and Federal Governments by the year 2025, as well as other related goals to improve wildfire and forest resiliency statewide.

Subsequently, the state developed a plan to meet this ambitious treatment target through the development of the 2021 California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan, which identified four key goals and 99 key actions. To achieve those goals, my colleague, Senator Laird authored a Bill, SB 456, to codify the action plan in 2021, which provided for the California wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force, which was meant to implement this action plan.

At the same time, the Legislature appropriated an unprecedented $2.6 billion over four years to Fund efforts to improve forest and landscape health and help prepare the framework to meet the 1 million acre treatment target by the year 2025 and thereafter. Now, considerable progress has been made through the combined and collaborative efforts of state, federal, local and tribal governments as well as other stakeholders. But 2025 is only two years away.

This Committee is convening this hearing to check in on the state's efforts to implement the action plan, improve forest and landscape health, reduce the risk of wildfire, and reach the 1 million acre treatment goal. The identification of obstacles or bottlenecks preventing progress on these important goals will be a welcome hearing outcome, particularly if folks can identify where legislative action could help.

This hearing will start with an overview of the challenges that wildfire poses to the state, followed by a panel of key state leaders who are directing the state's efforts. And we'll close with a stakeholder panel representing diverse interests. These panelists represent the efforts of so many people out there on the ground. So I do want to thank the panelists, but also who they represent. I appreciate them sharing their insights and perspectives.

I know all of our participants today are very busy, and their time here is appreciated. With that, I'd like to take a few minutes to allow my Senate colleagues the opportunity to make their own opening remarks. Do any of our Members have . . . Vice Chair Seyarto.

Thank you. So when we're doing fire plans, it's really important that the steps that have been taken have already been taken, and that's organizing and planning, and now it's kind of time to execute. And I think it's really important in the execution of this that we make sure we identify these barriers.

And like you had mentioned, hopefully one of the outcomes of this hearing is that we identify barriers that are holding the process up, because at the end of the day, that's the important part, is getting on the ground, doing the actual clearance and the land and the fuel management and also having a place to take the fuel after it's managed.

Anyway, I look forward to hearing what those updates are and how we can better serve the people that are trying to execute a plan for us here. And so I appreciate all of the speakers making themselves available today to give us that update. Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Chair Seyarto. Senator Laird.

Thank you. I feel like I should acknowledge off the bat the cognitive dissonance of being on NPR live this morning at 05:00 talking about the 11th atmospheric river and the fact that the levee in my district is going to break in a second place in a matter of hours, and that we are in the middle of some of the most dramatic wet storms in modern times. And I left that to come to a hearing on fire.

Yet I think one of the things that isn't totally understood is that when we have wet seasons, there's incredible grass and things created, and we could find, if the rain stops in the next week or two, that we have an early fire season due to the grasslands that catch fire, due to all this wet weather that we're having right now. And it makes this hearing very appropriate.

And I just want to acknowledge a bit of what the chair said at the outset, and that is, the fire program of the state for many years was whatever we put in the budget that year. And so if it turned out to be a down budget year, we didn't have a big fire prevention program that year or as big as in others. And the Administration stepped forward with goals of acres to be treated, things to be done.

And what SB 456 did in 2021 was basically put those goals into statute, create the task force, and give it the power to adaptively manage and to shift based on what's successful and the number of acres treated. And I think in the hearing today, I'm very grateful for all the witnesses. And I think one of my questions will be, to be very precise on how we're implementing that. Where are we? Are the reports in the legislation been submitted?

Is the transparency, which for the first time was in that Bill. It wasn't what the news reported. There's actually now an internal transparency from the state on acres treated and the efforts that didn't exist before. And so I really look forward to the hearing because I want to know what the implementation is so that we know that we are moving forward before we're in the next drought year and before we're in a major fire season.

So I also really want to thank the chair and the Committee staff for putting this together because I think it's a very important topic. Thank you for letting me make some opening comments.

Thank you, Senator Laird. Appreciate your remarks. Any other remarks? All right. And with that, we'll hear from our first panelists participating remotely, Professor John Battles from UC Berkeley, who will provide a General overview on the State of wildfire in California. Welcome, Professor Battles.

Thank you, Senator. Min, let me just get my talk up here.

Yeah.

So I think, Senator, your experience is probably similar to mine of chairing committees composed of smart, independent and diverse Members, that when you get complete agreement on an issue, it's something special and you pay attention.

And for the science advisory panel, which I co-chair for the Wildfire and Force Resilience Task Force, one of our priority recommendation, one that the entire Committee agrees upon, and it comes up again and again in our discussions that the priority for us, if we want to protect communities, protect firefighters and protect our landscapes, is that we have to manage high severity fire. That is sort of our major--so if you have to think of one goal that we would put out there is that we need to figure out how to get a handle on the high severity fire.

Let me step back and give you some context for this recommendation. This is the recent fire hazard severity zones that CAL FIRE and the state just put out for 2022. And it's remarkable. It shows that wildfire is a shared threat across the state for just the state responsibility area, not including all the federal lands.

More than half the state is exposed to very high fire hazard. That is a shared threat that sort of all us Californians, whether you're in Northern California or Southern California, share. And I think that's the impetus for the task force and the attention from both the state and Federal Governments on this issue.

Now, wildfire is part of the California experience. We have a climate that has warm to hot and dry summers. Those are conditions for vegetation and anything else that burn in the landscape. So this is, again, another shared aspect of being in California. Our biogeography supports fire, and fire is sort of part of our systems.

However, we have multiple fire regimes, but they really break down into two distinct regimes. So when we're thinking about fire and wildfire fuel reductions and wildfire management, we have to think about these two regimes. In much of our conifer forest and in forest in general throughout the state, in the forested area, we have too much fire, I mean, too little fire. They've been burning. We've suppressed fires for over a century and these are frequent fire systems, and we haven't let those frequent low intensity fires burn.

So we're creating conditions for high severity fire. In contrast, in Southern California, in these chaparral systems, we have too much fire. These are systems that are naturally high severity, but they've been burning too frequently, and that also leads to problems in terms of their resilience going forward. Again, so just a little background.

So we have one, we call this the frequent fire regime. These are typical of much of our conifer forest and even our oak woodland forests throughout the state. And we consider these to be fuel dominated, meaning that the vegetation there, the trees, the litter, the sticks on the ground, these things that combust, these really drive fire behavior, that you have to have a sufficient amount of fuel.

So when you have an ignition for fire to spread, and if you have too much fuel, that fire spreads faster and farther and burns hotter than is typical for these systems. In contrast, when we're in Southern California, the typical fire regime is infrequent, high severity fire. These shrublands, you can see in this picture here, the probability of high severity fire, which is very high here. These are basically mapping out the shrublands of Southern California. These aren't so much fuel driven.

They will burn when they have an ignition and particularly will burn hot and severe when there are winds there. They're not so much limited by the fuels because there's enough vegetation there to burn under these conditions. A really important point, and another general point about fire in California is that high winds, no matter what drives them and where they occur, increase the high severity fire.

So this is a recent paper from colleagues at NCAR showing that, okay, we have these big one arrows here in Southern California. These are the Santa Ana winds. These are these winds coming from these. These are known to be sources of catastrophic fire in Southern California and in Northern California. We call them Diablo winds.

Again, similar sort of high wind situations that if you have ignition, you very likely get a high severity fire, but any kind of sort of wind gradients, and they're complex in California, but whenever you have high winds, that's an added driver of high severity fire. And of course, as a manager, there's very little we can do about these wind patterns, but they need to be considered when we think about how to manage high severity fire.

So there's really two strategies, and these strategies have to be separate. If we have two regimes, we have to have two strategies. As I mentioned, these chaparral systems typically burn infrequently on the order of 30 to 40 years. And when they do burn, they burn at high severity with high severity, meaning that greater than 80% of the plants there burn. So in this top here, we see a chaparral fire. It burns through the canopy.

But for the landscape after high severity fire, this is sort of typical, and the plants have adapted to this and they'll quickly resprout and recover. So high severity fire is sort of part of the system for the chaparral, and the system will recover, however, that's for the landscape. But high severity fire still poses a risk both to the communities that are adjacent to these systems, and so we have to manage it.

In contrast, in much of the forested systems where we have frequent low to moderate intensity fire, the high intensity fires we're getting are completely atypical. This is a picture again of the, I think this is the castle fire where we see a giant sequoia, which really is very fire resistant, except for it's not resistant to these extreme fires. And we get both danger to the community and also danger to the environment.

After these high severity fires, the recovery of these forest systems is much more in doubt and it's much slower. These are not typical for these systems. So we have these responses that high severity is a General threat to the communities, it's a general threat to the firefighters that try and prevent them. And they have two different implications for what's going on in terms of landscape resilience, and we need to keep that in mind when we think about our strategies to manage these fires.

So in the chaparral, there's two things you can do, like reducing fuels, because they're not fuel dominated, reducing fuels does not have much impact on the fire regime. But the two things we can limit and control are ignition and spread. This map here is a map of the ignition probability, again, for Southern California with a darker, with the redder colors being higher frequency of. And again, you can see this troublesome problem.

Where we saw high severity fire, high probability, high severity fire, we also have high probability of human ignitions. And these largely are from along roadways. Some sparks from machinery and cars and vehicles that spark from the road, get into the wildlands, ignite dry fuel and then spread.

The second part, and I think perhaps a challenging part for Southern California, is that this idea of how do you prevent spread if these chaparral systems naturally burn at high severity, how do you stop that high severity spread from a suppression point of view so it doesn't endanger communities.

And one of them is, are these fuel brakes along ridgelines and other places where you can slow the fire, where you provide conduits and access for firefighters but these fuel breaks here, like you see the Los Padres, are controversial. The science here from Safari and Keeley and other folks comes down on the side that they don't stop every fire, but they are generally beneficial.

But it's clearly a flashpoint for controversy management in Southern California, because these field breaks do raise other risks in terms of invasive species getting established. And again, they don't always stop a fire, but they often are crucial to limiting the spread for the fuel dominated force of fire regimes of the forest throughout California. We have sort of, I think, much greater consensus on what we need to do. We need to reduce the fuel loads.

We can reduce those fuel loads between prescribed fire or mechanical fanning emastication. But both of these processes that remove the fine fuels, the fuels that burn quickly and burn hot, this reduction is proven and has a lot of scientific evidence that it's an effective way to again reduce the chances of high severity fire.

It doesn't reduce the chance of fire of low intensity fires or has less an effect, but when these fires do burn, they'll burn at a lower intensity and therefore not at this high severity. That again, risks both communities, firefighters and the landscapes. And of course, all of this is enmeshed with, and this is not an either or. We also need to focus on protecting the communities that live near these fire prone landscapes.

Again, whether you're a forest or chaparral as your wildland neighbor, there's much we have to do within our communities, from home hardening to vegetation clearance around homes, to planning that we limit the chances that these fires will get into our communities and cause destruction and risk human life and limb. Of course, the challenge we face is that we currently have, as I said, more than half the state is at very high hazard in terms of fire.

And climate is warming, and it will continue to warm no matter what we do for over the next 20 or 30 years with emissions as a people. Some of these increases in warming are simply baked into our system. And so we are going to have continuing to have a warming climate going forward. So how do we bend this curve? Here's a graph from 1990 to 2022 of acres burned per year in California since about 2012, that we have a rising limb of increasing area burn.

So how do we bend this curve so we get it under control? One that's absolutely essential is that we have to work together. The days of having the managers work in one silo and the policymakers work in another and the scientists work in another, and kind of knit things together in a slow, unintegrated way that doesn't work fast enough and doesn't work effectively enough. We all have to be in this together. We have to work together on this.

