Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 3 on Climate Crisis, Resources, Energy, and Transportation

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Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the first hearing of Budget Subcommittee Three. Good to see you, Assembly Member Connolly. Over the past two years of historic budget surpluses, which, unfortunately, we don't project for this year, California has committed roughly $54 billion over multiple years to slow climate change, preserve our natural resources, expand and reduce emissions from our transportation sector, and protect communities hardest hit by climate change, air pollution, and toxics.

It's been estimated that California's $54 billion climate investment on a per capita basis is 20% higher than the combined federal investments from the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRA, the CHIPS Act, and Infrastructure Investments, and the Jobs Act. While we will have to reduce our spending to address the projected $22 billion General Fund deficit, California's investments are still historic and will help us reach our climate conservation, environmental protection, and transportation goals while retaining our status as a national and international leader in fighting climate change.

While the Governor's Budget presents his suggestions for solving this deficit, the Legislature and this Subcommittee will review his proposed new spending proposals, cuts, delays, and fund shifts, and present our own set of solutions, taking into account oversight of existing programs and potential federal dollars that can accomplish the same goals. For housekeeping purposes today, today's hearing we will do an overview of the 2023 Budget architecture as it relates to natural resources and environmental protection.

The details will be divided up over many Committee hearings over the next coming months. Then we will move on to new proposals, proposed cuts, and oversight of the 15 departments on the agenda today from the California Natural Resources Agency. This includes 29 proposals on the nondiscusion calendar and four issues to be heard for each of the discussion items. I'll ask each of the witnesses in the agenda to introduce themselves before they begin their presentations.

At the end of the discussion items, Members of the Subcommittee may ask questions or make comments on any of the non-discussion items or the departments in the agendas that did not present. We will not be taking any votes today. After all the items are heard, we'll take public comment first in the room, following by phone testimony. Each member of the public will have 1 minute to speak.

The phone number is on the Committee website and should also be on the screen if you're watching over the Internet. The number is 877-692-8957. That's 877-692-8957 and the access code is 1315447 1315447. If you encounter any problems, please contact the Assembly Budget Committee at 916-319-2099 and a staff member will assist you. That's 916-319-2099 so if we will take roll, please.

[Roll call].

Thank you very much. So for our first issue will be an overview of the 2023 Climate Budget and the LAO, if you would please come up and introduce yourself and start with issue one, followed by Secretary Crowfoot.

Good morning. Rachel Ehlers from the Legislative Analyst Office. Nice to be with you here in person instead of on a television screen. I'll be speaking today from this handout, which hopefully you all have in front of you, and is also available on the Committee website and on the LAO website. I will be giving a brief overview of the recent augmentations, the structure of the Governor's Budget, and then some of our office's overarching comments and recommendations for you.

Hopefully, you all also have a copy of this doorstop report that our office put out last week that goes through all of these proposals in great detail. And I'm sure we'll be talking about this over the next coming weeks. But this also contains our comments in a more extensive manner. So turning to the first page of the handout here, this gives an overview of the augmentations in the recent budgets. You can see totals over $40 billion across five years.

Most of this is from the General Fund, about $34 billion from the General Fund, about $6 billion from special funds. That's primarily the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. A couple of points to draw your attention to here. You can see that $27 billion has already been provided of that amount and then an additional 8.7 committed or intended for the coming budget year.

So that distinction, we think is pretty important, and one you're going to want to keep in mind as you think about finding budget solutions, what money has already been provided versus what money is intended, but is not yet out the door as you're thinking about limiting disruption from some of the changes you may make. That's an important distinction. You can see the largest categories of spending here for zero-emission vehicles, energy, water, and drought, but also quite a bit of funding.

This is really unprecedented amounts of General Fund for these types of programs. These types of programs have historically been funded primarily through bonds or special funds. So this is really, as the Chair noted, a substantial commitment of General Fund. So turning to page two, as I think we're all aware, the state is facing a pretty significant budget problem, roughly $20 billion gap between commitments for the coming year and available resources or anticipated available resources.

So the Governor has some pretty significant proposals in these programs to begin to address that. The figure here in the handout is not great because it doesn't have a lot of color. There's a color version in your report, but I think what I would highlight for you here, which you can see even in the black and white image here, is the difference between the dark bars and the lighter bars.

So the dark bars in this figure represent all of the funding that under the Governor's Proposal would be maintained, all of the General Fund, and some special fund that would be retained.

The kind of medium color bars are proposals for fund shifts to other sources, primarily to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund or funding delays where the funding would still, under the Governor's Proposal, be provided for these programs at some point over the five years, but in a future year, and then that light bar kind of at the end are the proposed reductions in each of these areas.

So I think that's the first big takeaway here, is most of the vast majority of the funding is proposed to be retained. I think the second big takeaway we would suggest you take from this figure, is there is somewhat different treatment across these different kind of thematic areas. For example, you can see in the wildfire bar, not really much change proposed at all. In the zero-emission vehicle bar at the top, you can see a much more significant chunk. That's a fund shift.

The Governor is proposing to shift a chunk of that to the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. And then at the bottom for coastal resilience, you can see a much larger proportional reduction in that bar as compared to some of these others.

So turning to page three of the handout, some other components of the Governor's proposals we'd highlight for you. Included in the proposal is kind of trigger idea, a trigger restoration idea where some amount of this funding under the Governor's Proposal would be restored should the state generate enough revenue.

And the way that that would work is by in January 2024, when the Governor releases the budget next year, the Department of Finance would take a look and say, do we have enough revenues to support all of our ongoing commitments and do these restorations? So this would be about 2.2 billion from these programs and then some other portions from transportation, from housing, a total of $3.8 billion in this trigger. And the way it's proposed to be structured is an all-or-nothing.

So either there's enough money to fund all of the state's baseline commitments and all of these trigger restorations or not. There's no kind of partial pieces of it as is currently proposed.

There's also proposal for a similar trigger restoration with the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, where if the state were to generate additional cap-and-trade revenues over the course of the year beyond what's anticipated, the Governor would be proposing to give the Department of Finance authority to make some additional restorations for zero-emission vehicle programs, specifically in the middle of the year with those revenues.

And then finally, as I know you'll talk about both today and in some of your subsequent hearings, there is some new spending proposals as well in the Governor's proposals. Most notably today, which you'll talk about, are some CAL FIRE capital outlay proposals, only about $37 million in the budget year, but without year costs of roughly $500 million, so pretty significant. Also some pretty significant flood General Fund spending.

So turning to page four for the LAO's overarching assessment, I think we would start by saying the need for these programs remains. Climate change is obviously a big challenge that the state is facing, along with energy reliability, challenges, preserving the state's biodiversity. We think these programs and these efforts continue to be really high priorities for the state. But that said, identifying budget solutions in these areas we think is appropriate, in part because this was the largest area of one-time spending from the recent budget surpluses.

So now, as you're facing a budget problem and you're looking at making reductions, if you're not making them to one-time reductions, you're making them to base ongoing programs. So really looking at one-time expenditures is an appropriate place to look when you need to make some of these budget reductions. And we think you can still, and we as a state can continue to achieve a lot of our goals at a more scaled-down level.

But which programs we scale down really matters if we want to continue to address those goals. So the prioritization matters. I think if there's one big point we would want you to take away from this presentation today is that while we think the Governor's overall approach is reasonable, this is not the only way to do it. You have a lot of options as a Legislature. You could see from those bars there's a lot of funding there. There was a lot of funding retained.

You could do this in a really different way that would also be reasonable and that would reflect your priorities as a Legislature.

So I think that's the big takeaway from today and from this report that we wrote was really to try and give you options and alternatives as you are putting together your package that addresses the budget problem that you have, but also reflects the prioritization of the programs and activities that you'd like to retain. So as we'll walk through today and through the rest of the coming months, there are different prioritization criteria you could use.

We also think you might want to consider, as you're making some funding adjustments to some of these programs, whether you might want to also make some statutory adjustments to how that funding is used to prioritize. If you're scaling down, making sure you're focusing on the populations, the types of activities that you think are most important.

We want to highlight for you that making some of these fund shifts makes sense because if you have to reduce General Fund and you have some other funds available, whether it's Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund or federal funds, that that's a real opportunity. But those aren't without trade-offs. If you're using Greenhouse Gas Reduction Funds to backfill General Fund cuts for ZEV programs, you're not using the GGRF for other activities that historically the Legislature has used it for.

Similarly, with federal funds, it's a great opportunity that there is all this federal money available from some recent legislation, but it probably is not going to be a dollar-for-dollar match if you are reducing General Fund because federal programs have different types of criteria, eligibility, and program guidelines. We have concerns about the trigger approach that the Governor has proposed both for the General Fund and for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.

First, we don't think it's likely that the revenues will support that kind of trigger restoration. Based on our estimates, revenues would have to come in $7 billion higher than the Governor is proposing in order to be able to pull that trigger. We think revenue are trending the opposite direction. We think there's a pretty high likelihood that revenues will be less than the Governor is proposing.

So we think not only is that not realistic, but also minimizes legislative authority to grant the Administration that kind of authority to make those mid-year changes. We also just want to highlight that in this context of a budget situation, any dollar of new spending you are making is an extra dollar of reductions you're going to have to make.

So if you're making room for new spending and new activities, those may be high priorities, but they do come at the expense of some of the existing commitments. So making sure you're aware of that trade-off. And then finally, we think that additional solutions may be needed as the budget condition seems to be worsening. And so you may want to take the time, or we would recommend you take the time over the coming months to identify some of those additional solutions.

So you're not scrambling in May and June when you're facing your constitutional deadline to pass the budget and facing a bigger budget problem. So finally, turning to the last page, our overarching recommendations. We, as I indicated, recommend that you adopt a package of solution that reflects your priorities as a Legislature, that preserves the activities that focus on legislative priorities and goals. We think helping to address pressing needs, more urgent needs, should be a high priority for you as you're making your decisions.

Avoiding solutions that may cause disruptions, and that's where looking at funding that may have been kind of intended for the future as compared to funding that has already been provided, is an important distinction to try and minimize some disruption and then considering what other available resources might be able to be drawn upon. We think that you should be selective when you're thinking about delaying funding, because we do see an out-year budget problem as well.

Even under the Governor's Proposal, there are deficits for the coming years. So to the degree you're delaying funding, you're just pushing that problem to a future year that you're going to have to face. We would recommend rejecting both the General Fund and the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund trigger proposals. We think that you have authority as a Legislature to pass mid-year spending bills. You don't need to cede that authority to the Administration.

You can take a look at as revenues come in higher or lower and make adjustments. You don't need to put automatic processes in place right now. We, as I indicated, recommend you use the spring budget process to identify additional potential solutions, not only adjusting what the Governor has, but also identifying potential additional amounts that you may need to drop on to solve the budget problem.

We recommend you weigh the priority of new spending against your existing commitments, because again, there is that trade-off of a dollar of new spending comes at the expense of existing commitments. We think the availability of federal funding is a really great opportunity, but there's a lot of pots of funding. There's a lot of details that we have been spending time trying to identify, but we know that the Administration has as well, and all the departments.

So drawing upon that knowledge, avoiding duplication of effort and trying to get as much information as you can as you make your General Fund decisions, to know what other federal funds may be available to help supplement some of those activities, and then finally continuing to conduct oversight of spending and really outcomes, we think that's very key with this unprecedented General Fund expenditures. What are we getting from that money? Not just how is it being spent, but what are the outcomes?

And that will help you both, as you may need to make future spending reductions to prioritize but also as fiscal conditions improve, as you may want to make additional funding augmentations and investments, where could that funding be best utilized, especially in the context of the climate crisis we're facing, how can we make sure that we are using the dollars most effectively? So we'd encourage you to use your time to continue to conduct that oversight as well. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. Do we have any questions? Go ahead.

I could ask a few. Thank you very much for the testimony and looking forward to the ongoing process. So just digging down a little bit more to some of the issues you raised. You talked about the GHG Reduction Fund. Briefly, do we have a projection of where income from that will be, and are we expecting it to be historically lower or higher?

Historically, over the past few years, the administration's estimates have come in lower, so revenues have come in higher than what the Administration has estimated. And based on our projections, we think that's the case again this year. So we're still refining our estimates, but we think you'll probably have a few hundred million dollars more roughly than what the Governor has estimated. And again, we're still working on those estimates and we're hoping to get them to you in the next week or so.

So as you again mentioned, the Governor's revision is just one potential strategy. What are some other identified strategies and how would you assess those in terms of being effective during a constrained budget environment?

Yeah. Well, so in terms of kind of reducing spending, you can cut, you can make reductions. There's again, this delay strategy of pushing to the future, which we think you should be pretty judicious about using that shifting to other funds of General Fund. And then, of course, besides looking at spending, there's also the revenue option. That's always an option for the Legislature to look at generating additional revenues.

Of course, there are many trade-offs that come with that, but it is an option before you, I should mention another option, is looking into your reserves. We would recommend not doing that at this point pretty strongly because of the uncertainty and downside risk in the future years. We think that holding on to the funding in reserves is an important tool for you to prepare for the future. But of course, that is another option you have available.

Okay, great. Just a couple other things. The LAO suggests, and again, you talked about today increasing oversight of spending and outcomes. So just wondering, what does that look like from your perspective? What does the Legislature need to do to create better oversight of budgetary allocations, and could it involve legislation?

I think you have a number of options before you, including today, legislative hearings, both budget hearings and special oversight hearings. You could have to ask for information from the Administration, oral presentations. Another option is asking for reporting either formally through budget language. That would be reports that are submitted, or informally. You could ask for that kind of information as well.

Another option we think you might want to consider, especially for some of the high-priority programs or activities that are being tried out for the first time, of which there are many with this funding, that if you want to treat them as pilot efforts, make sure you're collecting the information that you need at the end of that pilot to see what we got from it and what the outcomes were so that you know whether that was a successful or less effective approach for the future.

As you're looking at making budget adjustments, that could be something else you think about, is carving out small amounts of funding from some of these programs to be used because it's not free to collect information, especially if you want to do a more rigorous research effort at looking at outcomes, then setting aside some funding to support some of that may be worth it.

Great. And then finally, and this may come up in additional testimony, but are there federal dollars from the infrastructure Bill that the state can tap into?

Yes, quite a bit for many of these similar categories, and they're structured in numerous different ways. Some is funding that's coming to the state directly through the state budget. Some are competitive grants that state agencies will be applying for, and then some are structured where individual nonprofit agencies, cities, and counties, or even individuals may be able to apply for. For example, in the case of zero-emission vehicles, there are tax rebates that households can apply for directly.

So this is some of the information that we think would be important to have the Administration help collect so that you're aware. Again, the caution that we don't think in many cases it will be a dollar-for-dollar match, where if you reduce a dollar of General Fund, whatever, that activity would get an exact dollar. But similar activities and outcomes and goals that really can help you as you're making these decisions.

For the benefit of people who are new in watching this, the role of the LAO Office, the Legislative Analyst Office, is to represent the Legislature in terms of an independent analysis of the Governor's Budget. So we really appreciate the insights and the suggestions. I have a few comments that I will make after Secretary Crowfoot's presentation here, and we really appreciate you taking time to be here, Secretary Crowfoot.

Well, thank you, Chair and Members of the Committee. It's a pleasure to be here, and I want to, first of all, compliment Ms. Ehlers and the Legislative Analyst's Office year in and year out. The interaction, the relationship that we have is professional and constructive and builds a better budget, so thank you very much. Our agency, as you know, is on the forefront of climate change.