We also have to learn faster because the climate keeps changing. That means conditions keep changing. And so our understanding constantly needs to be updated. That means there needs to be real and sustained investment in monitoring and evaluation and then a willingness to adjust our practices as we learn.

And finally, and I think, as Senator Larry mentioned in his opening comments, we need to keep at it. This is not a one shot, sort of get it done in 2025 and then step back. This needs to be annual investments to build this resilience into our system and maintain it going forward. Thank you. I can answer any questions.

Thank you so much for your presentation, Professor Battles. We'll now move to questions. Do any of my colleagues have questions for Professor battles?

Professor, I had a question regarding the chaparral and fuel load, and you said it wasn't important to reduce fuel load in chaparral.

It has limited impact in terms of preventing a high severity fire in chaparral system.

All right. Is there a lot of ember travel with chaparral when there's a fire?

Well, yeah, especially when there are high winds. It's the winds that move the embers. We have Chief Tyler here, who's certainly the expert on this.

But it's definitely a problem because I think that's something that we don't want to give the impression that that is not an important part of community planning. Because when you have WUI areas and you have ember travel, having a 50% reduction in some areas will absolutely be beneficial to being able to control along with some fire breaks and things like that.

So I just don't want my colleagues to think that we don't need to invest in ensuring that those areas have fuel management also, because there are a lot of areas down in Southern California where these areas are built into the communities, and there's a thought that you can't touch them, you have to go through all kinds of permits to even walk through them. And that's one of the problems that we're having in communities is these little open space areas.

When the embers get in there, they also ignite. And when there's less fuel, it's a lot easier to control those fires than when it's been overgrown. Like a lot of the shape the open chaperowe areas are, they can get the six to 10 foot growth, and that's certainly a lot. And when that happens and you have houses around it and then you have winds and ember travel. That's how you burn up houses in the middle of these communities that are not even near the brush. Thank you.

Thank you, Vice Chair. Do any of my colleagues have questions? All right, I have a few questions for you, Professor Battles, and thank you for your testimony. I guess the first question is whether 1 million acres is the right number. It's a nice, round number, obviously, but does that reflect the goals that we should have for the state? Should that number be higher, lower, sort of. What's your thoughts on that number?

Well, I think from the science perspective, it's not so much the acres, it's what you do in those acres. Right. And so acres is a good, solid accounting. What's going on but how you treat those acres depends on their efficacy in reducing high severity fire and where you put them. And so I think a million acres is a good start. I mean, we're not there yet.

And I think once we get them out, I think, again, that gets back to my idea of learning fast, is that we have to know we've never done a million acres before treatment across the landscape. And if we can put them out there, let's put them out there. That's the first goal. See how they do, and then be ready to evaluate as we go forward. But the task force is also sort of evaluating. Okay, what if we took this million acre target off?

What would we need? And there's currently science panel, science advisory panel, and other folks are involved in sort of thinking beyond the million acre strategy. But again, we have this target. Let's get it out there. We have commitments from both the federal and state governments to do it. And let's make this see what it does. And that's also part of this evaluation framework. We've never done this at this scale before.

Thank you, Professor. Sticking with the 1 million acre goal, my understanding is the way we're accounting for this is that retreating the same acre over and over will count for multiples. So if you retreat the same acre three times, that counts for three acres. When we think about the scope of the geography that we want to treat, what's the right amount of acreage that we're actually looking at in your mind?

Well, some estimates said that there's 20 million acres of federal and state land in California that needs some kind of fuel reduction effort. And so that's why I said, keep at it. If we have 20 million acres and we do a million a year, that's 20 years. But this idea of retreating, again, it's not that we'll retreat it three times in one go, but maybe the first entry is going in there to reduce some of the mechanical machinery, to remove some of the fuel.

So it's safe to go there with the prescribed fire. Then you follow up with the prescribed fire. So those are two separate events, two separate efforts. And so one year you go and do the thinning, the second year you come and do the prescribed fire. In terms of accounting for acres treated, each will have an impact on reducing fire severity with second round of treatments even making it lower. That's what I'm getting back to, sort of.

It's not just a matter of how many acres you treat, but how effectively. So acre that's been both thinned and has a prescribed fire afterward will be a better implement, will reduce high severity fire more effectively than just a single treatment. And so that's why it seems like we're double counting. But if you keep them as independent and you do them, know as you go forward, those are actually part of good sort of fuel reduction management to do those sequential treatments over time.

Thank you for that explanation, Professor Battles. We have lots of questions, but for the interests of time, I think we'll end the questioning now. But appreciate your time today. Thank you for your service on the task force's science advisory panel. With that, we'll move to our second panel. We'll hear from the Administration first. Our first presenter is Patrick Wright, the Director of the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. Welcome, Director Wright.

Thank you, Mr. Chair and Members of the Committee, what I'm going to try to do is walk you through how the task force is organized, some of the key elements of the plan, as you suggested, some of our major issues and challenges moving forward. So hopefully I can get my show rolling here. There we go. Let me see if I could. Thank you all. As you noted, Mr. Chair, we started in January 2021 with a comprehensive wildfire and forest resilience action plan.

I'm sorry, we can't see your presentation at the moment.

I'm sorry.

We're working on it. Technical difficulties. It's appropriate because today's pi day and everything should be irrational. Thank you. I'll be here all week.

Irrational part. Just tell us. Tell us.

All right. Do you want to just go on with your presentation? You should have the. Yeah, we have the printouts in front of us. So if you'd like to proceed, Director.

Sure. Thank you. As you mentioned at the outset, we produced an action plan in January 2021 that lays out a comprehensive set of measures that we need to put in place to try to achieve our million acre target and beyond. And most important, it includes 99 specific actions with clear deadlines, clear accountability from the agencies to make sure that we're on track and making progress with those targets. And that was shortly followed. Thank you, Senator Laird.

With a statute, SB 456 that lays out in clear detail the Legislature's expectations with respect to implementation of the plan, does require a number of reports, both annually and a five year update. All of that is coming together this spring. We've actually got a number of legislative reports that are due this spring that we're trying to align to make sure you get the information you need and that we have the kind of transparency and accountability that you've been looking for.

As far as the task force organization itself, we're made up of an Executive Committee that includes the key federal, state, local, tribal leaders. We think it's important that this not simply be a state driven task force, but that we have federal and local and tribal partners at the table with us shaping our strategies. And as Dr. Battle said, we have a science advisory council, which he co-chairs, to make sure we have the latest scientific information, data and tools at our disposal.

And finally, we have a wide range of interagency workgroups on everything from prescribed fire to workforce to Wood utilization to make sure we're making progress on each of the key issues that are in front of us in terms of our priorities moving forward. I mean, certainly from the outset, we've had an emphasis on overseeing the 99 key actions that are in the action plan. We do have a so called error table spreadsheet that anybody can go online and find out.

Where exactly are we with each of those 99 actions? Not only are we behind ahead completed, but who's the lead, what work group is working on that? What are the key issues, who to contact, et cetera. So hopefully, folks are getting the information they need across dozens of different agencies and actions that are underway. We're doing the same thing with respect to the expenditure plan. As the chair mentioned, we've invested at the state level more than $2.6 billion.

That's a lot of money to keep track of. But we're working closely with the Natural Resources Agency to maintain a series of spreadsheets where you can track how much of that money is going to which programs, how much is going to each region, what projects are being completed. Again, with an eye towards full disclosure of all the efforts that we're making across the board. And then in addition to tracking dollars and actions. Of course, as you mentioned, we're also tracking acres.

This has proved to be quite a challenging exercise because, as you've already discussed, it can get really complicated when agencies go in sometimes once, twice, three times on the same parcel. You might have a situation where Cal Fire might give a grant to Placer county to do work on forest service land. And so if you count that once or three times, we're trying to sort all the way through that so that we can give you a better set of estimates on what's being done on the ground.

We are going to do what are called estimates of both footprint acres, which is how many acres are being treated across the state individually, no matter how many times they're treated. But then we're also keeping track of those numbers of treatments, as you heard from Dr. Battles, keeping track of both of those is really important. We're not going to report one or the other. We think both are important.

It's important for you to know that some acres take multiple treatments to become resilient, but it's also important at the end of the day to know which specific areas are more resilient than others. There's also, I want to emphasize, an important goal of that acres treated exercise and the mapping we're doing. It's not just to count the number of acres that are being treated.

It's also to give folks in the field a better picture of what's happening so that for the first time ever, if you're in Orange County, you'll know where the state parks projects are, the forest service projects, the Cal Fire projects, the utility projects. So we'll begin to have the kind of coordination and alignment among those projects that we all know that we need to get to.

And then together with that, we're developing a very aggressive monitoring and evaluation plan that's based on both remote sensing, using satellite data, using drones, and also field data that's based on plots on the ground that measures both the effectiveness of individual projects. Are they working? Are they not working? Are they having impacts that we need to be concerned about, but also at a landscape scale to be able to go in every few years and saying, hey, are we meeting our landscape level goals? Are these landscapes more or less resilient to fire, to drought, biodiversity, carbon storage, et cetera? So all of that is coming together as part of our process.

And then, in general, what we're trying to do with the task force is move on three major fronts to help you sort of orient yourself. One major front is a set of what we're calling joint strategies. And these are strategies for things like prescribed fire for private landowner assistance, for wood utilization. And the real key theme of those joint strategies is alignment. As you heard from Dr. Battles, agencies in the past have tended to work on those issues in silos.

You'll have separate efforts on reforestation, for example, by the Forest Service, by CAL FIRE, by private landowner. We're bringing them all together. So we put together joint plans that point us in the right direction. So you'll continue to see a set of joint strategies as we move ahead.

And then, secondly, we're putting a lot of emphasis, as I mentioned earlier, on data. Coming up with the tracking systems, the accounting systems, the tools that regions throughout the state need to advance their strategies, so that they're more effective from both a forest health perspective and also a community resilience perspective. And then, finally, we're putting a lot of emphasis. You'll hear this from Keali'i Bright on regional frameworks.

If we're going to achieve our goals in the state, it's not going to be by Sacramento telling Orange County or Santa Cruz County where they should be doing their treatments. And so, instead, we're focusing on aligning our various programs, our funding programs, our technical programs, our toolkits and assessments, so that regional and local agencies have the tools they need to take their programs to the next level. So that's our overall strategy.

We've got a big focus on joint strategies, a big focus on data, and then also a big focus on regional strategies. We hope this will all come together in about a year with an update of our action plan that will answer your question about what's it going to take to get to that next level. We think we're roughly about halfway to our million acre target, depending on how you count various acres.

But by a year from now, we hope to have a series of scenarios that will tell you, both by region and both by treatment type, what's the best mix of measures that we need to put in place so that we can get to that target and beyond. We're also working closely with our sister agencies to make sure that this work is aligned with complementary state plans. The state is due to have an update of its Climate Adaptation Plan, its Natural Working Lands Plan.

So we're going to be working very closely with those agencies as well to make sure the Administration is speaking with one voice with our forest ought to be managed. And then finally, with respect to the key issues, what's it really going to take to get there? I would point to three.

One is we continue to need, as Dr. Battles said, alignment, alignment among the federal, state, local, and tribal agencies to make sure we're all working together at the landscape level, as opposed to having each agency focus on its own lands. And secondly, we're working very hard to build capacity. We're hearing this from everybody around the state that they lack the tools that they need to assess the condition of their forests, to plan and prioritize their projects, to evaluate their results.

So we're coming up with a set of regional toolkits where we go to each region and educate them and give them a set of tools so they can ramp up their efforts. And then finally, we're trying to align all of our funding sources from CAL FIRE, from the Forest Service, from various other agencies, Wildlife Conservation Board, from DOC, to start building these regional strategies, regional funding strategies, through block grants.

If there's one message I want to leave with you is we're not going to get to our million acre target and beyond on a project by project basis. We're going to get there on a landscape by landscape basis. So the one thing for the Legislature and Administration to be aware of is our need to reorient our funding programs and our planning programs to work more at that landscape level. We're well underway to do that.

You'll hear from Joe Tyler and Keali'i about how we're rapidly moving towards block grants to regions. So instead of funding hundreds and hundreds of scattered projects across the state, we're going to be funding, increasingly, block grants to regions to implement packages and bundles of projects so that we can ramp up our efforts as fast as possible. So that's our overall approach. We certainly look forward to looking to working closely with the Legislature and the key stakeholders you're going to hear from today to collaboratively and collectively ramp up our efforts to meet our challenge. Thank you very much, and I'd certainly be happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Director Wright. And we're going to be taking questions after we've heard from the other two. So next up we have Chief Joe Tyler, who is the Director of California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Good morning, Chairmen and Senators of the Natural Resource and Water Committee. My name is Joe Tyler, and I'm the Director at the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as CAL FIRE. Director Wright covered many of the details, so I wanted to spend some time highlighting a few items related to CAL FIRE. And it's important to note that we're only one of many partners at the local, state, federal, tribal, and private levels working together to accomplish our work.

With our federal, regional and local partners, CAL FIRE wears many hats as part of the Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. We serve on the Executive Committee, helping steer important policy directions. Our staff serve as program managers and subject matter experts on task force committees, tackling reforestation, communications, prescribed fire, urban forestry monitoring, and many other actionable items that have been discussed already. And we're helping, as you heard, to deliver the regional resource kits, tracking systems, and trying to meet our statewide goals.

We support this work as a convener and a collaborator, helping to coordinate and connect the dots between the community members and the state leaders, as well as all of our other partners. And through our strategic investments by the Legislature and the Administration, we carry forward financial support for the funding of the important work through millions and grants and other state funding. And then our personnel are also the doers and the implementers of this important work on the ground with all of our partners.

We take the goals and objectives from the task force and translate these to on the ground progress, and we couldn't do any of this work alone, and we're proud to help lead the charge as a partner agency. Now as it relates to CAL FIRE's contributions to in progress to meet the action plan, CAL FIRE is one of the lead agencies on 57 of the 99 key actions adopted by the task force.

Now of those 57, 18 of those are in progress for CAL FIRE and the task force. And those include, just as examples, timber harvests and improving resilience incentives, working on establishing a national prescribed fire training center, exploring strategies to liability issues, and then developing and implementing the new fire hazard severity zones, as Dr. Battles talked about earlier. Of note, of the fire hazard severity zones, they are open for public comment and currently are scheduled to close on April 4, 2023.

Seven of those actionable items that we're responsible for are in their final stages, which includes improving workforce development and timber harvest plan guidance documents. And seven are completed, which includes the Strategic Action Plan, grant programs to support cultural burning, automated prescribed fire burn permits, and trying to increase defensible space inspections. And last year alone, CAL FIRE, with its contract county partners as well, did over 289,000 defensible space inspections, where our goal was 250,000 per year.

And then there are 25 other action items that continue to be ongoing through progress. And beyond the 99 actionable items, CAL FIRE also continues to make progress and significant contributions to the four goals in the action plan. A few examples are those under goal one of increasing pace and scale of forest health projects. CAL FIRE has met and surpassed its fuels reduction goals in each of the last three years, treating more than 100,000 acres with our community partners and our grantees.

We've helped publish the California Strategic Plan for Expanding the Use of Beneficial Fire in March of 2022. We rolled out the automated prescribed burn permit system here in July of last year, and we have just working on launching the Forest Health Tribal Resilience Grant Program. We're up to $19 million are available to that.

We've awarded more than $215 million in forest health grants for fuels reduction, prescribed fire, pest management, biomass utilization, workforce development, and forest restoration projects across the last two fiscal years. And then, as Patrick said earlier, piloting three regional forest health grants in the north coast of Sierra in Southern California with contributions of $10 million each to try to bundle these projects in each of those areas. Within goal two is strengthening and protection of the communities.

Again, we've published an easy to use online application system to request defensible space inspections and request burn permits or conduct post assessments. We, again, have released the fire hazard severity zone maps, and, due to increased staffing investments, again increased those defensible space inspections and awarded 145 statewide grants for over $118 million last year, just within goal two. And goal three is all about managing landscape and achieving state economic environmental goals.

Working on awarding over $60 million in workforce and business development grants, launching a schoolyard greening, I'm sorry, a Green Schoolyard Program with over 117 million available to improve tree canopy covers for California's K through 12 schools, and then awarding 40 urban and community forestry grants of just under 30 million in the spring of 2022.

Now for goal four, driving innovation and measuring progress, we have launched an online viewer of CAL FIRE's fuels reduction and fire prevention projects called CalMAPPER. That is available on our public facing website and is intended to be transparent in the work that CAL FIRE is currently doing. And we currently have other states that are looking and asking about this model to how to display the information, and it's playing a key role in developing and tracking for all the statewide efforts.

The FRAP Program, the Fire Resource Assessment Program, funded 75 grants for over $14 million and continue to work towards funding additional. Relatedly, we also continue opportunities for how these projects can inform important research and apply the latest technology at our Demonstration State Forest. As an example in the Jackson Demonstration State Forest, there's technology where we are providing broadband Internet in the middle of the forest where there is no service.

It's being tested now by our research and development program, and last week during their demonstration appeared to work successfully. So they continue to work on projects like that. Related to efforts to monitor and evaluate our Vegetation Management Treatment Program, there's a lot underway and it really leads to the question is, how do we know if it's working, and how are we tracking all the moving parts to ensure success? The question earlier was treatments of the same acre twice or over two years leads to further resilience.

But we also want to make sure that we're treating the right acres. And I think the two panelists just before me talked about that as well, working together, not in silos, to make sure that we're making the best resilience efforts across the state. So just to share a few items on how we're tracking the progress, public resource code requires us to post information and reporting of the work.

It involves creating standardized protocols for monitoring, implementation, and evaluating the positive and negative ecological effects to fire behavior impacts being undertaken by the state. Now that was due by December 31, 2022. And as Dr. Battles started his conversation earlier today, when you get a diverse group of individuals in the same room with a lot of thoughts, a lot of great information comes from it, and this task force is really bringing everybody together to provide the best wildfire and forest resilience across the state.

So though we didn't meet our December 31, 2022 target, I can guarantee you, as it's sitting in my inbox and I'm reviewing it for edits now, that the manual related to standardized protocols for monitoring is close to being completed and published. CAL FIRE has created and vetted monitoring procedures to evaluate the effectiveness of projects, including measurement of size, climate conditions, and treatment types. And a team of researchers and staff continue to scrutinize the accuracy of how best to capture this information.

Starting in August 2022, CAL FIRE began implementing the protocols on a range of forest health and prescribed fire projects in collaboration with CARB, the Forest Service, and state parks to test our monitoring protocols. We recognize that they're iterative and fluid and mirror adjustments that need to be made over time and in the spirit of continuous improvement. They need to be flexible to bend and improve over time as new methods and projects are identified.

As I said earlier, the draft protocols will be posted on the CAL FIRE website here shortly, hopefully within weeks, and is being discussed further with Dr. Battles and the Science Advisory Panel as part of the task force for their feedback. And admittedly, while the timeframe has been extended to just a few months, as I discussed, it really was about getting a thorough review and collaborative feedback for a great final project or product.

The key issues and bottlenecks really looking at that, we recognize that there are issues to have to address. One of those are the changing climate conditions that we have, the changing weather that we have, as we see right now in one of the wettest winters that we have had, really lead us to have fuels that are out of prescription to not be able to put prescribed fire on the ground right now.

But it doesn't stop us from continuing to do mechanical and hand treatment fuels reduction and grant resources that are needed to help address aspects of the challenges. We recognize there's still work to do there as well. And we recognize that the state is in a budget deficit where hard decisions have to be considered by the Legislature and the Administration on where reductions potentially have to take place.

One of the concerns at CAL FIRE that we have, and we have talked openly about this, is we recognize that significant investments have been made in wildfire and forest resilience. But we also have to make sure that we have the long term support staff to be able to continue this great work that's going on.

And with temporary funding, we find that that comes with temporary positions that can last for up to 24 months before we have to let that person go back to their old position or release them from state service if they've never worked for the state before, to hire new staff. That could become problematic for us. But we're figuring out ways to overcome that.

And overall, through workforce and business development, a workforce, not just at CAL FIRE, but across the entire State of California, can implement the actions and strategies being put forth for the collaborative fuels reduction across the state. We recognize that we have to improve biomass utilization and biomass facilities across the state as well.

And then we've entered into a home hardening program that has experienced some slowdowns due to the FEMA Hazard Mitigation grant funding concerns around NEPA requirements that we're working closely with Cal OES as the conduit to FEMA to address. Now, I just heard from Acting State Fire Marshal Daniel Berlant last week that we are very close, at least in Lake County for Kelseyville area in that pilot project, to get some approvals from FEMA to be able to get those off the ground.

So it looks like a start is being made there. But I promise you that at the state level between CAL FIRE and Cal OES. Aside from waiting for FEMA approvals, we continue to accept and review applications and work with the communities through the Joint Powers Authority that was formed between the two agencies. And we have to really look for during these lean fiscal times related to the state budget that will require us to look for innovative ways to continue to get the great work done.

Now, I was asked to address recent investments in the Southern California area, and the Wildfire Prevention Grant Program specifically works to make awards towards regional equity. After all the grant applications are scored, each CAL FIRE unit in each of the six contract counties are awarded their top scored applications. Based on available funding, the process continues to ensure projects are spread across the state, as that distributes workload, as well, meets the top scored application processes to each of the units and the contract counties.

And last year, the Wildfire Prevention Grant Program was able to split its funding nearly 50/50 between CAL FIRE's northern region and CAL FIRE's southern region. Wildfire Prevention Grant Funding in the north last year was awarded $129 million, and in the south, $122 million. But for our Forest Health and Workforce and Business Development Programs over the last two years, the Forest Health for the north was awarded $171 million, and in the south, recognizing only $46 million based on the applications that came in.

Chief, if you can wrap it up quickly, that'd be great. We have other speakers we got to get to also. Thank you.

Absolutely. So last was Workforce and Business Development, 27 million in the north, 13 million in the south. And that is actually where I was going to conclude. I thank the Committee for their time, and I'm here to answer any questions.

Thank you, Chief Tyler. Next up, we have Keali'i Bright, Assistant Director, California Department of Conservation.

Oh, no, I'm not quite the Director. Division Director of the Division of Land Resources.

Assistant Director.

Good morning, Chair and Members of the Committee. Again, my name is Keali'i Bright. I'm with the Department of Conservation, and today we are going to be talking about our department's Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program that was previewed a little bit by Patrick earlier on.

You know, to kind of frame this up, no pun intended, as I describe my program, it's important to think of it kind of like the scaffolding of this much bigger strategy that's being discussed here today. So we tend to operate in the background supporting our principal partners like CAL FIRE and the Forest Service, Natural Resources Agency, et cetera, kind of providing all of the capacity services so that they can be successful in achieving their statewide goals. Let me open up my presentation, and I will.

All right, can you see my presentation? Perfect. So I guess where I'd like to start when I talk about these issues is trying to put into context what we're trying to achieve across all these different small local partners, small private contractors, small local agencies, big agencies, statewide federal agencies. What we're really trying to do here is put together a massive supply chain.