Over 25,000 men and women work across our agency and across the state, protecting communities from the impacts of climate change, reducing carbon pollution, and of course, growing our green economy. We're a diverse agency, from our largest department is CAL FIRE, which surges up to over 10,000 personnel during the height of fire season, to our smallest entity, the San Joaquin River Conservancy, that has less than a handful of employees. And we work across this broad organizational landscape on your priorities.

We know California is on the front lines of the climate crisis. A couple of facts that stick in my mind: in October, we ended the driest three-year period in over 100 years, and then just last month or in January, we experienced the wettest three weeks on record. It was only four or five months ago we experienced the longest, hottest heat wave in the state's history that almost interrupted our electrical grid.

These are challenges that places with Mediterranean climates across the world are facing, from the European Mediterranean to parts of Australia and South Africa. We know climate change is on the march, and Californians understand it's impacting their daily lives. That being said, California is leading the world, not only reducing carbon pollution and moving towards carbon neutrality, but adjusting to the impacts of climate change and protecting people and nature against its impacts. It has been a remarkable couple of years.

With legislative leadership and the leadership of Governor Newsom, we are putting generational investments to work combating climate change and protecting nature and addressing another priority of ours, which is ensuring all Californians can access nature and the outdoors. So it's been a remarkable couple of years, and thanks to your investments, our investments, we are making progress. One of the things I'm very proud of with our colleagues on our team in the Department of Finance is moving further and faster to allocate funding that you all have appropriated.

You've made it very clear that the challenges mean we have to move more efficiently than we have in the past to get funding on the ground to the communities that need it, and we've been able to do that. I'm also proud--as you consider how to exercise accountability over our spending--that we have developed some systems that allow for real-time reporting of that money leaving the state coffers and getting into the coffers of those who are doing the work on the ground.

So I am really, really proud of our progress. That being said, this is a different budget year. We know that. After two years of significant budget augmentations, we now face the challenge of living within a smaller General Fund. You all know better than I do, global inflation, a tight labor market, high interest rates have all meant that we have some budget belt-tightening to do. Good news is we plan for this.

The Governor, the Legislature have worked together establishing historic budget reserves, paying down debts, and, as referenced by Ms. Ehlers, focusing augmentation on one-time spending, much of which came into our agency. So now we face the challenge of delivering a balanced budget that maintains focus on the priorities we know Californians care about. So my mantra this year, our mantra has been to sustain key investments while closing the budget gap, and that's really manifested in the proposal for the next year's budget that you have before you.

We make clear whenever we can that the Governor is unwavering in his commitment and commitments to tackle climate change. You referenced, Chair, a 54 billion dollar budget, which is almost mind-bending in terms of the investment California is making to confront the climate crisis. This budget proposes that 48 of that 54 million dollars remain, even in difficult fiscal conditions. We are focused on maintaining investments where they are critical.

For example, as Ms. Ehlers pointed out, 98 percent of our drought/flood water resilience investments we're recommending stay in this coming budget and likewise, 97 percent of our wildfire investments. The budget continues to prioritize equity and investments in those most vulnerable communities.

We know that communities are differently impacted from the impacts of climate change and have different capacities, and so we continue to focus on our most vulnerable Californians. As Assembly Member Connolly referenced, we have a great opportunity with federal funding to supplant many of these cuts, and so we're very focused on an aggressive strategy to draw down federal funding on shared priorities.

Also, we've discussed already this trigger mechanism that would restore specified reductions if it's determined that the General Fund dollars are available here in the near future. It's worth noting that the Governor has made a commitment to work with the Legislature to fully reauthorize our Clean Transportation Program funding, known as AB 8, and he referenced in his January proposal that he is open to discussing a bond, general obligation bond with the Legislature as well that could fund these priorities.

We believe strongly this budget doesn't back down from the challenges we face in California. We know that our budget proposal continues to help California lead the world combating the challenges that we face, and we look forward to you applying your own policy insights and your own policy priorities to navigate how we move forward.

And so I want to thank you in advance for the work you'll do in coming weeks and months and all the work your teams will do. I want to recognize our incredible budget team at the agency, Bryan Cash, who's with me here today, as well as Amanda Martin and the entire team, and we would welcome any questions that you have both here today and in coming weeks. And with that, Chair, I'll turn it over to my colleague from the Department of Finance: Krystal Acierto.

Good morning, Chairs and Members. Krystal Acierto, Department of Finance. Thank you for the opportunity to provide a high level overview of the framework that the Administration used for the General Fund solutions in the climate and natural resources area. So, as my colleagues have already noted, the 2021 and 22 Budget Acts included 54 billion dollars over five years to advance the state's climate agenda. The budget maintains 48 billion of that, so about 89 percent of recently enacted climate investments.

And we continue to prioritize investments, specifically in priority populations, which face disproportionate harm from pollution and the climate crisis. So in terms of the overall framework, this includes mechanisms to offset the reductions where possible. So, as mentioned previously, this includes shifting previously general funded investments to special funds where appropriate. It also includes a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund trigger, as previously mentioned, whereby we'd be able to shift more of the General Fund for zero-emission vehicle programs if additional revenues were to materialize, and it also includes maximizing federal investments.

So Ms. Ehlers talked a little bit about the large amount of funding at the federal level, and so we've considered that as well as we are making decisions about reductions. There's also a General Fund trigger has been talked about by my colleagues that would trigger some of these program reductions back on, should General Fund materialize, and it also includes engaging the Legislature on a bond, as Mr. Crowfoot mentioned.

So in terms of the general framework, there were several considerations that were used. I think the LAO talked about some of these, but I'll just sort of step through those pieces. So the first was trying to protect the majority of funding for programs. So as I mentioned, overall, we're protecting 89 percent of the climate investments, and so that means that the majority of the programs have not been touched.

In those cases where we are suggesting reductions as part of the Governor's Budget, we try to maintain the majority of funding for those specific programs, especially those that have an equity emphasis. The second component, which I've already mentioned, is prioritizing equity investments in priority populations, and then we're also trying to protect funding for the most immediate climate risks. And so, as Mr. Crowfoot mentioned, this includes water and wildfire investments where we've protected 98 and 97 percent, respectively, of those previous investments.

In addition, we try to minimize disruptions for programs that are already underway, so looking at the status of where those funding allocations are and trying to just prevent disruption of kind of where the departments are at in implementing those programs. I've mentioned the potential availability to shift to other funds, special funds, and federal funds, and providing equitable reductions where possible across the different climate categories.

And then also, as Ms. Ehlers mentioned, looking at kind of the multiyear and those allocations where we've provided funding over multiple years to address the budget gap. So obviously, the Administration had to make really tough decisions. We're faced with a 22 and a half billion dollar deficit to meet our constitutional mandate for a balanced budget.

However, I just want to emphasize that we continue to support all of the climate investments, which is why we've taken this sort of flexible approach to how we address the budget deficit. So with that, I'm here for any questions that you might have.

Great. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. First of all, Secretary Crowfoot, you have earned a great reputation for being collaborative with the Legislature and with the general public out there, both you and your staff, and I just want to compliment you for that. These are programs that have a great deal of emotional investment by the part of the public, whether it's fire and flood resiliency and the concerns about climate change, et cetera.

And so we need to be as transparent and collaborative as possible going forward, and so my compliments in terms of that. I appreciate the Governor's goal, specifically of trying to maintain the core of those programs and then the difficulty of trying to do that when you have a 22 billion dollar cut.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the Legislature is probably--at least their antenna is up because some of the significant things that the Legislature thought they had brokered in terms of last year's deal disappeared at this point in time, and so we will be looking at that hard as we go forward.

But at the same time, I think all of us recognize, as the LAO's Office has pointed out, probably the projections are that the deficit is going to be worse than where the Governor's Budget was in January. So from the things that I certainly have heard from my colleagues in the Assembly so far, I don't think anybody's too enamored with embracing the trigger mechanisms because they don't think that's going to happen, number one.

And number two, if for some reason that happened, I think the argument that we ought to maintain flexibility based on things is probably there. The second thing is all of us--and this is for the general public that's out there that's paying attention--we need to actually be sharpening our pencils to find more cuts, not new spending. The revenue projections are not just projections. The revenue that has come in so far since January is falling short of what the original projections are.

So I think that we're making a mistake if we go into this with the idea that if we could just lobby and get these new programs funded, things that aren't there at this point in time. The one thing with this being my first time serving as Budget Sub Chair, I just want to get on the radar screen the importance of trying to do what you have mentioned, which is trying to determine whether we're getting great outcomes for the spending of our tax dollars.

And it is difficult with big bureaucracies, it is difficult with issues that don't have very clean measurements. It's one thing when you can clearly measure, but so much of coastal resiliency or even fire prevention, what's really an effective use of those dollars? And so we have to be, I think, extremely vigilant and professional in trying to find the best measures we can, that, yes, we're spending our dollars, we're spending taxpayers dollars just as efficiently as possible. So that'll be a constant theme of mine.

What can we do more efficiently, more cost-effectively as we move forward? One of the other things I'd just like to get on the radar screen is that I'm interested in trying to make sure that Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is spent exclusively on greenhouse gas reduction efforts. And that's a gray area also in terms of what qualifies, but that will be a consistent theme that I will ask about as we move forward. And with that, I appreciate and welcome the collaboration.

We all have to roll our sleeves up, and professionalism requires collaboration. If you want to be a professional Legislator, if you want to be a professional in the executive branch at this point in time, we have to collaborate to try to get there because nobody has sole control of this, and collaboration is absolutely an essential requirement there. So those are my comments, and anything from my colleague?

I have a few questions, Mr. Chair. Thank you. Good morning, Secretary Crowfoot. So I'm new up here, so please forgive some of the ignorance, but I just have a few questions. You run a very large and complex department. You oversee CAL FIRE, Department of Conservation, Department of Water Resources--I mean, these are big agencies, and what I hear emphasized in your budget over and over is the importance of climate policy, which I understand. But do you acknowledge that as we accelerate these climate policies, it's having an effect on energy costs and the pocketbooks of Californians?

So, first of all, thank you. It is a very large, complex agency, and one of those entities that is germane to energy is our California Energy Commission that works with the California Public Utilities Commission, which is a constitutionally independent entity, as well as our California Independent System Operator. So the CEC, as we know it, has a central role in policymaking, and I can tell you this: our priority is to control costs for energy and make this transition.

And I think sometimes it can be proposed as mutually exclusive. Either we're going to make the transition to green--if we make the transition to green energy, it's necessarily going to increase costs. I don't believe that's the case.

And if we look at how the costs for some technologies, such as wind energy and renewable energy or wind energy and solar energy have come down over the last decade, the kilowatt hour cost on solar and wind is actually in many cases lower than the cost of natural gas fossil fuels. That being said, I acknowledge the point that we have to be careful how we make this transition because it is critical to control for the affordability of energy.

At the end of the day, people working in California, wherever they be--this is a kitchen table issue, is the cost of the energy to heat their homes, the cost of the gasoline in their cars, so please do know we're prioritizing, yes, this transition beyond fossil fuels, but it has to be in a way that maintains affordability for energy consumers.

But you would agree that we don't have any energy that's as cost-effective and reliable right now as fossil fuels, correct? That is the cheapest, most reliable form of energy.

Yeah. I respectfully disagree on that point because, again, if you look at the renewable technologies such as solar and wind, over half of the energy that we're generating each day is provided by these technologies, and the unit cost of these technologies, in many cases, is cheaper.

Then why haven't our--

Assembly Member Essayli, if I could, on March 22nd, we're going to have the Energy Department here for a full discussion on energy. We have 15 departments here, and we also have to have--so I just--

Okay. I'll focus on. Thank you. Mr. I'll focus on the specific departments you oversee, because one of them is water. Department of Water Resources, correct?

Yes.

You oversee permitting for water infrastructure, water storage projects, correct? Correct. Proposition one was passed in 2014, correct?

Yes.

Okay. And so how many water projects have been completed in the last 10 years based on that Proposition?

Well, actually, dozens of projects have been completed across the state funded by the Department of Water Resources. So let me just put this in a bit of a broader context. So I talk about California's water system as a system of systems. So Department of Water Resources is an important part of water production and water provision in the state, but it's really the regional, the local water agencies that are delivering these projects.

So in the case of Department of Water Resources, thanks to the Legislature and the Governor, billions of dollars have actually been invested in building out water storage, water conveyance, water recycling, and those projects are coming online, including projects that have come online this year. So there's a broader context. But I want to address your point around Proposition one, which was the water bond in 2014. Well over $2 billion of that $7 billion plus bond were identified within that bond as funding water storage.

And there was a complex set of requirements for the public use of funds for water storage projects. And it set up a multi year process through our state's water Commission, which is also in our agency, to set the criteria around how projects could apply for that funding and then ultimately receive that funding. Ultimately, eight projects were identified as recipients of that Prop. One funding, four were surface storage projects, and four were projects that build underground surface storage.

One of those projects dropped out regarding over the inability for a local match that was required. That was a temperance flat project in the Central Valley. So seven projects remain, and those projects are in various phases of development. But I'm glad to report that we anticipate that the first of those projects breaks ground this year. Now, I think to your average voter, your average person, they wonder, well, how can these projects take a decade?

And I'll say this one is collecting the funding, getting the environmental permitting, getting the infrastructure together does take time. These are projects that are generational in nature. There hasn't been a large surface storage project created in California in decades. So these are projects that take a long time. That being said, we have our clear direction from the governor's office and the Governor himself to accelerate these projects as quickly as possible.

So of these seven projects would be glad to brief you in detail because I get briefed in detail in terms of where those projects are at.

Again, very impressive that you have that much background on the DWR from your position. And the Department of Water Resources will be, the Department will be here on March 29 and we'll be able to have much more detail. So again, these are the 15 departments, and I believe you have that. Those are the 15 departments we have here today. And Department of Water Resource is not one of those. So if we can focus on these departments, I want to make sure.

Will the secretary be back when we have those? Because he's the ultimate Boss.

I can't guarantee that the secretary can.

But I just want to comment. The reason I'm asking the secretary is because, I mean, ultimately he's accountable. And the frustration I hear from taxpayers is the state comes to us, they say, please pass this bond for our water storage needs. The voters approve it. Seven and a half $1.0 billion 10 years ago is a lot more than seven and a half and a half $1.0 billion today.

And the frustration is that they're not seeing their money being put to use quickly or efficiently, and that's the frustration. And so when we're asked to do more funding or Fund projects, we'd like to see results first. So I understand 10 years is a long time and maybe I'm encouraged. The Governor is now open to SQL reform. I've heard them say that. So whatever you do to expedite these, I encourage you to bring those proposals because it's not just a money issue. We have money.

We have $7 billion. It's just not being spent efficiently. Let me move on to fire. CAL FIRE is on the agenda, right. Okay, CAL FIRE. Okay, I just want to talk about CAL FIRE real quick. You agree that the destructive wildfires we've had have had a very negative impact on climate in California, correct?

Absolutely.

You don't disagree with that? And we'll talk more with CAL FIRE. But we spend a lot on suppression and not as much on prevention. And I think money is well used on prevention. But do you agree that all carbon is equal, whether it comes from the wildfire or whether it's generated by business? I mean, carbon has the same effect on the environment, correct?

Well, I've never considered that question, but I think a point that you're getting at that I'll agree with is that these catastrophic wildfires create not only pollution that impact public health, but major carbon emissions, which is a real problem in a state like California that's working to reduce carbon emissions.

You know under the scoping plan, as currently drafted or legislated, they don't consider wildfire emissions and the carbon emissions. Are you aware of that?

Well, actually the way I would describe this is that for the first time, the emissions off our lands is actually considered in the scoping plan that was just adopted. And so our agency has a new set of responsibilities to actually control the amount of emissions from our lands from wildfire and actually try to figure out a way that those lands can store more carbon.