A supply chain for fuels treatment projects, supply chain for products to go into the market, a supply chain for workforce, for environmental restoration, kind of all of these things that, as Senator Laird mentioned in his opening comments, had been funded in kind of sporadic ways as the state budget went up and down over time.

But now what we're trying to do is kind of institutionalize and stabilize this long supply chain so that we can continue to do the work that Dr. Battles described in his presentation for a long time. Decades. Right. With the wildfire funding we've received over the last few years, it's been really critical because we've been able to actually slot in support and investments into each section of the supply chain that you see on the screen.

This is a really simplified supply chain, but I wanted to point out where RFFC, the Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program that we support, kind of fits in. So we are not the implementers, CAL FIRE, Forest Service, WCB, other natural resources agencies kind of take shovel ready projects and move them to completion.

But what we are responsible for at our department is really like getting those regional plans, regional entities, and local projects shovel ready and on the shelf so that they can be implemented by our state partners. We're really focused on this front end and middle end of the supply chain, and we're directed by statute to do this statewide.

Wildfire is something that all of our regions of the state face, and it's something that we're trying to, frankly, engineer from very nascent stages across all of the fire prone regions in the state. The Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program is centered in this principle that regions really know what's best to guide their work, and they know what's best for their residents, their economies, and their natural resources.

Our job in the RFFC Program is to just, frankly, empower that knowledge and build capacity around it in both technical, bureaucratic, and implementation capacity, so that these regions can lead implementation of plans and projects that achieve their goals. At the same time, our state agencies, we're working within a state agency framework with its own goals, its own statewide priorities, as we have in statute and we have elsewhere.

And we are trying to kind of help the regions understand our statewide priorities so that their planning and their project development meets both their local priorities, but also our statewide priorities. And the task force has been really instrumental in this case, and through the RFFC program, we kind of work like the conduit between the work coming out of the task force along through the different channels of strategies and targets and goals.

And then through our program, we are socializing those strategies with our regional partners and our local partners so that they can build those into those plans and kind of create that feedback loop so that as their plans and projects come forward to state agencies like CAL FIRE, CAL FIRE sees their needs and priorities in those projects to make it easier for them to fund.

So our program from the beginning recognized that wildfire is wildfire capacity is a statewide need, and there was also kind of a history of imbalance when looking at how funding was distributed statewide for these purposes. So from the early, the beginning of the program, we kind of made a priority that we would work across four regions. We would balance, and those are the coast, North, Sierra, and Southern California.

And we would balance our funding fairly evenly amongst them so that it truly functioned as a statewide regional network with a balanced funding structure underneath it. Within each of the four regions, we then, as a program, Fund block grantees, essentially regional leaders, to then run their own local programs. Currently, we have 12 block grantees serving within our four regions.

And those 12 block grantees provide sub grants, partnership support to much larger networks of local partners who then do the work of developing localized strategies and projects and bringing those to our state agencies for implementation. We work with a significant amount of tribes across our programs through the block grantees. Block grantees like the Sierra Nevada Conservancy or the coastal Conservancy.

I'll walk through the Southern California ones later, but I really wanted to call out the tribal partnerships of the North Coast Resource Partnership up north, where we have a partnership leading the RFFC work in the region. That is a partnership between tribal governments and county government leaders working together to develop a North Coast wide strategy and range of projects and actions to accomplish their watershed goals. In statute, we were required to. It's kind of a pretty big requirement.

We were required to cover, within reason, all of the wildfire prone areas of the state. And since 2019, from what we can see and kind of what you can see on this map, we're actually now almost at about 87% of coverage of the state's high end, high fire regions of the state. And we're working with additional grantees now to try to cover that gap that still remains from the lack of some of these grants.

Frankly, some parts of these states just don't have organizations that we can turn to to lead this kind of work. So in that case, we're looking towards statewide entities to try to set up programs that can bring resources down to those parts of the state that are uncovered. We have depended primarily on state conservancies and resource conservation districts.

But as you can see here, too, where we didn't have them, we've turned to other partnerships, but also community foundations and kind of thinking about who do we have in place down on the ground that has strong fiscal capacity, good kind of equitable networks, and can mobilize large programs across areas that need them. So we were asked to discuss the bottlenecks and the barriers that we're seeing from our programs.

And I think kind of thinking back to that supply chain, I wanted to focus on one part that Chief Tyler just mentioned as well. That may not be front and Center for most people's thinking when you're looking at bottlenecks and barriers. But know for us, it's the engine of the work that we're trying to accomplish across the state, which is Administration and staffing.

One of the harmful impacts of up and down funding over time is that state agencies, federal agencies and local partners have never had the stable budgets to do the right fiscal planning to create programs that can sustain work over long periods of time. So what we end up getting are very small.

At the local level are very small agencies that are always trying to get competitive grants and funding their Administration and their staff, project managers, but really never grow to the point where they can sustain large enough programs to meet statewide needs.

At the state agency level, we're all dealing with, we've all been dealing with surges in funding recently, but then looking to the horizon, there's General insecurity in the budget for supporting the administrative demands that state agencies need to kind of keep moving all this money out. And what's been really important, as Patrick mentioned, is a shift in thinking from our agencies towards how can we make the grant process more efficient to both state agencies and our local know.

I give a lot of credit to Calfire for working within their current grant programs, thinking about how they can sequence funding over phases over multiple years, so that once a partner has a good program and good projects, they can just be funded over time. Their statute gives them a lot of really good flexibility there and then.

We've also been through our program and others looking at ways to batch funding around more around the plan and the partner versus the individual project so we can start to Fund things in much bigger ways. Some of the other major issues we're seeing from staff kind of spread over to other policy issues that we don't always think about. Almost all of our partners work in really rural areas and have really tough times finding their staff have tough times finding housing.

The surge in demand for people to do this work does not match the amount of housing that we're seeing in our rural communities. For those staff, you get a lot of staff burnout because they're being asked to do way more than they start out inspired and kind of leading with gusto. And then three years down the road, you just start to see the burnout and shifting to something more sustainable for them and their family.

And then there's a lot of competition between organizations doing this work because there's so much funding. So you'll see a lot of movement between organizations of key staff. Once you build relationships at a local level with these folks and then they move, it really undercuts your ability to sustain work over time. I think all of this falls within the stable funding problem, and it's something that we really appreciate the gains that the Legislature has made over the last so many years to give our work stability.

And I think we're starting to see improvements, but there's always more work to do. Next, I wanted to focus on Southern California. This was a request from the Committee staff to kind of look at what are our investments doing in Southern California, and then also kind of focus on what we announced at the last task force meeting down in Calabasas around funding commitments from multiple agencies coming into our program.

It was actually a surprise because we started really thinking about our forested ecosystems and kind of the groups that we knew working there.

But coming into our program, we were really surprised and because maybe, I don't know, we probably shouldn't have been, but how well developed and mature the organizational capacity and networks were in Southern California, and the regional forest and fire capacity from the program from the beginning was able to leverage these existing organizations, really build probably one of the strongest networks of high capacity partners to lead this work across the state.

When we started, we started with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, Inland Empire Resource Conservation District, and the RCD of Greater San Diego. And then later we added the Irvine Ranch Conservancy, which Michael will be presenting after me. And we recently added the Rivers and Mountains Conservancy and the Inland Empire Community Foundation. I can't understate the complexity of land ownerships and land types that these partners are working across and communities.

And through all this, we've just seen exemplary efforts to bring equitable forest and fire resilience to both communities and the landscape. And we've seen this really great working relationship across them. From our first three block grantees, we're starting to see. We're seeing their first priority plans come from their work and from their regional priority plans that we have now. There are about 362 projects that are ready to be funded.

And kind of interestingly, those projects represent 58 different lead entities, so you start to see that network expanding. And then lastly, I wanted to just touch on this funding package that we announced at the Southern California task force meeting. Because of this kind of deep organization across Southern California, we were able to see multiple agencies commit to $70 million in funding. Southern California US Forest Service spreading funding over three forests.

CAL FIRE committing to a multi partner block grant for forest health and potentially some wildfire prevention funding. Nifwith and the Forest Service doing a master stewardship program, and then the regional forest. Our program is going to be rolling out its second phase of investment into Southern California. To all of these partners, thank you. Very much for that. And that would be it. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Assistant Director. Appreciate your testimony. Thank you to all of our panelists for their testimony. We'll now move to questions.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I have three questions, and the first one probably goes to Patrick Wright first, although maybe the others can comment. And in the course of the hearing, you've talked about federal partners and local partners, private landowners and tribal governments. What's the split in the work that's being done?

I don't know if I'm asking for precise acreage or whatever, but when you have a goal of 500,000 acres to be treated, what's the relative weight of each of the individual partners in who's implementing it?

Sure, I'll take a crack at that. I think it's, as you heard earlier, the shared stewardship agreement and a couple of Executive orders from the Governor have asked the state agencies led by Calfire, to ramp up to 500,000 acres treated annually. And the Forest Service itself has made a commitment to try to get there as well.

As we talked about earlier, it gets complicated between so called footprint acres and activity acres, but I think both of them are treating roughly, we'll see at the end of the month when we unveil our draft numbers roughly about the same, I would say, with respect to CAL FIRE, their work, as you heard from Chief Tyler, has shifted dramatically upward, particularly on prescribed fire. Candidly, there was a lot of skepticism that CAL FIRE was going to be able to ramp up as quickly as it has.

They've already exceeded their 100,000 acre target for treatments and are on their way to achieving their 50,000 acre target for prescribed fire. There's also a number of other agencies involved, like BLM, National park service, the locals, the tribes, the privates. So it's a complicated picture, but generally the state and federal agencies are at the same level. We'll probably see the federal side ramp up. They're investing starting this year, $1.0 billion themselves because of money that's now coming from Congress.

So hopefully we'll be sorting that through in the next months and year ahead to give you a better sense of exactly where the different state agencies are landing with both acres treated and with their investments.

I think one of my primary concerns was how much is going to locals and that I didn't just hear, for example, when the Governor's Budget was released, and I can't remember if it was last year or the year before, there was a major amount for treating. And I asked how much of that goes to locals, because I wanted to know if there are fire safe councils and in the all politics or local category.

When the CCU fire happened in the Santa Cruz mountains, it took 925 homes, but it didn't get to other places near the summit where there's fire safe councils. And the question was, are they going to get some of this money? And the answer coming back surprised me. It was something like over 80% of the money that was proposed for prescribed fire was going to go to locals as opposed to CAL FIRE. And so that's as much.

What I was looking for is I get what the state and feds are doing, but are we really taking money and giving it to local fire safe councils who are on the ground and have done a lot of the permitting and have gone through things to make sure that a major piece of this is done by them?

Sure. I'll ask Joe, Chief Tyler to follow up, but my understanding is the vast majority of work at the state level, it's in the state category, but it's through funding primarily from Calfire on the implementation side and to some extent, the conservancies. For example, Calfire has 200 $1.0 million grant programs each for both fire prevention and for first health. They've got grant programs for prescribed fire, for Wood utilization. So the majority of work is being done locally under their authority, under their various grant programs.

Thank you. And then under the legislation that was passed a couple of years ago, there's an annual report required to the Legislature by January 1 on the progress to reaching the goals. And I don't think it's been submitted yet by this January 1. Is that expected sometime soon?

Yeah. You'll be getting, as I mentioned earlier, you'll be getting a package of reports very soon. Calfire was required to submit a number of reports by the end of the calendar year, as were we. And then CNRA was required by April 1 to give you a full report on all wildfire related expenditures. So we're in the process of trying to group those and align them so you get one set of information that's all consistent, and hopefully that'll be getting to you right away.