So I would actually say as a point of progress, this is the first scoping plan that has integrated what we call those natural and working lands as part of the overall equation towards carbon neutrality. And thanks to a legislative Bill passed last year, our agency now has to set specific targets on how to reduce emissions from land. So I hope include wildfires. It does.

Okay. So there's a Bill, I'm not sure where it 397, that would require in the scoping plan that the wildfire emissions be included. So it sounds like that's something you'd be supportive of in concept.

Yeah, I don't know that Bill, so I don't want to be premature in answering for that, but I can tell you this, wildfires generate carbon emissions and they're a big problem. They're a huge problem for our public health, including smoke impacts that our families experience. Wildfire season year in, year out. We have to get the catastrophic wildfire under control for public safety and health, but also for our climate action. So I'm supportive of proposals that move us, that hold us accountable for getting that done.

Yeah, I think that. Assembly Member Essayli, it's 10:25. We have many of these departments.

I promise I don't have as many questions for the others.

And Cal, fire is item issue three coming up.

I'll just close it. 1 minute if I can.

1 minute. Okay. Thank you.

1 minute.

Okay, real quick, will you just commit to looking at Bill, Assembly Bill 397 and providing your input and whether that's a concept you support? It's really important because wildfire emissions in 2020 negated 18 years of reduction in greenhouse gases. So if we're going to take a comprehensive look at carbon and carbon emissions, it does need to be comprehensive. Thank you, secretary, for answering all my questions.

Thank you, Assembly Member. I just follow up on one of your points, which is we agree we have to move further and faster to build infrastructure, period. And we have systems and a process in place that frankly doesn't move fast enough to get the infrastructure we need in place for the challenges that we face. And this is on energy, for example. It's on water.

And so I know that the Governor shares your intense focus on how we can deliver infrastructure more quickly and effectively given these challenges.

Thank you very much, Secretary Crowfoot. Thank you. And we're ready to move on to issue two, General Fund solutions. CNRA departments in the agenda. So, assistant secretary Cash, we'll start with issue number two.

Mr. Chair, Brian Cash from the natural Resources Agency. Just wondering if you want me to go through each of these items and answer the questions they're there or are there specific questions you'd like us to answer?

I think, given our time, probably not. Okay. I think that there are specific questions. You have no General overview comments or anything?

We gave an overview earlier, financed it on the General Fund solutions.

All right, so, good.

We're here to answer any questions.

Do you have any questions?

I'm at the natural Resources Agency. I work with Wade.

I don't have any questions Mr. Chair.

Thank you. I have three questions, if I could. What's that? All right, great. Okay. I have three questions, and I'll hold those until we have the LAo presentation. All right. And Crystal Asente, Department of Finance, is who I have on next. Right. Sherta. I'm sorry.

Crystal Sherta, Department of Finance. So I did kind of provide the overview of the administration's framework. I'm happy to talk about that again, if you'd like, or if we want to jump right into questions, we're available.

Great. I think we'll jump right into questions. Lao's office.

Yeah, just again, Rachel Ehlers from the Lao. In these specific reductions before you, I think we would have the same kind of these. Most of them appear reasonable. These are not the only options you have. In our report, we walk through for these specific types of programs. There are some that you may want to think about differently. In particular, we highlight regarding the programs for sea level rise under the state coastal Conservancy and Ocean Protection Council.

As we highlighted at the beginning, those are some disproportionate amounts of cuts in those programs. You may want to think, given the challenges of sea level rise and in particular, planning for sea level rise, which is the funding through the Ocean Protection Council, you may not want to cut as deeply there. We highlight some other programs where you could make additional reductions, should you choose to.

Great. And then Rachel Ellers, anything that you want to presen? Sorry. I'm sorry. Lizzie. Lizzie Uri, anything you want to present and Sonia Pettick?

Sonia Pettick, Lao. I'm just here to answer any questions.

Great. And then Helen Kirstie.

I'm also here just to answer questions. If you have any.

So can the Administration present all the cuts listed in the agenda for the departments? Could you do that, please?

Crystal, Department of Finance I will do my best. I'm not sure that I have them all, but can talk about some of the reductions across some of the different climate investment areas. So I'll start with, I apologize. Maybe I should clarify. Are you just wanting to talk about the ones that you had questions on, or would you like me to talk about all of the reductions across the various climate?

Mostly I just want to make sure we announce all of the cuts. We just list all of the cuts that are there.

Okay, I will. zero, yeah. Okay. All right. I will just kind of go through the agenda that folks have in front of them. So there are some reductions that are outside of kind of the climate investment area. That includes a reduction of 29 million for the Natural Resources Agency for the museum grant program. This also maintains funding of about $21 million for that purpose. There's also a reduction for the Natural Resources Agency for the Recreational Trails and Greenways program.

That's a $35 million reduction, as well as a reduction in the urban greening program. It's $100 million reduction in that area. There's also reductions for the state coastal conservancy. That includes the $10.4 million reduction for the San Francisco wetlands restoration, $2.6 million reduction for explore the coast. There's also various reductions in the coastal resilience space. That includes $325,000,000 for coastal protection adaptation, as well as $156,000,000 for sea level rise. Continuing on with sort of the broader coastal resilience.

There's also a reduction for the Ocean Protection Council of 79 and a half $1.0 million for the Department of Fish and Wildlife. There is a $20 million reduction for the fine scale vegetation mapping for California. So this maintains actually $25 million for vegetation mapping for the Department of Fish and Wildlife. And then there's also a reduction of $6 million for the natural Community and Conservation planning program, and there's 30 million that's being retained for that program.

Moving to the Department of Conservation, there's a $25 million reduction for the sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation program, as well as a $4 million reduction for the Climate Smart Land Management program. For the wildlife conservation Board. There's a $40 million reduction for the San Joaquin Valley Floodplain Restoration program. There's also reductions across various watershed climate resilience programs as well. So this is for various departments for WCB and DWR. That includes delay in funding as well. I'm going to switch here. Sorry.

For the Watershed Resilience program, overall, there's a reduction of $24 million General Fund in 2324. And there's also a delay in funding here of $270,000,000 General Fund to 2425. So this maintains across the watershed resilience programs $470,000,000 or 95% of the investments in that area. There's also a $35 million reduction from a total of 353,000,000 for protecting Fish and Wildlife from changing conditions.

And then there are reductions across the state conservancies, that state conservancies receive funding across various of the climate packages, including the wildfire package and nature based solutions. So there is a 100 $1.0 million reduction as part of the budget, but there's also $130,000,000 that's being retained as part of the nature based solutions funding, as well as 662,000,000 overall for the state conservancies. In addition, there is a reduction of $23.5 million from the local and tribal nature based solution core investment. And I think that covers.

I think you accomplished it right. Well, thank you. Number one, given the fact that the most significant cuts are coming from sort of budget sub three overall, that it's important for us to have read those into the record for the benefit of everybody. So we wanted to do that specifically with a few of these cuts. I'd like to ask if flood prevention, especially in the Central Valley, is a priority for this year's budget.

Why does the budget propose to eliminating the $40 million to restore the floodplains in the San Joaquin Valley?

As discussed as part of the administration's overall framework, decisions on reductions were made based on several considerations, including the availability of other funding through existing programs. And there are existing programs and new programs that have additional funding for this type of work in the Central Valley, but also in other parts of the state.

So the Administration feels fairly confident that they can obtain that funding and continue with this project.

We can continue. We have funding for these types of projects in this area, yes, and other places.

How about the Administration factoring in the cost of not taking early proactive action in terms of coastal resiliency, the financial risk of the states incurring by reducing the amount of funding for sea level rise prevention and coastal resiliency? Do you factor in it's less expensive to do it now than it is to wait until more damage is done.

I think the important thing there is that despite having cuts in this area, we are still making significant, unprecedented investments in this area. The amount of funding that's going is not like the amounts that we have seen in the past, even through bond measures. So it's still a significant amount of money.

Has there been an analysis of what projects are, where it's going to be more cost effective to do it now rather than wait to do the project? It's a classic if you repave the road before it deteriorates too much, it doesn't cost you too much to repave the road if you repave the road later, the same thing with coastal rise and damage to infrastructure, et cetera.

And I think that the agencies receiving this money, they're here and they can provide additional details if needed. But I believe they are prioritizing projects that will make the biggest difference right away.

I would really appreciate identifying what those projects are, which projects they think can wait, and which projects are those priority projects at the appropriate time. If somebody could get that information to us, I'd appreciate that. Great. Thank you. And then my final question.

Previous budgets allocated 445,000,000 to the Agency for water resilience projects, and at that time the Administration had not provided a list of projects that they anticipated to Fund, and it was believed those funds would be used only to benefit water districts that had signed the voluntary agreements with these funds allocated, but uncommitted.

Can the agency provide us an update on what entities or projects will be eligible for these funds and how the agency will ensure that the entire state, or, at a minimum, underserved communities hardest hit by the drought can benefit from these funds?

Sure, the funds will support water resilience projects that both improve regional water resiliency and increase durability to droughts and floods, and will require projects to provide additional in stream flows to improve water quality and ecosystem health. Projects include the installation of new groundweller wells, improved levees or new spillways, and other projects intended to reduce conceptive water demand.

The first projects to be awarded are anticipated to be in multiple areas in the Sacramento Valley watersheds like the Yuba, American, McCollumy, Sacramento and Feather rivers, and then other projects across the central valley as well. The funding will be dispersed through existing guidelines and new guidelines which are under development, and some recipients will be water districts that have signed the MOU that is part of the voluntary agreements.

The state's agreements with these water districts are going to be written in a way so that regardless of what happens with the voluntary agreements, the state will be assured of regional water resilience and environmental in stream flow benefits from these projects.

So before it was viewed that it would be exclusively districts that had signed the voluntary agreements. Now, some of them are ones that signed the voluntary agreements, but it's not exclusively for people that have signed the voluntary agreements.

Correct.

Okay. And can you provide a list of the projects that you have committed to so far?

We don't have any that have been committed yet, but as soon as we do, we will provide a list for you.

All right. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you very much. We are ready to move on to issue three. And Deputy Secretary Morse, if you'll please start with issue three, we will welcome any introductory comments that you have. We have on the panel here. I'm going to do everybody at once, I think, at this point in time.

Jessica Morris, deputy secretary of forest and Wildland Resilience, Natural Resources Agency Stephen Benson, principal program budget analyst, Department of Finance Jamie Gonzlov, finance budget analyst, Department of Finance Danielle Berlant, acting state fire marshal from CAL FIRE Matthew Reshman, Deputy Director, resource management, CAL FIRE, and Helen Kirstein, principal fiscal and policy Legislative Analyst Office. And we're going to start with Secretary Morse, your initial comments.

Thank you so much, chair Bennett, and good morning, Assembly Members. So I'm Jessica Morse. I'm deputy secretary at the California Natural Resources Agency. I handle our wildfire resilience portfolio. And 2022 really proved that our unprecedented investments in wildfire resilience are paying off, that we are seeing the change in fire behavior and intensity as these investments are hitting the ground. And it demonstrates the model that as we scale these investments, we can keep pace, potentially with catastrophic climate change.

And the 2022 fire season actually had the same number of fires as the 2021 fire season, but they were dramatically less destructive and dramatically fewer acres were burned. In 2022, we had about 360,000 acres burned and sadly, 770 homes lost. But compared to 2021, with the same number of fires, we had 2.5 million acres burn and around 3500 homes lost. And then compared to the 2021 fire season, 4 million acres burned, 11,000 structures lost.

And so what we're seeing is a trend in the right direction as we're seeing unprecedented investments in wildfire resilience start to come into effect. We had less last season. We had beneficial weather. We also had increased investments in fire suppression equipment such as Hela tankers. That allowed us to be able to have initial early attack on incredibly steep terrain which gave us an advantage.

But what we saw were that the fire resilience projects we had on the ground also came into play and proved the point that these can actually change and modify a fire's behavior. I'll give you two quick examples. So, in July of 2022, we had the Electra fire in Jackson area in Calaveras, Amador County. And that fire was looking like it was going to become a mega fire. It was moving quickly. The conditions were incredibly dry.

It hit a fuel break on the second day that we had had in place with some of this early action funding, and firefighters were able to then contain it along that line and control that fire and keep it and get it contained within the next couple of days. Then we also saw the Oak fire in Placer County, which was initial modeling was demonstrating that it was potentially going to be a mega fire.

This fire was spotting almost a mile ahead of the firefront, and the flames actually spotted right into a fuel break that we had established along the American river, and they were able to then contain the fire there. And it was a fire that didn't even make the news. And so what we're seeing is that fires that were modeled to be very large, the interventions we had in place, came into play. And so what we're seeing is that these investments are really paying off.

And just to give you a sense of the surge in wildfire resilience funding that we're seeing, because it's true that we had historically been investing mainly in fire suppression and fire response. And the resilience investments we scaled from the first major investments were in 2018 with $200 million a year. We surged that now over the last three years, to be totaling $2.7 billion in wildfire resilience programs. And those programs are not sitting idly by.

That has translated into over 1174 new wildfire resilience projects on the ground throughout the state. Just to give you a sense of the investments portfolio here and how we're structuring our wildfire resilience program, we invest across three fronts of fire resilience, as well as structural investments that help us increase the pace and scale.

So across those three fronts of fire resilience, we have programs that focus within communities that's talking about home hardening, defensible space, that allows us to ensure that homes are not turning into the ignitions within ember driven fires. We also invest around communities so that strategic fuel breaks around communities that give firefighters that tactical advantage on the ground to be able to establish fire lines, approach a fire. Those also create the safe evacuation routes in and out of communities that we use during fires.

And then the last area is actually across the whole landscape. This is where we're taking our forests, our oak woodlands, our grasslands, our chaparral, and we're turning them back into what should be more of their historic fire regime. So that is thinning out what 100 years of fire should have done on the landscape. But because of fire suppression, it wasn't done.

And so we have to go in by hand and often make that first entry by thinning out the landscape and then following it up with prescribed fire grazing, other prescriptions. But this is to ensure that our forested watersheds, our landscapes are healthy. And so when you have those projects across those three fronts, those landscapes around communities and within communities, what you're seeing is that fire behavior moderate.

And then to be able to increase our pace across this whole area, what we've been investing in are structural investments and programs that actually allow us to move faster and larger. So this is regional capacity building, making sure that we are having a cross jurisdictional, cohesive approach to wildfire, because fire isn't pausing at state versus federal versus local jurisdictional boundaries. So neither are we. We're investing on regulatory reform so that our processes are not slowing us down to get these projects out the door.

We're investing in ScIentific MoniToring so that we can actually be able to demonstrate and ensure that we're keeping pace with the new climate COnDITioNS that our forests are facing.

And we're also investing in workforce development and business development so the workforce to ensure that we have trained crews, from hand crews all the way up to professional foresters and heavy equipment operators, to do the scale of work, and then investments that are focused on business development specifically, because so much of this work is generating woody material, that we are translating that woody material into products that help sequester that carbon or use it better than open pile burning or have those slash piles complicate a fire.

So I want to close with one last thought and then just a couple of real world examples. One of the things that the state did when we got that early action funding, sort of the initial source of this funding in April of 2021, was we wanted to ensure that those projects were on the ground and ready by fire season 2022. We had to change some of our state business practices to do it. The Legislature helped.

The Legislature gave us contracting relief for a lot of this funding, which enabled us to get projects on the ground within a 10 day turnaround on our contracts, rather than what can sometimes be six month process. It allowed us to also change our grant timelines for those early action dollars.