Thank you. And then the last question is, I know in Keali'i Bright's testimony, he highlighted barriers and bottlenecks to any of you that wish to answer, what do you need that you don't have? You have these goals, you have money, you have certain statutory authority. What might you need to accomplish these goals that you don't have legislatively or budgetarily or otherwise?

My General sense, and certainly the other panelists can weigh in here, is I think we've got the legislative authority we need. It's a matter, as you've heard from all of us, of having sustained funding from the Legislature and from the Administration, and also to support our move to more funding at the landscape level and the block grant level. So we don't have project by project expenditure spread over the state. That's probably the biggest issue that we're facing.

It also has a big impact on wood utilization and workforce. If an individual agency is submitting a competitive grant for one project, they're not going to hire full time staff for several years, and you're not going to have businesses locate in that area to process the Wood. So as you heard from Kaylee, we're really moving towards giving regions 10203040, $70 million in consolidated coordinated funding so they can ramp up across the board.

So we really want to make sure the Legislature Administration is supportive of that approach. It is a new way of doing business. Most of the agencies traditionally have funded projects on a project by project basis. So we hope we will have your support for moving more aggressively towards the landscape level block ramp programs of the agencies.

And that triggers a follow up question, Mr. Chair, in moving to a landscape, look at that. You mentioned the individual permitting, and it used to be required that every individual agency had to send out notices as part of environmental review. And one of the fascinating stories of the paradise fire is those notices were about to go out. They'd been printed and they'd been collected and put in a car, and the printing shop burned down, but the car didn't.

And yet most of the people's property had burned that they were going to mail the notices to. And there was a statewide eir that was done at some point to try to lessen what the permitting was necessary at the individual level. When you say the regional landscapes, does that supersede that former process? Do you get permitted sort of regionally now and you don't have to go through all those individual things with jurisdictions that happened before?

I think in large part it depends on the project. The problem when you go project by project, as you mentioned, is often you need a permit, you need staff, you need approvals for every one of those small projects. So it's very labor intensive and costly. As you go to a landscape level, it triggers a different level of sequoia, a different level of permitting.

We're trying to grapple with that now to give the agencies the tools they need to do that, planning and permitting at a landscape level. But it often depends on the type of project and is it a federal project, is a state project, et cetera, to more specifically answer your question?

Well, I think when I was asking, what do you need that you don't have? If there's this extensive process for each thing that is slowing this down, it is good to know if there are any improvements that can be made that we might statutorily or otherwise address to make sure that these actually happen. So I just appreciate the response to those questions and look forward to the rest of the hearing.

Thank you. Senator Laird. That was slightly more than three questions, maybe 3.15 today on PI day.

I already had this exchange. I already had this exchange when the budget Director, when a question isn't asked the follow up question to make them answer the original question doesn't count.

A little pie joke never mind, feeling salty today. Thank you very much. I just wanted to reiterate what we said earlier, that this is obviously of paramount concern to all of us in California. I represent the coastal region in Orange County, and we too have been afflicted with a number of wildfires in recent years, including the Silverado fire that was mentioned earlier. This is something I think all of us are following very closely.

The treatment and prevention of acreage is important, even if it is very technical. With that, I guess I had a few questions here, maybe 3.14, maybe slightly less. Chief Taylor, for you. I was interested if you could tell me a little bit about how calfire might be working or planning to work with private industry to try to achieve some of your annual treatment targets. Are there plans to work with private industry? Sort of. What does that look like?

So a lot of that private industry work is through the collaboration of the task force that's coming together and determining how we're going to work through all of the goals together. Now, through workforce and business development, we have provided grant opportunities to workforce development in areas of Southern California, working with Sierra Pacific industries for reforestation and building an additional nursery for additional capacity in Siskiyou County, and as an example, in Crescent Mills just south of Greenville.

We work with those communities and those private partners to establish small mill facilities across the landscape. So there are examples across the state in which we're working with private partners, but those are just three of them.

Thank you, Chief Tyler, and thank you for your service. My next question is either for Assistant Director Bright or Director Wright. And really, it's a question on the metrics that we're using. And I guess when we talk about whether something is treated for purposes of fire prevention, one, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that means.

And two, I was wondering if there might be metrics that you're looking at that might distinguish between whether a particular acre is treated for purposes of the chaparral areas that were described earlier or for the forested areas. Because I presume, I think it was mentioned earlier that there are going to be different types of treatments that we look to. So if either you could speak to those points, basically, what does it mean when we say treated?

And should we be thinking about what treated means in different perspective for those types of acres?

Yeah, I think if you suggested there's more than one way to count what acres are treated, as I mentioned earlier, we'll be giving you soon, starting with our March 30 meeting, an estimate of the number of footprint acres that is how many acres throughout the state are being treated annually.

A second measure is what we call treatment acres, and that will count if, as you heard earlier, if an agency or a local agency goes in and does a thinning project and then a prescribed burn, we'll be able to see that as well. So you both get treatment acres and footprint acres. We're also developing a set of metrics.

In fact, Dr. Battles is leading our effort there because we all know it's not, at the end of the day about acres treated, it's about where are we with respect to protecting communities, improving forest health, storing carbon, improving biodiversity. So we've got a big series of metrics and pillars of resilience so that you and others will not only get estimates of how many acres were treated, but what's the benefit of treating those acres in meeting our state's goals? All of that is underway.

All of it's in draft right now. It'll be rolling out. And each of those are going to be specific to each of the four major regions. So obviously, your goal in treating chaparral is going to be very different, as you heard earlier from your goal in treating forest. So we hope to have both estimates. That's the bottom line of acres treated and the benefits you get from treating those acres.

And will that be part of what you described? Will that be part of the big package release that you're releasing to us later this spring, later this month, you'll.

Get the treatment tracking system where we've aligned, federal, state, local, private, so that we can see how many acres were treated with respect to the metrics. We're going region by region. So we have a solid set of metrics that are already done and in place for the Sierra Nevada. Things like the density of the trees, the health of the water bodies, where carbon storage opportunities are, et cetera.

We went to Southern California, as you heard, earlier in February, laid out a set of metrics for that area. We're going to be going to the central coast in a couple of months and then up to the north coast in the fall. So we're taking a region by region approach to work with the regions on defining what success and what resiliency is in each of those regions. And then by next year, we're going to pull it all together into a statewide assessment of how we're doing.

So we'll combine the regional efforts with the statewide assessment as part of our update of the action plan.

Thank you, Assistant Director Bright do you have any thoughts?

You know we don't really work with the metrics and the acreage. We work more with the partners and them developing projects to meet those.

Well then on that note, I would just note that the RFC program is very important to my area, just given the unique fire needs we have. And I guess following up on that, when do you see anticipate that the RFFC program will finish rolling out?

You know, I think, I think we'll be able to cover a little over 90% in this year. And then the last sections of the state are highly, largely, we'll have to look to our statewide partners, to county agencies and.

So those will be later on, but they are not as much in the populated areas and the kind of woolly around them as much far out there.

Thank you. Going back full circle on Pi day to Director. Right. Sorry. I'm going to do this all day. What do you anticipate that- will we hit the 500,000 acre goal by 2025?And then I want to repeat the question that I asked Dr. Battles before. Is that the right number?

Yeah. Good questions both. Again, as you'll see, at the end of the month, we're going to roll out our tracking system. In general, I think you'll find we're generally about halfway there. What we're trying to assess now is get a handle statewide. It's never been done before, to get together a package of all the planned projects throughout the state so that we can better answer that question.

And we're also going to do a series of modeling exercises, region by region, to determine what's the best mix in each region between prescribed fire thinning, reforestation. To get to that target. I'm confident with sustained funding and a ramp up, once we get that data, we'll be able to get there. But we're still at the point now where we're putting together the tools to better answer that question.

Thank you. Appreciate your testimony and answer to that. Senator or Vice Chair Seyarto has a question.

Thank you. Chief Tyler, you're there somewhere. The 100,000 acres that got treated this past year, what did that treatment consist of? Was it prescribed fires? Was it clearing? And kind of what percentage of each of those areas were treated? With what?

Thank you, Senator. I will certainly get back to you with those definitive numbers that we have. What I will tell you is, in 2021, over 116,000 acres were treated through force health prevention and unit fire plan related areas of impact. Last year was 109,000. This year is currently sitting at 37,168. And I can give you a little bit more detail on this current year.

Of that, 37,168, I can tell you that 17,491 of those acres were treated through prescribed fire, the remainder through mechanical and hand thinning. But I can get more details on the previous squeeze.

Are you talking about this year, like 2023? This year? I can't imagine a prescribed fire being able to be done in 2023. Everything's wet.

So it is a unique thing for the task force. Another item that we're all working through together is the time frames and how we collaborate that information between a state's fiscal year, a federal fiscal year, and a calendar year, something that we're all discussing on. So when I talk about 2022, it's the fiscal year 2022, and most of those acres were done, actually. And it shows me that we're starting to move this culture within the Department. Most of it was done in the latter portion of the fire season in 22.

Great. Thank you so much for clarifying. Anticipated curing because that has a big impact on workload and also preventing us from redoing areas that had already been done. Do you guys have kind of a curing date you're probably looking at this year? It might be a lot later than we are used to.

Yeah. As yourself and Senator Laird opened with today, we recognize that this wet season, as soon as it dries out, is going to create a grass crop. Now we look at our Predictive Services models from the north and the south. They really relate to us that we're going to have what is considered through June as a normal fire year, meaning not too extreme in that time frame, but not moderated by this weather either.

I do expect if we saw the rain stop next week and have no further rain through the season, obviously it's going to cure in Southern California quicker than Northern California. What I can tell you, and it was mentioned at the beginning of this hearing, is we will have an increased grass crop and that grass crop will carry wildland fire ignitions into the brush and into the timber quickly. So we will have to work through that.

Yeah. Hopefully the programs for private owners, their brush clearance takes that into account because there's nothing more frustrating for them than to be told to clear their- you know, go cut their- these areas out or mold the grass, basically so it's low. But then it just grows right back if you do it too early. And so you're doubling their workload, which can translate into a lot of money.

So I'm hoping they're very wary of that when they're out there doing their brush clearance with private owners. And allow them to actually cut it when it's most beneficial, where they will only have to do it once. And I know that's a little tricky because we got to do it before it gets too dry, but at the same time, so it won't grow back. So anyway, thank you guys for your information on what we're doing up to date and appreciate it all. Thank you.

Thank you, Director Wright, Chief Tyler, Assistant Director Bright, for your testimony and time. We're moving on to our third panel of the day, the Stakeholder Perspectives panel. And our first presenter is an Orange County leader in addressing wildfires. And I believe a constituent of mine, Michael O'Connell from the Irvine Ranch Conservancy. Welcome, Mr. O'Connell.

Thank you so much, Senator Min and Members of the Committee. I really appreciate the opportunity to provide testimony today. You are correct. I am one of your constituents and in fact we manage a lot of land in your district. So it's good to be here. I'm going to share my screen so you can see my presentation. And I'm going to be talking specifically about wildfire in the South Coast Region and risk reduction. First, a little bit about the Irvine Ranch Conservancy.

We're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and we're in a unique situation as an NRFFC block grantee. As Keali'i mentioned, most of the focus early on was with state conservancies, RCDs and others. We don't have any of those things in Orange County. And so Irvine Ranch Conservancy sort of functions in that role in the community. We are the hub of a network of coordination. And so it made sense for us to be part of the RFFC program. We have a very robust program.

We manage 30,000 acres of public urban wildlands, all of it highly fire prone. We have a big reach into the community as well. Our 525 volunteers annually give about 50,000 hours of service and provide almost 3,000 public programs and education opportunities for the public. Just a little bit to reemphasize about the south coast. It's quite a complicated picture of very dense urban areas that are surrounded by large urban wildlands. There's a huge amount of urban wildland interface in Southern California.

A lot of these communities are at risk from wildfire. We have a large and spread out national forest system. And interestingly enough, four of the six contract counties that CAL FIRE has are in Southern California. So a lot of the work locally is being done by the local fire departments under contract to CAL FIRE, not by CAL FIRE itself. I want to reemphasize, and I want to thank Professor Battles for his discussion of the ecology of wildfire.

I want to note that it has been a very long time coming for the State of California to recognize that there is a very different kind of fire regime in shrublands than in forested systems. For so long we had a one size fits all mindset about managing wildfire. And I personally consider it an enormous breakthrough that we're now talking about different types of fire regimes and the different types of solutions that result from those.

So where we are in coastal Southern California, it's all about winds and it's all about ignitions. The region has had far too much fire, and you can see from this picture what happens when you have repeated fires. The return interval for fire normally is between 70 and 150 years. And our current fire return interval for each square meter of ground is between 7 and 10 years.

And you can see what happens over time is that some of these spectacular open spaces become simply dry brush within a lengthened fire season, because these heavier fuels don't cure as quickly as the more flammable grasses, as we all know. And our fires have become increasingly catastrophic in the south coast over time, as they have other places. So what's really important for you to know about this is that it's very unconventional. It's not about forest fires.

It's about basically urban wildfires and shrublands that are ignited by humans. Almost 100% of our fires are human caused, either accidentally or intentionally. And they're driven by these strong seasonal winds, as we call them, Santa Anas. And they're only 18 to 24 days a year right now. I'm often asked what role climate change has in that, and we're not exactly sure.

It may be that these seasonal wind events become more frequent due to climate change over time, but currently they're about 18 to 24 days a year. What that means is that 90% of our acres burned and our property damage is occurring in only 10% of our fires, the fires that occur during those wind events.

And I want to just triple underline that for most routine ignitions outside of these wind events, the local fire departments and others who are working on suppression are extremely well resourced to respond to and suppress those fires before they get large. But when the wind events occur and you have 70, 80, sometimes 90 miles an hour winds, we've recorded that up on a place we call Windy Ridge in Orange County. Helicopters are grounded. You're waiting for the winds to subside. Meanwhile, the land is burning.

It's important that the embers will spread up to 5 miles downwind. And I've sat watching the news and seen a fire in the Santa Clarita Valley with the fire on the east side of the 5 freeway, lighting houses on fire on the west side of the 5 freeway, which you would think it would be a good fire break, but in this case, because of the winds and the embers, it's not. So they're very, very difficult, if not impossible, to suppress with conventional methods, these catastrophic fires, what I'm talking about.

So it does two things. One is it puts our communities at risk, obviously. And speaking just specifically about Orange County alone. In 2020 90,000 people were evacuated, some of them twice with our two major fires, the Silverado Fire and the Bond Fire. Most of our county is either directly or indirectly vulnerable, directly due to the fires and indirectly due to smoke and other things that happen, and ember cast as a result of that.

When schools are closed for a week because of a fire that's going on miles and miles away, that's an indirect impact that is pretty significant. Also very important is we have thousands of aging structures that are at high risk from embers. Most of the newer developments in Orange County that meet the code of 7A are doing actually relatively well. But these thousands of aging structures are at great risk from embers, and there's a huge need for retrofitting those to make them more resilient.

And there are also hundreds of fuel mod zones that are around these communities, the defensible space, we call it, that require maintenance. The Orange County Fire Authority does a huge number of inspections every year, but it's not the fire authority's job to respond to those inspections. They just point out what needs to happen. And some of these fuel mod zones remain unmanaged and unmaintained.

Also very important, and I think very relevant to what this Committee is charged with, is our investments in land protection are threatened by this problem as well. Again, in Orange County alone, 60,000 acres of highly biodiverse urban wildlands have been protected since 1980. These are globally significant lands with spectacular natural resources. Hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private funds have been spent doing this. They protect over 120 rare species and natural communities, and they also provide critical open space for nature and people.

That entire system, that entire investment is at risk. We will see type conversion of these habitats over time. As you saw in that previous picture I showed, if we don't get a handle on the fire issue. This is what brings my organization as a conservation organization to the table. It's the same threat. It is the single greatest threat to the survival and the health of these wildlands. Wildfire is that threat, and so it's imperative that we work on it.

As I mentioned, it's an unconventional issue, so unconventional responses are needed. Ignition prevention number one. These are the three things that need to happen, and they've been identified by the collaboration that we've been working on for quite some time that I'll mention in a minute. Number one, ignition prevention. 93% of our ignitions start on roadways and power line infrastructure. If you look at these two different maps, these are two completely different parts of Southern California.

But you can see that the ignition map almost is a roadway map, given how much of our ignitions occur along these roadways. So that's number one, ignition prevention, especially during those high wind events. We don't have to prevent every ignition along a roadway. We just have to prevent them that 18 to 24 days a year when they will turn into catastrophic fires. So there's some leverage there and some opportunity there. It's not 365 days a year. It's 18 to 24 days.

Mr. O'Connell, I hate to interrupt, if you don't mind starting to wrap up. Thank you.

Certainly. Absolutely. So the two other things I want to mention are the structure resilience. We need to go back and retrofit. We need defensible space and prevention from embers. And we also need these strategic fuel modification zones. We have a working group, we've been working since 2015 called Coast, and it has all of these organizations together working to share that problem that has been talked about earlier.

I've mentioned our urgent risk reduction priorities, and so I'll just close by saying the policy priorities for the south coast that I would share with you. Number one, regional focused solutions. I cannot tell you how important that is and how supportive that is to the work that we're doing on our unconventional responses here in Orange County. Regional collaborations through RFFC.

We've been working together as a group for years in Orange County, but the RFFC was the catalyst that allowed us to then get to the point where we're now developing action plans. And then I want to underscore what Director Wright said. Sustained regional funding, implementation funding through block grants is extremely important as well. So thank you again for the opportunity to testify today, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Mr. O'Connell. Next we'll hear from YG Gentry, Vice President of the California Forestry Association. Welcome, Mr. Gentry.

Thank you, sir. I am also Registered Professional Forester 2262. And some over 50 years ago, I started my career measuring trees. And to measure trees, you measure their circumference in order to obtain their diameter. And of course, to get from circumference to diameter, you have to divide by Pi. So I appreciate any good Pi reference or Pi joke, especially today. So thank you, Senator.

Appreciate it.

I'm going to cover on three major topics. First of all, I do think that it's important that I recognize and acknowledge my old friend and colleague Patrick Wright, whose collaboration and communication with us has been outstanding. We really appreciate and thank you very much, Patrick. The first thing that I'd like to talk about is reforesting burned areas.

And I think that the state, the Legislature, the Administration, CAL FIRE, all these entities have done a remarkable job in terms of bringing funds to bear in order to help develop infrastructure. We're working on developing better cone collection, which is important because these fires can often wipe out seed zones. It's important that we start banking some of this genetic material for the future. A lot of good effort has gone into this program.

One thing that I do think that ought to be looked at for the future is California Forest Improvement program, CFIP. That is a program that is specifically designed for the non industrial owner, and they really need the support in order to manage their lands appropriately. They don't have the resources that many of my members do, and so it's important for them to have access to consistent and stable funding. So that's something that I think that should be looked at.

Secondly, I would like to talk about a very important issue, which is low value wood products. And by low value wood products, I mean products that just don't pay for their way out of the woods, and particular biomass. A lot of focus gets paid to infrastructure development, reliable feedstock, transportation, incentives. All these are great things, great tools.

But I think it's very important that we also recognize that markets have to be there in order for this material to help pay its way out so that it isn't entirely a subsidized thing. Our Members would do even more fuel reduction work if there was some way of disposing of this material. As it stands right now, we have a lot of unused capacity within the biomass system, biomass generation. I think it should be given a higher priority in the renewable sector.

I think that would go a long way to facilitating projects in the State. So I think those are two main things. I think the Joint Institute for Wood Products-innovative wood products, is a great place to look at some of these things, but I would strongly encourage close examination of how we can make these things more economic and more viable. And the last thing I'd like to touch upon is permit synchronicity or permitting in general. Again, some kudos to CAL FIRE.

One thing that is just about ready to be published is under Assembly Bill 2889 there was a requirement to put out guidance for agencies and plan submitters so they would understand exactly what they needed to do in order to make sure that their plans were fully compliant with CEQA and would be more easily reviewed. And CAL Fire has done great work in this regard and is about to publish it.

And that is like a key component in all of this, because that will help set the business practices that are necessary for us to go forward with our permits. The big thing here in permit synchronicity is that CAL FIRE does a very good job in terms of reviewing harvest plans and exemptions. They do a great job. But in the CEQA process, there's also these other permits and agreements that have to come aboard. And so they rely on the analysis that's done within the timber harvest plan.

And sometimes those things get hung up. And so what we're trying to work on there is how we can make those subsequent permits and agreements come on board more quickly, and I believe that that can be done. We are working on a process right now to bring people in, bring them to the table, so that we can address what they need for their environmental review and analysis, so that there isn't any undue delay.

To be sure, many of our projects go forward with alacrity, but some don't. And we need to address what it is that hangs those things up. The final thing that I do think is important is to address CalTrees, which is the electronic submission program for timber harvest plans and exemptions. So far, it's working fairly well for exemptions. There's a lot of hiccups and a lot of birthing pains involved in this because fundamentally, environmental review is an iterative process.

It's a back and forth between reviewing agencies, the plan submitter, and addressing mitigations and other needs. But CalTrees holds great promise because it will help facilitate communication between all parties so that this information gets shared in a timely manner. And as I mentioned earlier, the guidance document that Calfire is working on should help set business practices so that that communication is on the same level, so that everyone understands what's expected of them and what's required of them. And with that, I will conclude.

Thank you, Mr. Gentry. Next we'll hear from Liz Forsberg party, from the Nature Conservancy. Welcome, Dr. Forsberg party.

Thank you, Chair and Members of the Committee. My name is Liz Forsberg, and I am the State Policy Director for the Nature Conservancy. The Nature Conservancy is a global environmental nonprofit working to create a world where people and nature can thrive. In California, the Nature Conservancy works to protect the ecosystem, species, and natural resources the state relies on. In the Sierra Nevada, we are working to restore wildfire resilience. After a century of excluding fires in our Sierra forest, these landscapes are now dangerously overgrown.

Western dry forests have evolved with frequent fire, which would remove small trees and brush. Forests that were once characterized by large, widely spaced trees and low severity fire are now dominated by trees that are packed together up to five times their natural density and face increasingly destructive mega fires.

The Nature Conservancy has been responding to this crisis by increasing the pace and scale of forest restoration efforts in the Sierra, through working with partners to implement forest restoration practices like ecological thinning and controlled burns, and designing strategies to bring forest restoration to the landscape scale. We have a plan to exponentially increase the amount of forests we restore, and here's how we got there. First, we launched forest restoration efforts at our 2,300 acre Independence Lake Preserve.

To protect the lake's threatened drought and to reduce the risk of high severity wildfire, we applied ecological thinning and prescribed fire burning techniques that are now being scaled across the Sierra. In 2015, the conservancy brought together state, federal, and local partners, including Placer County Water Agency, to establish the 28,000 acre French Meadow Project. The group took the same restoration approach to use at Independence Lake and then scaled it in a landscape 10 times larger.