So we had grant solicitations that either started within two weeks of getting the appropriation, or in Calfire's case, they started a longer grant process, but they started at months before we actually got the appropriation so that they were ready to award when the dollars came. And then we also changed our regulatory approach so that CEQA and our different regulations weren't causing an inhibition and slowing down our projects. So what it meant is that we had projects that came from when we got the appropriations.

We had some projects start within four weeks of getting those dollars. And that's allowed us to get the funding that has already been invested here, translated into over 1000 projects on the ground throughout the state. And so that's why we're asking for an additional $664,000,000 in this budget request that would complete that three year funding, getting us to $2.7 billion.

As you heard from the Legislative Analyst Office, we did contribute to some of the budget solutions, given the deficit from the fire program, but they were very minimal. And I'm happy to discuss those. About $91 million of programs that we think don't have, that won't really dramatically inhibit our capacity to provide that critical public safety to both the communities and the environmental safety.

And so let me just conclude with two quick examples of what this funding has done, and then my colleagues and I are going to be really happy to answer questions. So when you're looking across this wildfire resilience program, it actually includes 40 different programs within it, across 22 different departments. So we're taking an all hands on deck approach.

And so this funding has translated into funding at state parks that has 42 different state parks that have had fuel reduction done on them, and getting those critical habitats into a fire resilient state, it translated into our regional capacity building program, being able to actually cover every fire prone region in the state, including two new areas in Southern California, in La County area, and Riverside. And so we were able to actually expand those regional capacity programs across the state.

And then we also are investing in everything from our CAL FIRE projects have translated into over 100,000 acres treated, which, just to give you context, is incredibly unprecedented. Calfire's target for acres treated was in 2018, the force carbon plan laid out. CAL FIRE might be able to treat 60,000 acres a year starting in 2030, if they're lucky. And we know this is a stretch goal.

And what Calfire has actually done with these resources and this funding is treated over 100,000 acres a year over the last three years. So what we're seeing is these projects surge. The huge impact is being made on the ground, and we're really proud of the work going on and excited to be able to continue this incredible effort.

Thank you very much. And your enthusiasm and pride in your Department shows that speaks well for the Department. So thank you very much. Department of Finance. Do you have anything you want to add?

Stephen Benson, Department of Finance. Nothing additional presentation wise from either of the Department of Finance folks, but available to answer questions.

And can you present the specific General Fund solutions from the wildfire package from.

The ones in the agenda? Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

So there's really five sort of areas within the wildfire and forest resilience package where there are solutions. The first one, as you have noted in here, is a stewardship of state owned land. There's a $25 million reduction over a couple of fiscal years that was funding set aside for the natural Resources Agency to allocate out to state agencies for sort of defensible space type projects, if you will, around state owned facilities.

There is a reduction of, well, really a shift of $15 million that was in for workforce training grants. That's being shifted from sort of traditional General Fund to 14 of it being on Prop . 98 General Fund. The idea being that can be focused on community colleges in the workforce development area. With that climate catalyst Fund, there's a $41 million reduction from there over a couple of different fiscal years. Within the monitoring and research area, there's a reduction of 5 million.

And with defensible space inspectors, there's a reduction of 5 million as well. So a total of reductions of 91. But of that 91, really 14 is also being shifted to a different Fund source. So it's a little bit less in terms of total Fund reduction.

Helen Kerstein with the Legislative Analyst Office. So as you heard, the Governor really maintains the vast majority of the funding in this area. There are a few targeted reductions, as was noted by Mr. Benson here, but really 97% are maintained. So the vast majority is maintained. We think that's appropriate. I mean, this is definitely one of the most kind of urgent and pressing issues. We think that the state, it's confronting.

We think it is important to continue providing resources in the area of wildfire and forest resilience, really, given the potential impacts. Well, already the impacts we've seen and certainly the potential impacts which could even grow with climate change. So we think this is a very important area. As was noted, there are some targeted reductions. We think those in general are reasonable. There is one that we did raise some potential concerns with. That's the cut to defensible space inspectors.

We did some work on defensible space inspections back in 2021 and really found that those inspections are kind of a really critical kind of baseline resource for the state to understand what's happening out there in terms of defensible space, but also to educate homeowners and to let them know kind of how they can keep their own properties safe. So we think that's a really, it's not a ton of money, but we think it's an important part of the state's efforts.

And so we do have some potential concerns there. And then there are a couple of areas that we suggest as possible areas the Legislature could consider if it does need to find additional reductions. We tried to do this sort of in each of the different thematic packages we tried to see, hey, this is one way to do it, but there are some other ways you could do it, too.

Two of the specific programs we identified that the Legislature could consider, if it's looking for additional reductions, are the transportation of woody biomass. We think that's an important activity, certainly we don't want to leave piles of biomass in the forest, but we do note that CAL FIRE does have some existing programs that fund similar activities, including its Wildfire Prevention Program. And so we think that it's just not clear how much this new dedicated program kind of how that will interact with those existing programs.

So we think providing the money in the current year that's already out there probably makes sense. And then the Legislature could consider potentially deferring the funding that was scheduled for budget year on that. Similarly, with home hardening, that's an area we think the Legislature could - we think it's, again an important area, but really there was pilot money that was provided in 2021. We think the Legislature could consider seeing how that money actually is implemented.

Right now, it's taken a while to go out the door because there have been some complications, especially with trying to get some federal money to also work alongside the state money. So it's taken some time to get out the door. We do think once that's implemented, it'll be important to really evaluate how that specific program is designed, whether some tweaks need to be made.

So Legislature could potentially wait on some of the money that's scheduled to go out, but it hasn't yet been provided to that to see kind of whether it wants to make some additional changes there. Also just note, as was mentioned before, there's a lot of federal money coming in. This is one of a number of areas where there is some federal money that's slated both from the Inflation Reduction Act as well as IIJA. So that's something just to keep in mind.

There's some federal programs that are very similar to the state programs that we talked that are funded here, like there's a Federal Forest Legacy Program, for example, as well as others. And so that's something that perhaps we'll want to continue to learn more about and get some information on a continuing basis from the Administration on.

Thank you. I'm going to engage in the first question here unless either the Chiefs have something that you had prepared to say. I'm going to engage in the first question because I think it's just so important. You talked about - Secretary Crowfoot talked in response to the questions from Assemblymember ... Lee about the tremendous value in decreasing the wildfires and their impacts.

It's both the immediate impact of the smoke on people's lives, the immediate impact of the loss of life and property, but also the long term impact in terms of the greenhouse gas emissions that are going out there and the impacts. So it seems that the conversion to prevention and the efforts on prevention is really a great investment as long as we're making them smart investments as we go forward. And so early in the agenda, I mentioned how important cost effectiveness is and efficiency.

This is going to be an area that I really want to drill down on and try to make sure that we get better and better at both quantifying and identifying what are the best practices, where are the best places to do preventative burns, under what conditions and what situations and all of that, and try to really create over the years great tracking tools so that we really learn each year and we get better at it.

You're the professionals and I would very much like to see us each year get better at that. So my question is, we had significantly fewer fires, and one of the reasons for your enthusiasm is that that happened, Deputy Secretary Morse. My question with all that, can you quantify the thinning projects, the defensive space inspections? Can you quantify it and compare it to previous years? How many acres were treated towards a state goal of 500,000 acres? And I heard you say 100,000 a year for three years.

Right. Okay, so we've done 100,000 a year. Right. But the biggest thing is culture. My understanding is that firefighters in CAL FIRE in general, people are hired to fight fires, the prevention and the preventative burns and those things. If you got time, you got around to it. And I think we certainly have to make this now an equal priority with responding to fires, the same sense of urgency. So whenever you have that downtime, et cetera, and that we build that in. So can you talk to us and give us some response in terms of both the cultural shift that we have to have so that we can quantify and get even more bang for our buck in terms of the prevention side of things?

Allow me to introduce my colleagues here. So I have Chief Matthew Reischman from CAL FIRE, who handles all of their natural resources program and is a professional forester. And I have Acting State Fireman Marshal Daniel Berlant, who handles the programs that include defensible space, community hardening. And so to answer your question, which I think is kind of multi tiered around, how are we shifting state culture around prescribed fire? I think that's a really critical one.

And then also, Daniel can give you statistics about defensible space inspections and the progress that we're making there. Chief Reischman can also give you sort of the comparison of how we've done the acres treated over the years, I think starting in 2015, if you have that. But otherwise, we'll flag somebody down from the back.

But before we get into that detail, and there's a lot to talk about on prescribed fire, I just want to take a step back and talk about sort of how we're doing monitoring and tracking to get to the core of your question, which is, so we have a program on CAL FIRE's website called CalMAPPER that shows you where all the treated acres are.

And now we're going to be expanding that coming this Summer to be able to show you all of the state departments and then eventually all of our federal partners as well. So you can get a complete picture of the State of where treatments are happening. We're also making dramatic investments in monitoring and research so that we are actually tracking the progress that we're having on the ground. So that includes investments in remote sensing. So the funding that we've gotten, we partnered with our federal partners.

So this is a very cost effective way to do it. The US Geologic Survey put in about 80% of the funding. We put in about 20% of the funding. It gave us 30 million acres of LiDAR, which is a laser map of the state, high resolution, and it covers all of the high fire risk areas of the state now, in current LiDAR. That gives us an instant snapshot of what the vegetation load is, what the fuel load is, what it looks like post fire.

We're also investing in tree mortality, early tracking systems, as well as vegetation change detection, which will get, again, that's going to be remote sensing through satellites that will show us where we're seeing forestlands converting to shrublands, shrublands converting to grasslands, where we're seeing the thinning projects that we've done taking shape, where we're seeing how they're interacting with recent fires and so that we can see that in action.

And then before we transition to my colleagues, I just want to give you one example of how effective prescribed fire is and why we are really changing state culture and investments in it. So we've tried to remove barriers so that private burners can come into place. So we've got prescribed fire liability fund, which covers insurance for private burners. We've been investing in prescribed fire collaboratives throughout the state.

We've been investing in traditional ecological knowledge and cultural burners so that we are promoting those collaborations with California Native American Tribes to increase cultural fire on the ground as well. So a lot of these programs that we're investing in have a piece of prescribed fire that they're moving forward. And just to give you one clear example, in the 2021 Caldor Fire that was up in the Lake Tahoe area, catastrophic fire, moving incredibly intensely, it burned through an area that had been a 3000 acre prescribed burn.

When it hit that burn outside of the town of Kirkwood, it actually burned at low intensity underneath the forest. And so when you look at this area, you have blackened trees and then you get to the area that had been the prescribed fire of 3000 acres. So you have this 3000 acre sea of green, and that's what saved the town of Kirkwood in the Caldor fire. So we're really committed to increasing prescribed fire. And Chief Reischman, let me turn it to you to talk about CAL FIRE's effort and some of the great accomplishments even this fall.

Sure. So, Chair Bennett, first off, before I go down that road, if I might speak directly to your question on cultural shift, because I think it's a fantastic question. I appreciate it very much. As you know, we are the state's Fire Department, but we're also the state's Forestry Department. And the way that we've seen fires burning over the last decade is immense. And it comes down to the weather and the fuels, the topography, the conditions that we're seeing out there on the ground.

Historically, the approach to fire was to put it out, suppress fire. But our troops know now that you can't simply take that approach and hope to cause the differences and changes that we need to see on the landscape. And so at the direction of Chief Tyler, our Director and even prior directors has been to be engaged with forestry. We have training in forestry and forest management, prescribed fire, vegetation reduction. And when our folks, and as you know, we're an all risk fire department.

So it's just not simply wildland fire, but when our folks are not actively engaged in mitigating emergencies, they're out working on fuel brakes, they're out conducting defensible space inspections. And so we're not sitting by idly, simply waiting for the bell to go off and to go to the fire or the emergency. We're actively engaged in these projects at the unit level, at the region level, and at the Sacramento level.

One of the specific examples when it comes to prescribed fire that we're bringing into our department is traditional ecological knowledge, our ability to understand better how the Native Americans across the state have used fire traditionally. We know that it was used annually on a lot of acres across the entire state. But different times of the year, they burn under different conditions, sometimes to propagate certain plants so that they could engage in basketry.

And so we're bringing that knowledge in our relationships that we have with the tribes back into our department. Because, to be honest with you, we haven't done a lot of cultural burning in our department. We have a lot to learn there, and we recognize that. So we're excited about our tribal grants that we have and our ability to be able to engage more readily with Native American tribes in order to bring that knowledge into our department.

If I could follow up, I welcome the engagement on that particular question. When I say culture, it's really the whole agency culture. This idea has been presented to me, and that is that you have a number of people already, and as you mentioned, when they're not doing immediate response, they're out doing fuel breaks. But if you have to be ready to do immediate response, it influences how much and how you can do fuel brakes and preventative fires, et cetera.

And given the nature of the fire, to what extent can we have people who are dedicated essentially full time to be ready to be working on prevention, preventative fires, fuel brakes, all of those kinds of things. And they are the backup force for when fires are really raging. And you have to have them, because you have to have some people literally on standby ready to go.

And those people on standby that are ready to go, they might be able to do a fuel break that's pretty close or whatever, but they can't really engage in the big. So to what extent is the agency actually shifting so that we have both sides can support the other? You've got an urgency, you have to be urgent response, but you can do something fairly close to the station, so you're helping them.

But on the other hand, we have these people who are almost all doing preventative fires, but they can come in when we have things start to really grow on the fire side of it. Can you help us understand that part of the Department at this point in time?

Sure. Again, I appreciate the question. We have 10 fuel reduction crews that are specifically dedicated to doing fuels work across the state. There's five in the south and five in the north. And so these men and women are out actively engaged in fuel reduction work every day. Their main focus is not initial attack, although if we get into situations where we need support, we have called on them.

As far as using our other resources to engage in fire prevention work, I think a lot of it comes to logistics. A lot of the fuel break work we do is remote, but that doesn't mean we have to dedicate all of our folks to it. In any given day, within our units, we're looking operationally at the resources we have available, and we're looking at the weather conditions and where we're most likely to get those fires start.

We know where our assets at risk are, and we know where our ignition potential is. And so we're moving resources around at any time in order to engage in fire prevention activities based on the fire potential that we have in those units. So we're taking that into consideration in our command centers, and we're moving resources around accordingly.

So you have 10 units currently designated to fire prevention. You said fuel - fuel reduction, five north and five south. How many did you have four years ago?

As far as fuel reduction crews that were specifically allocated for fire prevention work. Those crews came to us back in 2019, so I would say we did not have any. But that's not to say that our other resources weren't actively engaged in fire prevention work, regardless of their funding type.

So I'm going to ask you a question, and I'll get to you just in a second. And that is, so we've increased the funding significantly, and we've stayed at 100,000 acres three years straight. Is there a reason why last year we didn't have as many fires? So is there a reason why we didn't have an increase in the number of acres that we were able to engage in?

So I would say last year we had a similar number of fires. And as far as us increasing our acreages over the years, we've been actively engaged every year. And I wouldn't say there was any specific reason we responded to those fires. They just didn't get as large and damaging.

So it took less, fewer resources, fewer distractions, I would assume. But bottom line, with increased resources, we should be seeing the trend line of acres treated increasing. Correct.

Chair, if I could jump in. Good morning. First off, Chair Bennett and Members of the Committee. I want to add to this point that first, take note that this year and the fiscal year that we're in now, luckily, we had a more moderate fall, and so we were able to take our firefighters, who are on the front lines based on more moderate weather, though, and really focus them on doing fuel reduction.