Then in 2019, we partnered to create the 275,000 acre North Yuba River Watershed Project. It is the largest forest restoration of its kind in the Sierra. Using the partnership model from French Meadows, we are working with nine partners to restore one of the most critical watersheds in the region.

And then finally, thanks to the scientific credibility and strong partnerships we built up, the conservancy was invited to work with the Forest Service to lead the Tahoe Central Sierra Initiative's science effort to guide the restoration across 2.4 million acres of forest land surrounding Lake Tahoe. The ultimate goal of our Sierra strategy is to restore 9 million acres of core forested area within the mountain range. The Tahoe Central Sierra initiative is already helping us develop a strategic plan for the entire system.

Our projects are developed not only to improve the health and resilience of forests, but also to address the critical barriers to increasing landscape scale restoration. With these projects in mind, I will share the Nature Conservancy's perspective on the task force progress in achieving landscape scale treatments. I will outline three key barriers and the actions taken to address them. The first challenge is that California's landscape is divided upon multiple ownerships, federal, state, tribal, and private landowners. And wildfire resilience is a shared responsibility.

California must adopt a comprehensive all lands approach to approve forest health within the state. Federal agencies own and manage about 57% of the state's forested land, and they have significantly increased the scale of their fuel reduction projects in recent years. To that end, in 2020, the Governor and the Forest Service signed an agreement for shared stewardship of California's forest, which included the commitment by the Federal Government to match the California goal of reducing wildfire risks on 500,000 acres per year.

Joint federal state management is critical to California's overall forest health, and recognizing this need to work together, Congress included the Good Neighbor Authority in the 2014 Farm Bill, which authorized formal agreements between states and the Federal Government that enabled the sharing of funds, staff, and other resources across jurisdictional boundaries. In 2021, the Legislature expanded the Good Neighbor Authority in California through AB 697.

The bill established a formal program to build capacity for the state to assist with both project planning, including the required environmental analysis and implementation of landscape scale restoration projects on national forest land. The bill highlighted the importance of landscape scale collaboratives, where additional state funding and resources are likely to provide the greatest return on investment. With respect to wildfire resilience, the French Meadows Project is a good example of a collaborative forest project where all the partners share the cost and burden of project planning and implementation.

The overall out of pocket cost for just planning for the Forest French Meadows project was approximately $1.3 million. The partnership and cost sharing with the Forest Service allowed the project to move quickly. The second barrier is the need for a robust workforce to actively restore our forest at a landscape scale. There's been a dramatic increase in the level of public funding, with the most recent state budget appropriating over $1.3 billion.

However, California's current forestry workforce falls short of that needed to deploy the large sums of money flowing to forest resilience. The Nature Conservancy estimated that California's current public sector workforce will need to grow by nearly 9,400 to help put these funds to work. It is worth noting the state budget included $30 million over two years for workforce training. The task force is developing strategies to expand the forest related workforce and is quantifying the training programs needed to help shape the budget investments.

The budget also included $20 million to establish a prescribed fire claims fund. A major obstacle to increasing the pace and scale of prescribed liability prescribed fire is the ability of practitioners to secure the necessary liability insurance. The claims fund pays for damages in the unlikely event that a prescribed fire escapes beyond fire lines. The fund will serve as a backstop for private insurance market. CAL FIRE has done an amazing job to pull together a stakeholder group to design and implement the fund.

The working group is in the final stages of reviewing the program and is planning on launching the program and reservation system next month. Finally, the establishment of regional frameworks will help stakeholders develop landscape scale wildfire resilience project. The task force is applying a regional approach to managing the state's forest ecosystem by empowering local communities to set priorities for projects.

As mentioned in a previous panel, the task force is working with the Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program to establish forest collaborative and support regional leadership to build capacity to develop, prioritize, and implement strategies and projects that create fire adapted landscapes. However, many of the newly established collaboratives lack guidance on developing landscape scale strategies, so the task force created Regional Resource Kits to help. The kits provide stakeholders with data, maps, and planning tools.

They help support effective planning by providing a regional framework for resilience, a common framework for planning and prioritizing treatment options. The regional frameworks are based on the Tahoe Central Sierra Initiatives framework and provide a structure for assessing landscape conditions, setting objectives, designing projects, and measuring progress towards resilience. The kits are a terrific resource that provide the tools needed to guide regional partners and collaboratives in their efforts to reduce wildfire risk and improve forest health.

The task force has made great progress to deliver on the commitments in the action plan, and increasing the use of landscape scale projects will help the task force improve wildfire resilience and ensure our forests can adapt to a changing climate. Thank you, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you so much, Dr. Forsberg. Next we'll hear from Paul Mason from the Pacific Forest Trust. Welcome, Mr. Mason.

Thank you, Chairman and Members of the Committee. Paul Mason with Pacific Forest Trust. Pacific Forest Trust is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that for the last 30 years has focused on the conservation and restoration of private forests in California and throughout the west for all of their benefits, economic, environmental, and social. We're a land trust that holds over 100,000 acres of working forest conservation easements, largely with major timber companies and large ranches in Northern California.

And of course, we have an active policy program here in Sacramento where we work to align state and federal programs around fire, water, climate, biodiversity, trying to advance landscape restoration efforts. Overall, I really want to highlight that the task force has been a massive success story. In the 20 years that I've been working here in Sacramento, I'm hard pressed to think of another example that has catalyzed cross Department coordination and coordination with the Federal Government and locals as well.

And I think that Director Wright deserves a lot of credit for that, as well as, you know Keali'i Bright over at Department of Conservation, Chief Tyler and his predecessors. Really, a lot of progress has been made in the last five years. There's also a huge amount of consensus on where we need to go forward. And so I'm going to have to abandon the good part of my remarks, because much of what I would have said has already been said by Patrick, by Keali'i, and by Director Tyler.

I was asked to speak in particular to forested watersheds, and I want to focus in some on those watersheds that form the headwaters of the greater Sacramento River area, the area that drains into Oroville, Shasta, and Trinity Reservoir, which form the backbone of the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project, and are where a great deal of California's water comes from.

That's an area that stretches basically from north of Lake Tahoe and the Feather River, and Senator Dahle's district around to the upper Trinity watershed above the Trinity Reservoir. And Senator Mcguire's district provides most of the water to the agricultural industry in California, as well as drinking water to 25 million Californians, and really warrants some focused attention as we're moving forward with our sort of planning and implementation on getting to forest restoration at scale.

In fact, there was a bill on this very issue back in 2018 that urged the agencies to develop the sort of comprehensive assessment of need and prioritize the investment opportunities for that particular 7 million acre region. That has not happened yet in the sort of focus way that ultimately it needs to happen. But I think there is promise on the horizon, both with the sort of planning the state's doing, but also with some new philanthropic focus in that region.

Much of what I would focus on in terms of changes to how we are approaching our investments on the landscape has been highlighted by previous speakers. We really need to move away from the individual project approach. That has been fine as we're getting started and rolling out some of these first investments when there's just so much need across the landscape. But it does tend to focus the squeaky wheel, focus on the squeaky wheel and on project proponents that are good at bringing projects forward.

We need to become more proactive about looking across the landscape, identifying the areas that are the highest priority to treat, even if they don't have an active proponent right now.

And then we can reach out, work with those landowners to apply some of the treatments across the landscape and look at the whole watershed, the whole landscape, as if it was an infrastructure project and that we are trying to restore as much function to that watershed as possible, identifying the needs, figuring out how we're going to pay for the work permit it, and move through quickly if we don't move to that more coordinated approach and the sort of block grant or more efficient funding approach that several other speakers have talked about.

We're just not going to get to scale quickly enough. What could take 10 years is going to end up taking 50 years. And frankly, we don't have 50 years to work with here. A couple of other things I really want to highlight is the need for vastly more beneficial fire. Most of California, certainly at the forested portions of California, are adapted to fire. Everything is going to burn. That's its natural state, it's how it evolved.

But we can control the timing of the fire and therefore the outcomes, so that we're getting the sort of outcomes that are maintaining and restoring forest structure rather than eliminating forest structure. We need to be thinking about beneficial fire, lower intensity fire as essentially an inoculation against extreme fire and not over relying on suppression, which as a practical matter makes the problem worse, continues the fuel buildup, and the only fires that get really large are the ones burning under extreme conditions.

So we will never have enough good fire. We should be aiming for a million acres a year, not 50,000 acres a year, and just getting as far as we possibly can there. The other thing that I think is important to keep in mind as we're trying to get back to this sort of-

you know there's a lot of consensus now about the condition we're trying to restore on the forested landscape with fewer but larger trees, well spaced, with thick fire, resilient bark, and branches that start well up into the canopy. But those conditions do not just happen on the managed landscape. There is an economic incentive to harvest timber before that. So conservation with private landowners is going to have to be an integral part of getting back to this resilient forest condition.

We're not going to retain large trees on the managed forest landscape absent public funding, partnering with private landowners to make sure that some portion of those trees are retained in a large fire resilient condition. That's going to be essential, that we have mechanisms that will endure over time there. It's also an important way that we can advance our 30x30 conservation goals, biodiversity, and that's where we'll end up storing a lot of carbon on the landscape as well.

So just to wrap up and try and keep under time here, I want to leave you with four key points. First, we need to maintain and increase the funding and the momentum that we have built over the last five years. Wherever we can. We can focus on reducing the administrative burden and trying to deploy money more efficiently to projects on the landscape and landscapes, not just projects and predictable, stable money is better for building momentum.

Number two, we really need to treat our critical source watersheds, as the critical infrastructure that they are and really establish some focused funding and implementation to get to the outcomes that we're going to need later in the century. Three, there's an essential role for conservation in achieving and maintaining more natural forest condition over time, where we have those large trees and greater heterogeneity across the landscape.

And lastly, we're going to need to get comfortable with using a lot more prescribed and managed fire to maintain these more resilient conditions on the landscape. Fire is part of our ecology. It's only going to be more common in a hotter, drier California. But we can control the timing, and we just need more of it under conditions where we like the outcomes than where we have outcomes we don't like. So thank you for this opportunity to share some thoughts.

Thank you, Mr. Mason, and thank you to all of our presenters on this panel. I will now move to questions. Do any of my Senate colleagues have questions? Vice Chair.

Questions? Mr. Gentry, you're still there, I take it.

Yes, sir.

Great. So the permitting process that you had talked to, alluded to and said that one of the fixes is that they're developing roadmaps so that people know how to get through the process or what they need to do to get through the process. And while I like the roadmaps because they do help people do that, 600 miles is still 600 miles. And our permitting process seems to be onerous, to say the least.

And, like, when you're doing your timber harvest plans, what's the process for that, and what's kind of the average time it takes to get through one?

So the time frames can really vary, and it's going to depend on where the plan is located, what it's proposing to do more often than not CAL FIRE, when you look at the Sierra Nevada, the Modoc, places like that, somewhere around three months seems to be about the time frame. By regulation and statute, it's supposed to be somewhere around 72-73 days.

It is the subsequent permitting that can sometimes confound the situation, because you're also required to have either the general order from water quality or you need 1,600 permits from DFW for water course crossings. Those things can consume a lot of time, and in theory, they really shouldn't, since the environmental review has already taken place. And so that's something we need to work on.

If the information is not getting to those agencies, then we need to make sure that they have the information necessary to make their judgment. CEQA is CEQA, and you have to comply with it. It's important for environmental review, it's important for assessing the impacts. It's important for public disclosure. So there's really no way of getting around some of those minimum time frames. You have to do a certain amount.

What has changed for us primarily, is the amount of time that we put into the preparatory work for the harvest plan. It can take up to two years to get to that, even submitting the harvest plan, just to do the environmental review internally. So that's a different kind of thing. And there's really based on CEQA and based on court cases and based on how things are looked at, I'm not sure that there is any real good solution for that.