In fact, in the Fall months, we were able to accomplish over 14,000 acres of prescribed fire. Your points are very valid about having dedicated workforce to fire prevention, which we do have, as Chief Reischman's mentioned, with our fuels crews, we have dedicated defensible space inspectors. But the really important piece that has got us to this 100,000 acre goal, from what was really about a 10,000 acre accomplishment a decade ago, really has been our grant programs.

They have significantly augmented our ability as an agency to see good work done on the ground without taking away our own internal resources. So we've really been able to see successes in getting our acreage as a state increased by supporting local fire safe councils, local fire departments, tribes and others. And so really, I think we really need to emphasize the importance of our fire prevention as well as our forest health grant programs in helping to augment that.

Now, to your point, how do we get past the 100,000 acre goal? We're continuing to strategize under the Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force to partner with the US Forest Service, our other state agencies. As Deputy Secretary Morse said, one of the things we're working on doing is really supporting our sister agencies in the CNRA portfolio to get their acreages and projects onto an interactive website so you can see all those projects.

And so you're going to start to see not just the 100,000 acres that CAL FIRE and our grantees are performing, but the tens of thousands of acres being performed by the CNRA departments, the hundreds of thousands of acres being performed by the US Forest Service, hundreds of thousands of acres from our private, local and federal. So we really want to, I think, stay focused on, we are on the right track. As Jessica's mentioned earlier, we want to keep going there. And so that's why in front of you, the continuation of these grant programs is so critical.

I applaud you for being on the right track. So I agree with you. I'm just trying to encourage you to keep having that track, keep moving up. Deputy Secretary.

Yeah, just a little context that might be helpful. One of the reasons we deployed 22 different departments to be able to do this work, including all of the state conservancies, was to ensure that we could have year round fuel reduction going forward. Because State Parks, Department of Fish and Wildlife, State Conservancies, our new dedicated Forestry Corps at the California Conservation Corps, those crews don't get deployed to fire during fire seasons.

And so that allows us to be able to, and again, that started in April of 2021, getting that funding. And so that allows us to have more of that year round effort in addition to CAL FIRE's dedicated fuel crews. And so part of the context here is that it's not all on CAL FIRE shoulders. Fire resilience is really a team effort.

And then to your question about the acres, just a few years ago in, I think 2015, 2016 we were around 15,000 acres a year as a state being treated. That surged to 60,000 acres in 2019. And then we've started seeing this surge with the Governor coming in. He devoted some additional funding to CAL FIRE in his first action to get to that 1st 100,000 acres. CAL FIRE has been able to sustain it. Those acre years, that fuel reduction gets reported along a fiscal year.

So what I'm reporting ended in July of 2022. So the benefits from this fire season will be reporting in next year's numbers in addition to all of the other state departments. It looks like that early action, we're still sort of, I'll give you a rough number that I don't want us to be just so you have a sense of it, that first year of funding from the additional departments, like the state conservancies, got us about an additional 50,000 acres treated.

But we're still working on sort of vetting that number until it gets released publicly later this Summer. But what we're seeing is the trends are moving in the right direction. It is an all hands on deck effort. And to your point, we were very focused and deliberate about ensuring that we wouldn't have our fuel reduction programs being pulled off and siphoned off during fire season.

Thank you very much. To my colleagues - Questions. Assembly Member Connolly.

Thank you. Really appreciate kind of the discussion happening. And you're hearing a couple of key themes I think repeated in different ways. One is this notion of a good amount of money has been allocated over the last several years. And again, it's great news that this year wildfire is largely funded in the budget. I share some of the concerns around, for example, defensible space.

But putting that aside, money allocated versus money that is allocated directly to projects and then money that is actually spent. You talked about that a little bit, but give me a sense, and I apologize for having to miss part of the testimony, has money been directly allocated to projects? Kind of in what way? And what's the status and what is the timeline for money actually being spent? And I have one other question.

Yeah, absolutely. So of the initial funding, we now have $1.3 billion committed into projects that has translated into 1174 projects across the state. That is a very fast turnaround. The initial surge of funding was 500 million, and most of last year's funding is now in projects as well. And so then what would get us to that 2.7 billion that we've referenced. That would be the additional 664,000,000 that we're requesting this year.

Great. The second theme is culture change, and we urge you to continue to embrace that and effectuate that. The fact, though, is that CAL FIRE is still spending most of the budget on wildfire response or suppression. What are we doing to reconfigure funding to address prevention? And is culture change actually reflected in the budget that we're being asked to approve? If you could respond to that.

Yeah, let me frame it up and then hand it off to my colleagues here. One thing that's important to note is that the resilience investments are a lot cheaper than suppression, and we don't have the luxury right now while we're trying to get ahead of this curve, to be able to sit back and say, good luck with your fire, everybody. We'll see you later. We're focusing on this fuel break, so we do have to respond.

Obviously. So what you're going to see in the budget trend lines, this potentially $2.7 billion, nearly $3 billion investment in wildfire resilience, is that culture shift that you're looking for. That is us saying rather than spending what was in the tens of millions of dollars before 2018 or $200 million after 2018, we are investing on the scores of billions of dollars across all of these programs to devote ourselves to prevention because we are seeing it be cost effective, better for our communities, improve our watershed safety. Right.

The trickle down effects are phenomenal from this. This surge in investment is us making that shift. What ideally we'd love to se - right -when the challenges of the climate conditions are getting hotter and more extreme as we are moving at a pace that is unprecedented for resilience. What we'd like to see is the investments in resilience continue to go up and that start over a longer period to cause our investments in suppression to be able to come down.

And I do want to be clear that we saw the fraction of the fires, we saw the same number of fires, but the fraction of destruction this fire season, that progress, we don't anticipate that it will be a straight line, that we will see some years where our resilience is really paying off and others where the climate conditions, you get 100 miles an hour winds and you're just in a tough spot.

And so we want to make sure that we can be responsive to the increased extreme climate conditions and fire conditions we're facing while investing in that resilience, which gets us that fuel load reduction, modifies the fire behavior and gives us a better chance.

And if I could add real quick, thanks to funding from the Legislature - back to this culture discussion - we've been able to establish a new division within the Department, the Community Wildfire Preparedness and Mitigation Division, specifically focused on our efforts to prepare communities to support communities in their overall wildfire resiliency. And that makes sure that we as an agency are staying laser focused on this priority. But I think to your point of what are we doing?

The proposal that you have in front of you is the funding to allow us to continue this last two years of significant surge in investing in fire prevention. And so obviously, we are asking the Legislature to continue to help us financially continue this good work. And again, the proof is in the fact that we've been able to increase the acres treated, the number of defensible space inspections, and we want to continue that trajectory. This proposal allows us to do that.

Since we're on the topic. And then if you have a question but can you actually break down what percentage of the budget is prevention and what percentage of the budget is suppression?

Stephen Benson, Department of Finance so one thought that I was hoping to actually get in - so thank you for asking the question - is, I think what you see in the budget is there's resources that are sort of historically and primarily fire suppression. But more and more, the budget conversation is what's the multi benefit that comes from different investments. So when we make investments in fire suppression resources, I think there's a conversation and acknowledgment that that also has benefit on the prevention and forest resilience side.

So, for example, for multiple years now, we have been doing sort of limited time or limited term small window augmentations in the Spring and the Fall, and fire prevention resources. And that involves bringing in sometimes additional crews. ... crews, fire crews. It also will involve activating certain fire stations, fire engines earlier or keeping them active longer. That's done with a primary focus of being pre positioned. We want to make sure that the resources are positioned ready to go if there are incidences.

But there's a recognition of a major sort of multi benefit that while we have those resources positioned, that increases the overall resource available to the Department and allows them to, as Chief Reischman talked about, sort of talk about how to position, use those resources. So they make sure that as they're tracking sort of biggest fire risk and making sure folks are there to respond if that happens, it also increases the pool of resources available to.

Going out and doing fire prevention type activities. So while the primary focus may be making sure that we're positioned ready from a suppression standpoint, really there's multi benefit. And so I think when you talk about splitting it out, it's very difficult to do that because the resources have benefits on both sides.

So I'll ask a question, maybe. Well, I'll let the Lao try her response.

I'll see if I can help a little. But so I think that my colleagues are correct. There's not necessarily a totally neat and easy everyone's exactly just prevention or exactly just mitigation or exactly just suppression. So it is nuanced for sure. But if you look at the big budget categories in California's budget, certainly the significant majority is mostly focused on the suppression side. So we're talking about maybe something over 80% probably on average, over the last several years.

And while we've had big increases in resilience, a couple of points on that, and they really have been quite significant. And I don't want to downplay that at all. But I think a couple of points, one, most of it has been one time. There is some sort of longer term funding on the GGRF side, even that actually will expire eventually. But most of the work that we've done on the resilience side has been these packages.

And so after next year, we're going to have to, I think, have some conversations about what to do kind of more of an ongoing basis on that, whereas I would say on the suppression side, more of it has been ongoing. So we've made more of it has been on what ongoing. So we've made very significant increases.

And we'll talk about this actually in the next item, too, when we're going to talk about the cap outlay proposals, because really some of that is driven by what we've made in terms of augmentations. On the suppression side. We had, I think 1500 just in the 2223 budget, 1500 new positions for CAL FIRE. I think most of those were on the suppression side, and so I think like 800 and something of them were basically like uniform folks.

So really big increases percentage wise and just numbers wise on the suppression side. And most of that has been ongoing. Some of it we've had some one time, but a lot of it's been ongoing. So I think those are really important conversations for the Legislature to have. What is this appropriate balance? Right. How much do you want and how much, especially on an ongoing basis.

So there's this year, and obviously we want to make sure we respond to those big fires, but what's our vision going forward? What kinds of investments in infrastructure? I'm kind of foreshadowing my future comments, but do we want to make with that future in mind? And I think that's really important. And I think these are really critical questions, so really appreciate you asking them.

So I'm going to ask the question again next year. Okay. So I'm going to put it out this way and I'll ask it a little bit differently. And that is every position should probably be identified as primarily either prevention or suppression. So it seems like while the Department of Finance points out, yeah, people do both. And I admit there's sort of a gray area in there, but certainly most people would put themselves in one side or the other in this category.

And the same thing is true with capital outlay. ET mean a helicopter that's primarily there for suppression and usually on standby. But if occasionally it gets used for prevention, I would put that under suppression because that is a long term, I mean, if in fact, we are recognizing prevention is absolutely essential for us, that it's just not acceptable for us to have 4 million acres burn every year. If that's not acceptable, then we have to get going on the suppression, on the prevention.

And so we do have to have a long term strategy. And that is sort of the big cultural change. And that is just how much here, if we take a certain percent here and put it into prevention, do we get more gain than we know in terms of that? I think that CAL FIRE is doing a great job and had a great success this past year and is in the midst of both historic investments being made and recognition by the public in making those investments.

But also historic thinking, creative, proactive thinking as the professionals and as the top professionals there, it's really incumbent upon you, the leadership, to try to move all organizations, everybody wants to reluctant to change a man, try to make change in high school, it's difficult to make change. And yet this change to having the proper mix or a good mix in terms of prevention and suppression is really important. And so it will keep coming up.

And so I would welcome any conversations throughout the year that you would like to have. I appreciate that you came in and we had an initial good talk to get started on this, but it will be the way I'll ask the question next year if that helps. Any other questions? Assembly Member Sa Lee.

Thank you. Appreciate it. Ms. Kirsten. Right. You work for the Lao. You call them your colleagues. I'm just curious. You don't work for the Governor, do you?

No, I don't. Sorry. We all work regularly. I think of them in a collegial way.

I understand. But we're separate branch, right?

Absolutely.

And we need to check their work.

We absolutely take our role of oversight very seriously. And so we sometimes feel like colleagues. Sometimes maybe.

I appreciate that we are on the.

Other side of the table.

I just want to make sure I understand everyone's roles, and then. Mr. Is it Gonzalez? Benson. Sorry. Mr. Benson, what is the overall budget for fire for the year? What's the number for CAL FIRE's budget? Yes.

I want to say it's just below $3.0 billion.

2.3.0 billion. Okay. And I saw in your report the amount we're spending, the governor's proposal on fire prevention is 400 million. Is that correct? Based on your report, the Governor proposes 400 million. What's that?

664,000,000 for wildfire resilience.

600 per year, or is that over?

No, go ahead. So the way that the wildfire and forest resilience investments have been working, as Mrs. Kirsten referred to, is we've been doing sort of one time, multi year things. So the package we did last year included funding for 2223 as well as 2324. And so of the 2324 portion of that package, there's 664,000,000 that's sort of awaiting appropriation, if you will, in the 2324 budget. So it's already been sort of agreed to, but it still has to be appropriated.

Okay. Well, when I put those two numbers together, it does look like about an 8020 ratio, what you said.

Sorry. Just to maybe add a little bit of more clarification, and if it's helpful, I think on page 38 is the page that has those one time packages for your reference. But you'll notice many of them are for CAL FIRE, but not all of them. And I think that was referenced also by Ms. Morse. There are a variety of agencies that have been receiving funding as part of this wildfire package.

So CAL FIRE has been getting in the hundreds of millions, generally as part of these packages annually, but not all of it has gone to CAL FIRE. And also, Calfire does have some base funding for this, which is not in these packages. So it's a little bit harder to track. But, yeah, in General, I would say probably about kind of 80 ish, maybe a little bit more than that percent goes to the suppression side.

I would just say from our perspective, I realize it's difficult, it's nuanced, but it's important for us to know what money is being spent on what, so we can assess where the priorities are. Right. Because that's how we determine what we prioritize where we spend our money. And I think the theme today is prevention. I mean, prevention is very important because we can't continue to spend billions of dollars a year on fighting fires. We don't have that kind of money, and it's destroying communities.

So I want to ask about, I think it was referred to culture, I'll call it policy. So, Chief Berlant. Right. So let me ask you, when I read and understand the big fires, the problem is there's too much fuel in the forest. Is that accurate to say what's fueling the.

That's one factor. Obviously, extreme weather conditions that we've been experiencing over the last several years in particular, plays a major role as well.

So obviously, when you're talking about treating acres, you're talking about reducing the fuel in the forest, right?

Well, when we talk about acres treated, we really have two programs, our forest health program, that is more of in the forest. But then our wildfire prevention fuels reduction work is really in and around communities. Fuel breaks around a community stop a wildfire from entering them. Fuel reduction around roadways to allow for emergency evacuations. So it's not just fuel reduction work in the forest. This is in and around communities as well. And we prioritize that.

Okay. Have we changed any policies when it comes to fuel reduction to reduce more fuel in the forests?

Why don't I, Chief Berlant is the acting state fire marshal. So that's a very broad question. I can give you a couple of examples. So these investments have given us sort of more direct programs that allow us to really expand our reach into forested areas. A lot of our fuel reduction had been focused around immediate communities before and strategic fuel breaks to be able to aid firefighters.

And now what we're seeing is both those, like I was talking about, those three layers, we've really started to invest across landscapes as well. So a couple of examples of some of the programs through Calfire and others, we're investing across small forested landowners. They make up, almost 40% of the forested land in California is private, and 26% of the forest land is small forested landowners. So people who have 2000 acres or less. So CAL FIRE has a program that's giving direct assistance to small forested landowners.

So we don't get these little patchworks of gaps as we're doing this work. We also have a program specifically for large industrial forest landowners. We have of that private acreage about 8 million acres are in industrial, large scale timberlands. And so we have funding for them to be able, through the forest Legacy program, to be able to actively manage and thin out their forests to a state that is better for the watershed writ large and also better for catastrophic fires.

We are going in and taking out fuel. Is that what these programs do? Right, and by fuel, I mean like dead trees and things that are going to catch on fire, correct?

And I did want to ask Chief Reischman, what is the lumber industry's role in helping to reduce the fuel in the forest? I saw you worked for a lumber mill at some point in your career for a lumber company.

Yes.

Correct. So, first off, thank you for the question. I appreciate it. They have a huge role.

Our industrial timberland owners are very much at the table and own a significant amount of acreages across the state, and they are very actively engaged in fuel reduction work, not only just generating commercial timber products, which obviously go to support mills and become timber products, but engaging across the landscape with their work and plugging into other landowners, private landowners, state lands, and federal lands to create a landscape approach to fuel reduction. So they very much have a seat at the table. They're very actively engaged.

So do we allow lumber companies to go into state forest and take out dead trees? Is that happening?

So, state forest, it depends on the type of state forest. CAL FIRE. We have a demonstration state forest where we conduct active timber harvesting. It's largely affiliated with research that we do. These would not be, basically, we would hire contract licensed timber operators to come in and be able to conduct the work. A lot of times, industrial timberland owners who own the mills will purchase the logs.

So there's really multifacets of people that are engaged, or entities, I should say, that are engaged with the effort of harvesting. But, yes, we do.

Okay. I asked the question because we have a private industry that they could monetize this and they don't need state dollars to operate. But if we allow them access to take out dead trees and reduce the fuel, it seems like a win win. I just don't know if that's the policy or not. Do we partner with them to allow them to go in and remove those debt trees? They're doing a service, and I guess it helps their business as well.

But is that a thing or is that not a thing?

I'm happy to answer that. So I think it's important to understand the context of what we're doing to try to actually increase Wood products in California. That's a major goal of ours. If you look at the Forest and wildfire resilience action plan, that's one of our key pillars. That's also one of the key areas that we're funding. Unfortunately, if it were just as simple as like, hey, private industry, come on in, that would be amazing.

But the challenge we're having is the supply chain for this is not predictable. So what we're trying to do as a state government is remove some of the barriers and obstacles that prevents industry from coming in and expanding the mill capacity in California. I mean, for example, we gave a grant to a community in Crescent mills through the Sierra Nevada community, the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, that opened a small mill in Crescent Mills, 5 miles from Greenville, which had burned a few years ago.

And so now that Wood is from. The burnt Wood from Greenville is going 5 miles down the road, getting milled, going back to the reconstruction of Greenville. And so we're trying to get that to be a more sustainable model. But the challenges we're seeing with industry is that access to capital. So there's not a great lending program in this space. So that's why we started the climate catalyst Fund. And we're also investing in supply chain stability and predictability, because there's so many different landowners.

And again, most of the work the state is doing is not on land that the state owns. And so it means that the life of our grant is the only guarantee you can give on the supply of woody material coming off of those lands. And so what the Legislature did with us, which was really innovative, is they allowed us to expand the expiration date on the dollars from two years to seven years.

So that meant for every grant we're giving out, you can actually give out a seven year supply agreement and a seven year workforce contract for that project. It allows us to get bigger, be more efficient, but allows us to stabilize the area. So that, let's say you wanted to start a small mill. You could go in with then a supply agreement for multiple years to be able to guarantee the loans that you're going to get. We also started.

I know we have a lot going on, but I just wanted to summarize. It's not an access or policy issue. You're saying it's a capital and supply chain issue. I just want to make sure there's no regulatory hurdles or red tape. That's maybe question.

And I think it's to the point that what is coming out of our fuel reduction and thinning project is not often commercial grade lumber. Right. Most often, what's coming out is slash. It's stuff that can be used in particle board. There's a lot of innovation happening in the space that can convert this to jet fuel, to liquid natural gas. There's kind of a full range of assortment of products that you can use. We're trying to come up with an all of the above approach.

That's part of the reason we had the investment in the biomass subsidy, which is functionally, when you have slash piles in the forest, these are often sort of multi story high slash piles. We have to devote full fire engines during an active fire to these slash piles. There's a lot that have kind of built up over the years that we're trying to get out. The new projects that we're doing, we're mostly removing the slash as we're going, as part of the grants that we're requiring.

But for the ones that have built up, there's a lot of slash piles there that don't have a lot of great use. And so that's why we're asking for that transportation subsidy, to be able to target those slash piles that have been left and get them out, because it's a bit of an emergency.

The challenge we have is, as we're trying to grow this entire industry that can use anything from small diameter Wood to biomass material, these innovative uses aren't up online yet, because they don't have the capital, they don't have the supply chain agreements and the scale needed to build these larger facilities. And so while we have an investment, as you've seen, for expanding the innovative uses, there's a $50 million program in our budget for expanding Low carbon uses for this material for sort of next generation technologies.

The challenge is with current technology, you have biomass to energy facilities that you can take it to. You have potentially sawmills, particle boards. And so you have to try to do this with the existing infrastructure. So what we're trying to do is get the woody material we have to the existing economies that can use it right now so that we don't just have it open.

Pile burning and emitting all of it's actually black carbon is what comes out of, not CO2, that comes out of smoke, so that we're not emitting that sort of black carbon, which creates that sort of heat flash and then falls out of the atmosphere within a couple of weeks. So we're trying to remove that.

But what we're also trying to do with all of these economic investments is get us to a point where we can actually grow the suite of technologies and tools that can consume this woody material and create a more sustainable economy around it.

No, I appreciate that. And we'll just note in concluding a lot of those combustion facilities are outdated. The technology has to be improved. So appreciate the direction. I'm going to wrap this up. It's been, I think, a very good presentation for us, and we really welcome the amount of time and information you've all been willing to give us. I'd just like us to think about a couple of things. Number one, where will we be 10 years from now?

And that's what we should be thinking about, I think. And that is, if, in fact, investments in prevention is absolutely essential to keep us from having 4 million acres burning with any kind of consistency, then we need to find a way to get there. And it can't be with, well, we've got one time grant money, and so we're going to do prevention with the one time grant money, and maybe we can extend it for two or three years.

It has to be built into the budget, and that requires culture change, and it also just requires good professional thinking about how to make that work. But it doesn't make any sense to have all of the ongoing funding, or the vast majority, 80% of the ongoing funding going for suppression. If the investment equation says this amount of investment in prevention actually saves you that much in the long run, in terms of prevention, that's 12.

Along that line we talk about somebody could either be in suppression or be in prevention. And we know that there can be some overlap, increasing the flexibility of the Department. I mean, this right now, fire risk is pretty Low.

If we had everybody sort of trained up and in the right sort of frame of mind about how to do it, you could have an enormous amount of people on the suppression side really being able to move farther away from their station and be more assertive or be a crew that could really help get after something.

So I think more flexibility, so that when we have these atmospheric river conditions and we have real Low fire risk conditions, and meanwhile, we should be able to have the prevention people be geared up so that when we're at the Santa Ana winds are blowing in Southern California, they are ready to respond quickly, so maybe we can catch some things before they get out of control.

Those are two challenges that I would offer to you, but you clearly heard from three Assembly Members representing different parts of the state and different political persuasions. Prevention is on the minds of the public, and it's on the minds of the Legislature, and we know it's on your mind, but the question is to translate into that to a good professional response in the long run.

And so welcome this, welcome your openness to answering these questions and stuff and questions along this line will be here again next year, and we look forward to having further conversations about that. So thank you all very much. Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

And Assembly Members, thank you. We're going to try to be a little more, a little quicker with this last item, just given the amount of time that we have spent on this. But I don't want to cut anybody off. But if we can all be as efficient as possible, we'll appreciate that also. So we have Director Tyler. I'm going to introduce the other panelists that we have coming up. We have Director Tyler, the Director of CAL FIRE.

We have Brent Jevvier, Deputy Director, cooperative fire, CAL FIRE. Mike Dugan, assistant Deputy Director, technical services, CAL FIRE. Michael McGinnis, Principal Program budget analyst, Department of Finance VI Nugent, staff budget analyst, Department of Finance and Helen Kirstein, principal fiscal and policy analyst, Legislative Analyst Office. And we will start with Director Tyler and your comments and go from there.

Great, thank you and good morning, chair Bennett and Members of Budget sub three. My name is Joe Tyler. I am the Director of Calfire. The proposals that we'll talk about today are various capital outlay projects that comprise of approximately $31.9 million of General Fund in fiscal year 23. Calfire controls and maintains over 2500 structures across 530 facilities across the State of California. That includes fire stations, conservation camps, fire centers, telecommunication facilities, air attack bases, hell attack bases, nurseries, and as we'll talk about today, training centers.

The average age of the facilities across CAL FIRE exceed 50 years in age. The projects that have been put forward today consist of a variety of those facilities that I have talked about already. As a result of the aging infrastructure and as a result of increased use from extended and year round fire year, as well as the increase to personnel across the Department in a total force organization. I'm tying back into your last discussion as well that we see a higher rate of facility deterioration.

To give you an example, in budget year 2013, the Department had 6885 authorized positions. In budget year 20, 211 thousand, 292 positions. The facilities have an expected life of 50 years and these are the top priorities in Calfire's five year infrastructure plan. We've worked closely with the Administration to develop the plan, have really addressed emergency response facilities. First and foremost is our priority to be able to set the stage moving forward.

So with that, we're happy to answer any questions that you have and specific questions related to this package.

We'll turn it over to Lao.

So Helen Kirsten, again with the Legislative Analyst Office. So as the agenda covers multiple projects, we didn't raise issues with most of them. There are two specific kind of projects that we did raise some concerns on. I'll try to summarize quickly, although there are a lot of pieces, so bear with me. So the first one that we raised some concerns on is a proposal to initiate a new training center. That's a really significant proposal.

The total costs of that proposal are over $400 million, I think closer to $500 million. And then there's some ongoing costs as well because this basically has two components. There's a cap outlay piece that's building the facility, and then there's some personnel that are requested on an ongoing basis. So we are recommending partially funding this proposal. So I'm going to go through the specific pieces really hopefully as quickly as I can on that.

We're recommending approving the study component, but a modified, kind of a modified study. So the Administration is proposing a study that would basically just look at what are some parcels for this new training center and what's refining the cost estimate. We think that that should be modified to really look more broadly at is this facility actually needed and is this the best way to meet that need?

And the reason for that is that the Department really is arguing that we've had these big increases in staffing, which we have had, and so they need this training facility, but this training facility won't come online until 2030, and it's hopefully going to last for 50 years or more. We're hoping it's going to be there. Anything that we built, it will be there for a long time.

So we think really in understanding whether this is what we should do, we really need to think about, well, what's that long term vision for the Department? What are they going to need in terms of firefighters? What are the training needs that are going to go from kind of flow from that. Right. Because the initial hire, you have to train everyone up, but then attrition is less. So your training needs. Hopefully we have this big burst. We're hiring all these firefighters. We train them up.

Hopefully we won't be having that level of training need on an ongoing basis. So I think it's really important for the study to look at that and look at the other options. The Department is in the process of doing a master plan of one of their main training centers, the ion facility. So we think that the results of that should be part of that study as well. The second piece we're recommending rejecting the funding for the acquisition phase.

So the Department also is requesting acquisition money at this time. We think that's premature until those studies have been completed. We're also recommending rejecting the facility related staff that's requested. They're requesting 12 ongoing positions, mostly to interface with DGS, who will be overseeing the construction of this project. But also, if there are projects from I own study, they would potentially be involved in that. But we think that's premature at this time.

And really, it's not typical to have that level of staffing, if any staffing at all, for that activity. And then we are recommending approving some level of funding for these sort of short term training needs. We definitely acknowledge that there are probably a lot of training needs associated with these folks that have just been brought on, just been kind of funded.

There was some funding last year that was provided for training. So some of that's being used as part of this proposal, but to the extent that there are additional needs that weren't covered, we think it's reasonable to address those. We just think that some additional information would be helpful to verify exactly what those levels are. Sorry, should I go forth? So that was number one. I know that was a lot, just even for number one.

The second proposal that we raised concerns with is the Growlersburg Conservation Camp. So this one we're recommending rejecting in its entirety. And really, that's driven by a few reasons, one of which is that it's not clear to us that this camp is going to be needed on an ongoing basis. A lot of the reason for that is what's happening with the camp population. So we've seen really the significant--

Oh, yeah, sorry.

Somebody's got something beeping.

Oh, I will stop moving.

You are directed to hold still.

Sorry. We've seen pretty significant declines in the inmate population in the state, and that's translated into significant declines in the population at conservation camps. Right. So conservation camps house the inmates who do a lot of hand crew work, do a lot of both suppression as well as some prevention work as well. So just a couple of years ago, we closed eight camps. Even with those closures, the existing camps are operating at about 50% capacity.

The Administration is estimating that we'll probably see about a 7% decline in the inmate population just in the next couple of years. So further declines. So we think there's a good chance that the state may be looking at additional closures of facilities. And so, really keeping all of the options on the table is probably helpful. As the state has been losing those conservation camp folks, we've been gradually replacing them with other types of crews. So CAL FIRE has received some crews that are CAL FIRE staff.

We've also seen some crews from the Conservation Corps program, also the Military Department. So there have been a variety of different tools the state has used. And so even if we want to have a facility in this spot, and there's already currently a conservation corp facility that's very close by, but if we want more capacity there, we think it's important to have all those options on the table because we are kind of moving towards those options relative to the inmates.

So we think that investing this- this proposal would be about 100 million to rebuild this facility- we think that that would kind of make it harder for the Legislature to look at all those options. Two other real quick things. One the costs have gotten a lot higher, even since the Legislature last looked at this project two years ago. Two years ago, it was about 60 million. Now we're looking at about 100 million.

And then I think really kind of a key thing is, given the general fund condition, both this and the other proposal, my colleague Rachel Ehlers talked about it earlier. Anything that we approve this year in terms of general fund, there may be other cuts that need to happen, and we think that this particular proposal is a long standing one. It's been around for 16 years. Over that time, it's been stopped and started multiple times.

And the Administration has questioned, is this the best approach or not? I mean, even just last year, the funds that were provided were allowed to revert because there were some of these questions about the future of conservation camps and whether this could be a good facility to close. So we think that those questions are still out there. If anything, the signs seem to be pointing towards fewer camp members, less general funds.

So just given that, we think that this is one that it doesn't make sense to proceed with now.

I have a few specific questions, but I think I'd like to first just ask you to respond to the LAO's comments and why you would disagree, and I'll have it be both the Department of Finance and you as the Director.

Thank you, Chair Bennett. I certainly appreciate the LAO's report and recommendations. The training facility of CAL FIRE in Ione, California, in Amador County, was built in 1967. Certainly the conditions of CAL FIRE were different as the Department or Division of Forestry in 1967.

By 2015, we entered into a cooperative agreement with the County of Riverside for temporary use of facilities there in Riverside, as well to continue total force training of our administrative, fire suppression, fire prevention and resource management employees. As we look into the future and the augmentations that have come recently, we recognize that we need to expand, and that becomes part of the swing space looking for those opportunities.

But we cannot rely looking forward, as you said in the last discussion, planning 10 and 20 years ahead of relying on swing space for the purposes of a training center. And that's the reason this proposal comes forward, to move our training centers to a state funded, additional state funded training facility in the State of California.

As it relates to Growlersburg Conservation Camp, that is-- certainly the conservation camp numbers are concerning, and it's an ongoing discussion between all agencies in the Administration related to conservation camp funding and staffing levels. What I will tell you is that Growlersburg Conservation Camp is located strategically in El Dorado county along the south rim of the Middle Fork and the North Fork of the American river. It serves the communities of El Dorado county all the way into Lake Tahoe, as well as crossing north into Placer County, serving those communities as well.