Well, I guess that kind of negates my second question. Perhaps you guys can come up with some ideas that we could implement at our level to help that process, because this is kind of an emergency type process also. We need to get this done. And whatever the processes are out there that are standing as barriers to getting it done, we need to know about, and we need some ideas about what we can do to overcome those a little bit.

One thing that my members have looked at very closely and are starting to implement on a bigger basis is habitat conservation plans. Which allows for a lot of this environmental review to already be done prior to the plan even being done. So that's a considerable investment in time, money, and resources, but that's something that a lot of folks are looking at.

Yeah, I was the chair of one of those and was there when it started down in Riverside County, when it ended. But at the end of the day, many years later, watching what it was supposed to do, it still seems there's this God awful process that everybody has to go through to try to get a project done, even with the habitat plan. Anyway, thank you very much for pointing that issue out for us a little bit, and I appreciate all you do. Thank you.

Yeah, me. Okay, Senator, you good? All right, I have a couple of questions here. First, for Mr. O'Connell. I was wondering if you could elaborate on some of your testimony, and in particular, if you have concerns and/or suggestions around how we have a consistent, continuous implementation of a regional investment strategy in fire prevention around the state.

Sure, I'd be happy to. I think what our experience has been, the key is getting everyone in the room and actively collaborating over time. Once that happens and plans are developed, those plans are almost inherently long term. And so what we need then is long term support in terms of funding and in terms of some of the policies that are necessary to support those action plans.

And what I'm speaking about specifically is we've talked a lot today about the fact that wildfire is not a problem that is limited to the fire department. Everyone is involved. We have to share the solution. In our case, since ignitions occur along roadways, mostly 82% of our ignitions occur along roadways. The primary party that is involved in that is Caltrans or the county public works departments.

And so having them at the table and having them have the policies, and the funding, and the support that they need, in order to, play the role that is essential for them is really critical. So this starts to get pretty complicated pretty quickly. But vesting the solution in any one entity is risky because there are so many facets to it.

But I would say the shortest answer is long term support and sustained regional funding in the flexibility of the block grants that we've talked about, tied to these regional plans that are developed through active collaboration. That's really the breakthrough. That's the way to do it, and that's what the task force has been encouraging, and it's very exciting.

Thank you, Mr. O'Connell. Appreciate that. I have a question for Dr. Forsberg and Mr. Mason, and that's really around this idea of sustainability right? We're talking about treatment right now. We don't know what the budget will look like 10 years from now.

And so I was wondering if you had any suggestions or ideas on the best methods to ensure that 25 years from now, we're continuing to treat the highest priority forests and wild lands, and that these continue to go forward long after all of us are at office.

Let's start with you, Dr. Forsberg. Go ahead.

Oh, sure. I'm happy to answer. And then turn it over to my colleague, Mr. Mason. I think some of the challenges that have been discussed today help us think through how we can think about long term commitments to forest restoration, really thinking through, about what the first entry looks like. Maybe it's going to be some ecological binning and then the ability to get more fire on the ground and subsequent treatments.

That really is going to help bring the landscape into a healthier condition, and it's also going to reduce the cost of projects long term by increasing the use of prescribed fire and getting fire into the intervals, into the appropriate intervals that they are needed in the landscape. So, again, in our work in the Sierras, that's really trying to return fire to the system and making sure that we're getting more frequent fires into the landscape.

Thank you. Mr. Mason.

Sure. I would certainly echo what Dr. Forsberg just had to say, really, maybe add to that, that as we move beyond treating small areas of a few hundred acres and start getting to larger treated areas of thousands of acres or whole watersheds, they're back into a more natural condition where we can let fire operate at a larger scale to maintain conditions. That's going to help an awful lot in terms of being able to bring the cost down and work at a larger scale.

We are also going to need stable, ongoing funding, because there's going to need to be public inputs into this for generations. I mean, it's taken us well over 100 years to create this problem, and it's going to take an awful long time to get out as well, especially with the changing, the climate continuing to make the project more challenging.

So I think that beyond the dedication of GGRF, that runs out another five years or so, we're really going to need a permanent and substantial source of funding to deal with these sorts of challenges across the landscape. Whether that's based on- Well, there's a variety of ways to get there. None of them are going to be easy. But I think that fundamentally, really baking something into the baseline investments that the state is making is going to be essential.

Thank you, Mr. Mason. I appreciate that. Thank you to all our presenters. We appreciate your time today. And so I would now like to invite public comment. Let's begin with any witnesses here in room 2100. Please line up at the front. And please note, given our limited time today, we're just going to ask you to limit your testimony or comments to two minutes each. I'll remind you that written testimony or comments are welcome from the public and should be emailed to our Committee. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning Committee Members. My name is Jason Hodgson. I'm the proud Superintendent of the Taft Union High School District. And Senator Min, if this morning was a little salty, we'd like to offer a little sweet just before lunch today. With me today, I'm proud to say I'm represented by career technical education academy students from Taft, California, here to talk a little bit about their experiences with natural resources and also maybe add a little extended push toward powering the fight against saving our forest.

I appreciate it. I did notice the young people sitting patiently through a lot of testimony. Yeah.

And this is by the way, a student led effort. We have their coordinator teacher here as well as a few board members. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for your time.

Thank you for pending. Do we have anyone else wishing to make comments? Just please line up at the front and please limit your comments to two minutes each, although it sounds like that won't be a problem.

Good morning, my name is Macy Bear. I'm the AADE treasurer. AADE stands for American Association of Drilling and Engineer and it's kind of like our student section for our oil technology academy. One thing I noticed that a lot was mentioned throughout the meeting was climate change. And I know that everyone says CO2 is affecting the climate change and that's a big push on pretty much just making different advancements towards becoming carbon neutral.

But one thing that I did find out was that about 10 years ago, the earth wasn't as green as it is today and it's five to 10% greener than it was 10 years ago. But also in the last four Ice Ages, the CO2 level was very low. And I know that there has been studies and everything that does say there is a greenhouse effect and everything, but that is just something that I wanted to mention.

Thank you for your comment.

Hi, I'm Lorena Gonzalez, senior representative.

Not with the Labor Federation. Different Lorena Gonzalez, just to be clear.

She already got that yesterday.

Please go ahead.

The petroleum industry impacts the nation because it supports millions of American jobs and it's strictly overlooked by federal, state and local. And many times people choose to focus on this as the main source of pollution. But there's bulk carriers that emit 558 metric tons of carbon per year. And the petroleum industry helps my community because it provides indirect, direct and induced jobs that help everyone in my community.

Thank you very much. And just as a reminder to our future commenters, thank you for that, Ms. Gonzalez. Today's topic is wildfire. So if you could keep your comments to that, there will be opportunities down the line, if you'd like to come back, I'm sure we will talk about fossil fuels and other things that are germane to some of these comments, but thank you.

They've been talking about wildfire.

Hi, good afternoon. My name is Natalie Pence and one of the- Well, obviously it's fire and safety for the topic. I wanted to kind of inform you guys how the oil industry also affects this industry as well. And one of them is the petroleum industry provides us with everyday essentials, as known, but it also provides us with heavy equipment such as helicopters, air support, chainsaws and wood clippers. And that's pretty much all I have relating to this topic.

Thank you.

Hi, I'm Athena Campos. I'm President of the Oil Technology Academy and I'm addressing how the petroleum industry affects my community. Businesses such as era energy, Chevron, sentinel, peak resources all support tafts events, clubs, activities and more. Perfect example is Oil Dorado. We celebrate the founding of Taft by oil. Another example is the need center. It's a building provided by the oil fields company, and this building provides food, clothing, hygiene essentials and more to those in need.

Without the petroleum industry, many small towns would not be here today. Much like our town, the petroleum industry brought people to start our small town with businesses such as grocery stores, schools, restaurants and more. If these businesses shut down, there goes employment rates, which affects the population. And as the population goes down, Taft is no longer Taft.

So, in conclusion, the petroleum industry is a contributing partner in helping California set an example to other states and countries, reproduce affordable, reliable energy that safeguards public health, safety and the environment. Together, we share the goal of creating a stable and thriving economy where we can strengthen working families, local employers and diverse communities. Thank you.

Thank you. You're an awful hard bunch to cut off, but if we could keep it to wildfires, I'd appreciate that if we have any more.

Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Hi, Chair, Members of the Committee. John Andersen, Director of Forest Policy with Mendocino and Humboldt Redwood companies just want to touch on the 500,000 acre goal that the state has. It's my understanding that the task force is going to be counting the timber harvest plan acres in those. That's 110-120,000 acres a year. And it really seems like we need to go above and beyond those acres. We've had timber harvest plans for, well, since 1974. And the wildfire situation has only gotten worse.

So that 500,000 acres, if we really want meaningful acres, should be above and beyond what the timber harvest plans do. They do reduce fuel, but we need to go above and beyond that. And then, just to echo the comments of George Gentry, the permit synchronization process we've been trying to work on for several years here. I'm glad the task force is taking that on.

I've written over 50 timber harvest plans myself, and I can tell you that triple state permit process that we have is very laborious. And if we can get all those permits lined up, approved at the same time, we can be moving ahead at a much faster clip for our fuel reduction projects. Thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate that.

Good morning. I'm Stacey Corless. I'm here with the Sierra Consortium. We are a group of regional conservation and community based organizations. And you heard from Paul and others, we so strongly support the work of the Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force. It's been game changing for us in the Sierra Nevada, especially the regional capacity building efforts through the RFFCP program, you know, I live in Mammoth Lakes, in Inyo and Mono counties.

We did not have local capacity at all to take on landscape level forest resilience programs working with the US Forest Service. And now it's happening so strongly support that kind of a broken record with the need for sustained funding. But I'll say it again, and really a combination of funding is needed. We welcome the opportunity that a bond measure could bring, but we need that sustained funding.

And one thing I didn't hear really too much is the unprecedented levels of federal funding that are now available and the incredible alignment through the task force with applying that funding to priority projects for the state. But this is outside the Legislature's traditional scope. But if there were a way to signal to the Federal Government the need for that alignment and for working together on project planning, not just project planning, but prioritization, again, the alignment is there. Everybody's working together really well.

But I think that could be an interesting thing for you to do outside the traditional scope of your authority. Trying to work in a pi joke, but I teach history at UC Irvine in your district. Thank you.

Well, thank you for your suggestions and your comments. Anyone else in the room? Okay, then. Thank you to all who gave comment. We'll now move to individuals waiting to provide public comment via the teleconference service.

For those who are just joining or have not yet called in to participate, please dial this toll free number 877-226-8216 and when prompted, please use the following access code 6217161. Moderator if you could, please prompt the individuals waiting to provide public comment, and then provide to me the total number of people on the line.

Thank you. And if you'd like to make a comment, please press 1-0 at this time. Again, it's 1-0. Give me just a moment. And currently, nobody in queue here.

Thank you. Moderator. Well, then, I guess with that thank you to all the panelists who presented today, the individuals who participated in public testimony. Improving landscape and forest health, increasing wildfire and forest resilience to wildfire in order to protect our communities is a daunting challenge, but one that we must dedicate resources to on an ongoing basis. I look forward to working with my legislative colleagues and the Administration to achieve this shared effort.

If you are not able to testify via the teleconference service, please submit your comments or suggestions in writing to the Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee or visit the Committee website. Your comments and suggestions are important to us, and we want to include your testimony in the official hearing records. Thank you, including to the folks from the Technical Institute for participating today. We appreciate your patience and cooperation. With that, we've concluded the agenda, and this Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee is adjourned.