They were some of the first crews into the Mosquito Fire in 2022, and they served as a spike base camp for the Mosquito Fire as well. The LAO may not know that the Growlersburg Conservation Camp was my camp. I was the chief of Growlersburg Conservation Camp. It is strategically located, I believe, best suited for the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

And in the relationship we have with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and that strong relationship, I would arguably suggest that Growlersburg Conservation Camp would be one of the last camps that we would ever consider consolidating into some other function other than the use of inmates.

Thank you very much. Two questions. One, these new projects, why weren't they proposed last year when we had the huge budget surpluses the past two years? Why weren't they incorporated into the prior five year infrastructure plans?

I'm going to allow Mike Duggan, our Chief of Tech Services, to answer that question.

Yeah. I'd say some of these projects that were outside the five year infrastructure plan were brought in due to the immediate need of them. We have a few acquisitions that were brought in. We have one due to the property owner passed away, and the heirs want to sell the property and they're giving the opportunity to the state.

Well, some of these projects--

You can move your microphone closer. Is that better?

We don't have any other options. That's for Albany Fire Station and as for Hayfork Fire Station as well. Our lease expired and the property owner wanted our facility, so we were forced to leave. So we were not given any opportunity to renew. We tried to find any place occupiable, even in the temporary state. And that's where we're at, actually, which is in a very remote part of Trinity county. Our nearest station to that response time is close to an hour.

What we provide in that area is emergency services and fire response, even extrications, et cetera.

How about the training center?

Oh, okay. I'm sorry.

That's the big expense here. Why not in the five year plan? Why not last year when we had lots of money?

Well, primarily we have been working on providing information, numbers on what our projections are and really what the needs in training are. What I'm getting at is we have one fully state owned facility in Ione, and it's restricted as far as its growth due to infrastructure constraints and even some real estate constraints. So that's just a limited capacity area, so it won't solve our issues. As far as total need, the only other state owned facility we have is the Ventura Training Center, and that's strictly for a parole program. And also it's just a converted conservation camp and it's very narrow in size that we can't expand.

So what we are looking at immediately and have been is lease opportunities where we're sharing space. So why we brought this in now is the absolute need of in order to meet the training requirements of even prior to 2022, we need this facility in order to make it. So the temporary leases or the leases that we've set up and agreements, like I said, are shared space. They're not long term solutions. And we do have a limited amount of time of really borrowing that space with our cooperators.

I understand that's why we need it. You see, we're bringing in now. But why we weren't aware of that last year?

Well, we had to provide the information in order to justify this request.

I see. How about Growlersburg? Well, why not that last year?

Well, that's an ongoing project actually. We're in the preliminary plan phase, and the money that reverted was we were not in that phase.

We were allowed previously to actually have both phases at the same time, even though we were not in the working drawing phase. So that money reverted, we are at the point of moving into the next design phase to complete this. This project has been in and out, I shouldn't say in and out, but it's been our number one priority for a camp replacement since 2006, and due to budget constraints, it has been kicked out. This would be our first camp replacement ever as a Department.

We have 31 camps left, so it's very problematic that we can't execute one camp replacement for the Department, for the state. That's why it's really imperative for us to do this, to push it forward, to get it through design. I think it's a wise move in order to do so because then we can get that total answer of what it would be to continue this program.

So my focus is not again, why we need these things, but rather why now and not last year, why we weren't aware, but Department of Finance looks like--

Yes, good morning. Mike Villines with the Department of Finance. With regard to Growlersburg in particular, near the end of the spring budget process last year, the Department was nearing the completion of preliminary plans for the project.

And as is often the case, when we near completion of that particular phase, there was a recognition that there was going to be a meaningful increase in the cost of the project. We were not prepared at that time to move forward with the working drawings request of this continuing project. There was an existing appropriation, as was pointed out by the Department.

However, it was recognized that that would be insufficient and rather than attempting to continue off that existing appropriation, we opted to revert the funds, knowing that we would, in the future, at this point in time, need to come forward with a new request that recognized the increased cost to the project.

Additionally, with the New Academy proposal, many of the factors that contributed to this project being proposed in the budget year were determined based on the decisions that were made regarding CAL FIRE staffing in the addition of over 1000 positions in the current fiscal year. And so as a result, proposing a new training facility prior to those decisions being made would have been premature.

I'm going to give everybody one last shot, just in case somebody said something that you want to either counter or build on. I'm going to start with LAO.

Nothing else to add at this time, but happy to answer any other questions you have.

Department of Finance. LAO raised a couple of good points about the academy. It is projected to be completed in seven years. The expectation is the acquisition would take two years, so time is of the utmost importance. It's not unprecedented that phases are concurrently appropriated for projects.

In recent budgets, there have been projects that have been appropriate for phases of study and acquisition, or study employment plans, and we just wanted to make the point that if there are examples that are required, we're happy to provide them. But ultimately, the project is not unprecedented in incorporating the two phases.

Great. Anybody else? Go ahead.

Additionally, I would build upon V's comment and note that throughout the past 15 years or so, anytime there's been a significant reduction in general fund revenues, we have canceled or withdrawn CAL FIRE projects as a means by which to obtain general fund savings. The need for these projects does not in any way get put on hold or diminished by withdrawing the project.

And as such, many of the projects that we're currently working with started back in 2006, '07 and '08, because they've been withdrawn and then restarted so many times. And what has happened as a result is that the staff at the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection have had to work with increasingly aged and outdated facilities, and we've seen significant cost increases over the period that the project has been on hold.

Growlersburg, I would say, is a textbook example of this, in that over the 15 or so years that it has been withdrawn and reproposed, the costs have more than doubled despite the fact that the scope has stayed relatively the same.

Well, anything from you guys, finish it up?

Yeah, I just have a quick thing concerning the positions. Though it was definitely an unusual request. We're facing a situation now of addressing supporting training facilities statewide and with cooperators in our units as well.

So the idea of bringing these people on at this point would be they would be subject matter experts to provide information, to do research, to set specifications on the design, to be present for the implementation of them. And then when the keys are handed over to us, when the project is complete, we have to operate and maintain these for the next 50, and kind of what's showing now, 60 years for our facility.

So just FYI, Ione is a 56 year old facility, and it'll push into 60 years old, 60 plus by the time we actually get the next capital project on that. So that's why we ask for those subject matter experts that are basically design and technical people to work with the people in the field, our cooperators at even our joint training centers. And so then we can more effectively address basically these four training centers, a new one and cooperative ones as well.

Director Tyler?

Chair Bennett, thank you for your time. And we look forward to working with our colleagues and answering any questions that you have moving forward into the process.

Great. I have one more question. We may have challenges, as I pointed out the beginning, where we have actually less money than is currently in the budget. So can you give us a ranking of these projects? Which of the new and in progress capital projects are most mission critical in case we have to do that?

Do you have a ranking of that? And can you give us that?

We talked about this in pre-hearing, but yes, all our projects are mission critical because of age and an operational need. But yes, we'll work with the Department of Finance Agency and the LAO on producing what that criteria might be because there's several categories we're trying to cover.

When you create that ranking list, can you share that with us?

Absolutely.

Yeah. Great. Thank you very much. Appreciate that.

I really appreciate that both the Director and the Deputy Director were here for the previous conversation because you're going to play a critical role, obviously, in the Department overall and in whatever kind of organizational changes we have to make with regards to that. But the conversations about prevention and suppression will be ongoing in California and I think engaged by the public pretty significantly and stuff. So I really am glad that you're here. Appreciate the responses.

I appreciate being able to have people give both sides, and I hope that if you have other pieces of information that you do want to add, as we're trying to strategize from our standpoint in terms of budget, don't hesitate to let us know. And that's an open invitation to all five of you there. All right, great. Thank you very much.

And with that, we now are going to go to public comment because we don't have any other Assemblymembers here at this point in time. So we'll start with public comment. And the public comment is only on the 15 departments that we covered today. So if you want to cover something about the Department of Water or whatever, please, this is the departments that we have here today. And we'll start our public comment with people in the audience first.

And we are ready if you'll start with your name and affiliation.

Yes, Mr. Chairman, well, and no Members, but maybe if they're listening. Brendan Tuig, on behalf of the California Air Pollution Control Officers Association, which are the executive officers from the 35 local air districts, I was just going to touch very briefly on the overview part of the hearing. I won't get into any detail. All I want to say, and I'll provide more comment at subsequent hearings, is that we very much appreciate your comments about outcomes and cost effectiveness.

We have three air district programs at ranked at the top of the LAO's ZEV report on the 2022-23 ZEV package. And those three programs are the Carl Moyer program, the AB 617 Community Air Protection program, and also the FARMER program. And so those programs, I won't comment on Moyer today, but 617 and FARMER, those provide quantifiable emissions. They are set for reductions in this budget. The FARMER program is actually zeroed out. And so what we want to convey is you can actually do both.

You can get your greenhouse gas reductions and you can also get your air pollution reductions. And so I'll comment more. And I do appreciate you letting me speak today, even though it's on the overview part. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Good morning, Chairman Bennett. Paul Mason with Pacific Forest Trust. I'll be brief. Very much appreciate the spirited conversation you had about prevention. We very much support the investments in wildfire and forest resilience, and that will need to be continued and increased going forward.

Also, really appreciate the focus on monitoring outcomes and making sure that as we're engaged in this colossal enterprise, we're trying to modify a million acres a year, that's 1% of California every year, that we have a rational, scientifically valid way of assessing are we making a difference and are we causing harm along the way? And that's something that's currently in statute and hasn't happened yet, so it'll be a place for the Legislature to follow up.

Last thing I'll really focus in on is on the cuts to the Wildlife Conservation Board funding and frankly, other related funding. As I think you noted as well, a lot of those cuts really fell disproportionately heavily on legislative augmentations that were made last year. And so some of the relatively positive, overarching, minimal cuts in some of these different packages really gloss over the fact that much of what's available was from those legislative augmentations.

So I think that there's going to be places where we can soften those cuts significantly. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Chair and staff. Alex Leumer, on behalf of the Environmental Defense Fund in Audubon, in strong support of maintaining the 20 million promised in last year's budget and provided for in the January proposal for the Department of Conservation's Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program, for which demand has exceeded funding to date and is anticipated to continue to grow as more land is retired under SGMA.

On behalf of Defenders of Wildlife, California Native Plant Society, Mojave Desert Land Trust, the California Wilderness Coalition, Sonoma Land Trust and Audubon Society, in strong opposition to the cuts to 30x30 funding. Generally, I won't get into the specifics of each agency, but the current proposed budget takes a substantial step backwards in the commitments to ensure that the state and its partners can achieve these important conservation, climate and equity goals.

The programs proposed for reductions are essential to laying the groundwork for effective use of future funding that will be needed to protect the state from the impacts of climate change and sea level rise. We urge the rejection of the deep funding cuts and the reductions going forward for the 30x 0 programs and climate resilience programs broadly. Lastly, we urge the Legislature to adopt the resource agencies proposed BCP to implement 30x30.

This modest BCP would add staffing to support the 30x30 implementation and reporting requirements under AB 2278. And then I'll just echo Paul's comments about the vegetation mapping for CAL FIRE.

Thank you very much.

Okay. Thank you.

Hi, I'm Laura Walsh with Surf Rider Foundation. I wanted to respond to a couple of coastal resilience points. Is that okay now or is that for next meeting?

Yeah, now is fine.

Okay, great. Yeah. We're representing 37 organizations opposing these cuts and asking for a restoration. And I just wanted to speak to the fact that this was said to be that there was already unprecedented funding for coastal resilience. That's just because the state only recently started looking into this. And as Assemblymember Bennett, you pointed out, the cost of no action is so much higher than planning now. And every dollar we spend now has such a higher value.

Just want to talk about the January coastal storms which were the picture for sea level rise for us along the coast. Santa Cruz is spending $10 million to repair less than a 1 mile stretch of road. We got to do the upfront spending now. This is really existential for us coastal and ocean orgs. And the LAO office report said that this raises concerns. We think that's putting it lightly. This isn't belt tightening for us. This is drowning. So please restore the budget. Thank you so much.

Thank you for your testimony and being brief.

Good morning. Good afternoon. I'm Paula Birdsong, Executive Director for the Sacramento Regional Conservation Corps, and I represent the other 13 local Conservation Corps throughout the state. We're here to ask that you reconsider the $23.5 million cut for our programs. We are the preventive end. We're the local folks. We have a workforce of 1000 corps members for crews to go out and to do the work that needs to be done locally.

And we really urge just another look at that cut because we serve the most at risk communities. We have 18 to 26 year olds who go out locally and do that work. We are out there day by day. We are on the ground making sure that we do the preventive work. We don't do any of the fire suppression, but just the work to make sure that those fires don't happen. So I brought some of my core members.

They'd like to tell you what those cuts mean to them. We don't want any of them not to have a job. Thank you so much.

Thank you for your testimony. I'm going to like this.

Good afternoon. My name is Elliot Thomas. I'm 19. I work at Sacramento Regional Conservation Corps and I was recommended to work there by my probation officer around like August, September time. And I really liked it over there, you know what I'm saying? I'm able to do agriculture, landscaping, RC work, Caltrans especially. It really helped me change my life. All glory to God, you know what I'm saying?

So I really would appreciate if you continue to support the conservation corps, not just in Sacramento, but in California in general. Thank you.

Thanks for taking the time.

Hello. My name is Tierra Williams. I'm 19 years old and I, too, am representing the Conservation Corp. I chose the corp because for me, it was more than just a stepping stone. For me, it's been a full ladder. As a homeless young adult, it has been so much more than just a job for me. The resources they've offered are helping me to get back on my feet right now, especially since before coming here, I was definitely on my last leg.

I definitely beyond grateful for the opportunity to be a corps member. And if the budget gets cut, a lot of people that are like me will lose out on getting a second chance that we definitely needed way more than anything else right about now. So thank you. I thank you for your time.

Your testimony means a lot. Thank you.

Hello, my name is Rodrigo Aribe, and I'm here with the Sacramento Regional Conservation Corps. I actually found them online. I was job searching, you see, you know, at my area, it's kind of hard to find work at times. Especially jobs that are willing to train up new people. So the Conservation Corps definitely helped me with that. I mean, they offer a wide range of training and benefits. So, yeah, it definitely helped me get things sped along in my life.

So I really hope funding does not get cut.

Thank you very much for that testimony.

Hi, my name is Jordin Barnes.

Could you bring the microphone down a little bit, please?

Hi, my name is Jordin Barnes. I'm also representing the Sacramento Regional Conservation Corps. I had administrative work experience prior to entering the corps, but due to the pandemic, I was unable to find work in my field and was forced to take positions in restaurants, piercing shops, and eventually the Conservation Corps. The corps ended up being a godsend, though, because within a month of being at the corps, Paula, our Director, assessed my resume and abilities and presented me with a career opportunity.

I'm proud to say that I've now been working at Environmental Policy Consulting Firm since September of 2022. I was only with the corps for a short while, but I immediately saw the impact that this program had on my peers. A lot of minority youth are forced to choose between working and finishing their education, which puts them in unstable situations and sends them on downward spirals. Here at the corps, students must work to earn their diploma while attending their paid job training.

This means that they don't have to choose between one or the other. Cutting funding to this program would be detrimental to the success of our youth in underserved communities. Thank you.

Thank you for your testimony.

My name is Albert Weisreeves. I also work at SRCC, Sacramento Regional Conservation Corps. This program has done wonderful things. My home detention officer referred me to the place, and when I did, he asked me if I wanted to work and go to school, and I said yes, and it's completely changed my life. I would recommend anybody that wants to do something with themselves and make a chance for themselves, something to better themselves.

This is the place to go if you're 18 to 26 and without your guys' funds, won't be possible. So we appreciate-- I also have three weeks from now, I'll get this off. I have completed all my drug tests. I've done all that. I got 45 credits left on my diploma, and I've got forklift certified, career certified.

We are career class certified. I'm currently trying to work my way to crew leader right now, and I've learned a lot of things. Recycle Caltrans, how to use the lift gates on the trucks, how to work the forklifts, all that. And I've done all the safety trainings and stuff. I learned a lot of things with this company, and we'd appreciate it, not just for the Sacramento Regional Conservation Corps, but all the corps, if you can, because it does make a difference.

And when somebody does need more or less, like, a betterment for themselves, they need that place to go, and that's the place.

Congratulations for what you've accomplished personally, and thanks to all five of you for being inspirational today. Really appreciate you being here. Thank you.

Yes, sir.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and staff. Rico Mastrodonato with the Trust for Public Land. And I'm here to talk about a couple of specific programs briefly and then give a comment about the budget cuts. Specifically, there is a new program at CAL FIRE to green schoolyards, public schoolyards, K through 12. This is an extremely important program. Our school campuses, public school campuses, pardon me, are climate liabilities. They're covered in pavement. There's no permeable surfaces. They're heat islands. Kids can't even use them. They're dangerous.

Since it's publicly owned land, we can do these conversions relatively cheaply, a couple of million dollars. So this is a new program. We're counting on the Legislature to make sure that it stays funded. So I wanted to bring that up. The other thing I wanted to bring up is the state parks' Local Parks Program that was zeroed out. It's been oversubscribed by $6 billion. There's not a single legislative district that hasn't benefited from this.

Over 3 million community members have access to parks within walking distance because of this program. And we talk about accessibility all the time. Well, the best success to accessibility is making it within walking distance. As soon as there's transportation, you have barriers. Lastly, I want to say the budget cuts specifically to programs that are preparing us or helping make us more resilient and adapt us to climate change being cut. It's hard to get your brain around.

People are our environment, our habitat, our water supply, our communities. Human beings are dying from heat and numbers that we don't fully understand, and we're in a lot of trouble. We're not prepared. So make the cut somewhere else, but not to adaptation programs. Thanks. Thank you.

Hello, Chairman Bennett? Julie Retner from River Partners. I'm also the President of Reclamation District 2092, which is a flood management agency on the San Joaquin River. I'm here to advocate for the recovery of the $40 million San Joaquin Valley floodplain funding in the budget for this year. I have the pleasure of working with lovely corps Members like this to implement floodplain restoration projects for the last 20 years in the San Joaquin Valley.

And what we've learned over time is that these public investments in floodplains are not only the biggest bang for our buck in terms of climate resilience, flood safety, water storage, below ground and ecosystem recovery, but they're also needed to be scaled up in very important ways right now. And we have a broad alignment amongst the sectors of the San Joaquin Valley, the Administration and the Legislature about how important it is to scale up these efforts to expand our floodplains.

This is definitely a pay now or pay later endeavor. We lost more lives in California in the last month and a half to flood catastrophe than we did to virus. And so I strongly encourage this legislative committee to not only restore that funding for floodplains, but I also extend an invitation to come visit the river with me, and I'll show you what these look like on the ground. They're not new, they're not pilot, they're demonstrated improvements. Thank you.

Thank you. And if you haven't picked up on it, that little buzzer is the 1 minute buzzer, right? I assume everybody's got that.

Okay, I'll talk fast. Daniel Gluesenkamp with the California Institute for Biodiversity, proud partner of Power and Nature Coalition. So some of what I'll say is reflected in the letter that we've submitted, three things. First of all, thank you. Thank you very much. It's clear what hard work it is to develop these budgets for you and for the staff especially.

Thank you very much. Second, appreciating what we've built here, the models that you built, the structures, the systems are totally new. They turn their back on the past, rebuild it, look toward the future. They center equity. They talk to communities. They involve the voices of scientists. They do something new that two years ago we couldn't have dreamed of. There was a lot more despair.

The last couple of years of budgets have not just invested in things, but shown a framework that we didn't see before, which is a strategy for saving everything, for saving all of us. And so I'd ask you for, third, defend that. Don't give into it just because, don't cut the things just because they're new. Those new things are special. Those are the things that are seeds of the future that you are building.

And it's just getting started and there's folks who want to prune it before it can flower. But I would ask you, Defend 30x30 funding, Wildlife Conservation Board coastal conservancies. Defend the coastal resilience funding in particular emergencies such as defending, and protecting intertidal biodiversity, and focus on things which won't be funded by a bond which prep us for bonds and for shovel-ready federal funding.

Mr Chairman, members. Darryl Lucien here testifying on behalf of the 40-acre Conservation League, one of the state's only Black land conservancies. We want to testify in support broadly with many of the other things that have been mentioned for 30x30 funding as a whole. But we want to drill down on a few programs. CAL FIRE forest health funding.

I would echo what was previously said, we're going to pay for it anyway, so we might as well fund it up front as opposed to having to declare a State of an emergency and paying for it that way.

We're acquiring actually 650 acres of land based on funding that we received earmarked in last year's state budget and the Forest Health grant program, along with the Forestry Corps program within the California Conservation Corps, we believe are going to be critical to helping us meet our dual goals of conservation and public access. And so we want to urge support for both of those programs. Sierra Nevada Conservancy funding as well, because they fund some very similar things that are very important, and that's what we have. Thank you.

Hi Chair and staff Nicholas Mazadi. On behalf of the Santa Cruz County mid Penn region.

Should be a little closer to the microphone. Even a little closer, you're really hard to hear it. There you go. Good. Why don't you pull that mic up a little bit? There you go. Okay, cool. That helps.

Thanks. Nicholas Mazati on behalf of Midpen Regional Open Space District, the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County, Save the Redwoods Leagues. Semper Environments Fund and the California State Parks Foundation, all expressing strong concerns over the governor's proposed cuts to the coastal resilience package, particularly the $175 million for this year and $150 million for next year. All funding for coastal conservancies, coastal protection and adaption efforts. The Governor is proposing to cut this program by 43 percent, which is much-needed funding for programming to protect the coast.

It'll drastically slow down our progress in building a climate-smart climate-resilient community preparing for sea level rise and meeting our 30x30 goals. This funding is needed and ready to go to on-the-ground programming. By pulling this back, we'll be setting ourselves back multiple years. While we acknowledge the need for some of these cuts are necessary, this is not the place to make them.

We really appreciate the steps taken last year in the budget and we encourage you guys not to take a step backward. Thank you.

Thank you. Mr. Chair. Mark Fenstermaker here for the California Association of Resource Conservation Districts, the California Council of Land Trust, want to offer our support for issue five, implementation of AB 1757.

Like to echo the comments earlier made regarding the cuts to Coastal Conservancy and WCB want to focus in on the cuts proposed to the Department of Conservation's climate Smart Lands program.

This is really investing in our clients, members, as well as other on-the-ground local agencies, nonprofits and their capacity and their ability to implement the projects that are going to get us to our goals for 30x30 and nature-based solutions. I want to switch over to the discussion on CAL FIRE and their funding. I certainly echo all the comments about prevention.

I want to talk about culture change in that one of the places we see there needs to be a change is around the way we're funding projects. We really need to scale up how we're funding landscape scale approaches and strategies, rather than just a project by project basis.

And then lastly, on behalf of Earth Justice, on issue number eight, relating to CalJAN's budget, there are a couple of accountability measures we'd like to see before CalJANs has appropriated more funding and more staff, particularly the implementation of AB 1057 from several years ago and the public health rulemaking coming out of that bill. And we certainly look forward to working with you and your staff on that going forward. Appreciate it.

Rebecca Marcus, on behalf of the American Farmland Trust, Carbon Cycle Institute, the California Climate and Agriculture Network, and the California-certified organic farmers, we're in strong support of issue number five. Passage of AB 1757 was an important step in integrating the natural working lands into our state's climate strategy. Additionally, while we understand the constrained fiscal circumstances the state finds itself in, we are disappointed that the Administration has focused the majority of those proposed reductions on our climate investments.

We specifically are opposed to the $4 million reduction to the Climate Smart land management program. And I echo the sentiments just said by my colleague Mr. Fenstermaker on this program. Opposed. Also opposed to the $25 million reduction to the Sustainable Ag Glands conservation program. Thank you.

Hello, I'm Erin Woolley on behalf of Sierra Club California. I just want to echo the previous statements made regarding 30x30 and the proposed cuts there.

We're in strong support of fully funding these programs and ensuring that we're making investments now that are needed to be able to meet the goals that the Legislature and the administration have committed to for 30x30. On a separate note, I just want to say that we are aware the administration has introduced a bill, a budget trailer bill, related to the western Joshua Tree endangered species proposal, and Sierra Club will be opposing that trailer bill.

And I didn't catch your organization.

Sierra Club California. Thank you very much.

Hello and thank you for listening to all of these comments, Mr. Bennett. Abigail Miles on behalf of the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County.

Also just echoing all the comments made before regarding cuts to funding to coastal resilience and to WCB as part of the 30x30 package, I would just highlight, as someone mentioned earlier, January kind of demonstrated why this funding is so critical right now, specifically the funding to the coastal conservancy to make sure our entire coastline is ready to carry out adaptation measures and build climate resilience.

Also would like to echo the comments made about Doc's sustainable Aglands conservation program and the $25 million cut zeroing out the general fund dollars for that program. Would like to express concern about that and just emphasize what a crucial program that is to conservation efforts statewide. Thank you.

Thank you very much. We will now go to the phone lines. Operator, do we have anybody on the phone lines?

Thank you. For public comment, you may press one and then zero. And we will go to line 25. Your line is open.

Good afternoon, Chairman. Rebecca Baskins with Kahn, Soares and Conway, thank you for the review of climate investments in the 2023 proposal. We wanted to highlight again the lack of funding proposed in the governor's January budget for the farmer program.

This program enables California farmers to turn over high emission diesel tractors and equipment to cleaner or zero emissions. The programs, administered by carbon local air districts, touch every area of California and is historically oversubscribed, although it is one of the most cost-efficient climate investment on a dollar-per-emission reduction basis. But most importantly, funding for the program results in immediate air quality improvements for all communities. When appropriate, we encourage the subcommittee to reevaluate the need for this program and reinvest this year's budget. Thank you.

Thank you. Next caller.

Thank you. Next, we'll go to line 28. Your line is open.

Good afternoon, Chair Bennett. This is Megan Cleveland with the Nature Conservancy calling to request that the Legislature preserve critical funding in the budget, support climate resilience and biodiversity conservation. As many before have highlighted, the governor's January budget proposal makes significant cuts to natural resources and climate spending, and these cuts are far greater than the proposed reductions in other areas of the budget.

In total, the proposed reductions for multi-year investments in nature-based climate solutions is more than $1.5 billion. Additionally, the governor's January budget proposal reduces general fund expenditures for the California Natural Resources Agency by 37 percent. We ask the Legislature to protect critical investments in nature-based solutions and biodiversity conservation, and we would also like to voice our support for Ms. Rentner's ask to protect funding for the San Joaquin Valley floodplain restoration.

Additionally, we recommend that the Legislature restore and preserve General funded corporations to programs that are considered ineligible for special funding or bond funding. And then finally, these cuts demonstrate that California urgently needs a climate bond and a disciplined investment plan that goes with it. And this will be a down payment to address growing challenges in managing natural resources for the benefit of all Californians. Thank you so much.

Thank you for your testimony. Next caller.

Next, we'll go line 29. Your line is open.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to comment. This is Ben McCue from outdoor outreach in San Diego. And we're a San Diego-based youth development nonprofit and just wanted to mention that we're urging the committee to provide full funding for the coastal conservancies explore the coast program. And through that program, since 2019, we've provided ongoing experiences and connections to more than 2000 youth and their families from climate-vulnerable communities in San Diego and Imperial counties.

And the ripple effect that we've seen in this program is profound. And several of the young adults who first joined outdoor outreach as explore the coast participants are now paid instructors and mentors meeting our explore the coast programs today. One participant even shared that through a kayaking program in San Diego Bay, she was able to connect to her here and now moment that allowed her to manage her anxiety and depression.

She went on to become an outdoor outreach instructor, a tide pool guide at Cabrillo National Monument, a student at UC Berkeley and was actually most recently appointed to the California Youth Empowerment Commission. And for all of these reasons and more, we really urge the Committee to provide the full amount and bring back the $2.6 million reduction that the Governor proposed to the Explorer Coast.

Thank you. Line 24, your line is open.

Good afternoon, chair and members, Bonnie Benhayon with the Climate Center, thank you for the opportunity to provide public comment today. We respectfully urge the Legislature to reject the deep cuts made to California's investments in its national and working land. This funding is an investment in not only its commitment to achieve carbon neutrality, but also its goals for adaptation, resiliency, and protecting air and water quality for its residents.

Furthermore, we know that the work we don't do now on our coastlines, agricultural lands, urban lands and other landscapes will result in far more costs and damages to our communities, environment and economy down the line. To that end, we strongly support the budget change proposal submitted by CNRA to support the implementation of AB 1757. This process is critical in laying out the framework and the much needed scaling up of the use of our natural and working lands as major climate solutions.

Lastly, we're looking forward to the discussions on a climate bond. But it cannot be relied on to backfill these important programs because, one, given the recent performance of environmental measures on the statewide ballot, and two, the fact that if approved, we would not be able to push these revenues out the door, likely until July 2025, which is far too late.

Thank you for your testimony. Next caller.

Thank you. Next, we'll go to line 20. Your line is open.

Yes. Good afternoon, Chair Bennett and Members of the Committee. Andrew Sall with the Western Riverside County Regional Conservation Authority, one of the largest habitat conservation plans in the nation. We would just like to also express our support for restoring the proposed $6 million in cuts from the $36 million in available funding to CDFW for natural community conservation programs. Thanks for your time.

Thank you. Next caller.

Thank you. We'll go to line 18. Your line is open.

Good afternoon. This is Jennifer Caballero, and I am the Executive Director of the California Association of Museums. Thank you so much, chair Bennett. I strongly urge this Committee to restore the $29 million that had been allocated for the museum grant program through the CRNA. Museums around the state are trusted sources of information, and they have the capacity to inspire real change in individuals and society.

There's really a big bang for the buck in these museum grant programs, and over the years, we do see outcomes of these modest investments in public awareness and behaviors. Museums in the grant program bolster efforts to educate the public about the impacts of climate change and how Californians respond.

As Secretary Crowfoot mentioned earlier, California is on the forefront of many ways that we need to adapt to climate change, and these grants address the potential for loss of cultural, historical, and irreplaceable artifacts and buildings, all increasingly at risk for the impacts of climate change. Retaining these grant funds is crucial. We are on the right track with this, and I urge you to reconsider the proposal to cut $29 million from the museum grant program. Not a ton of money, but it can make a huge difference.

Thank you for your testimony. Next caller.

Thank you. Line 27, your line is open. Please go ahead. Line 27. Please go ahead. That's your line. Okay.

That is me. Thank you. My name is Harry Spanglet. I'm the chair of Sacramento Inspiring Connections Outdoors, ICO. We're an all-volunteer group and we're under the Sierra Club, but we receive absolutely no funding from them. We take local underserved kids working through local agencies and schools on completely free outdoor adventures.

And one of our most popular trips by far are our trips to the ocean, because invariably the vast majority of our participants, high school, college, all the way down to grade school, have never been to the ocean. They've heard about the ocean all their lives through media, but they've never been there either due lack of resources. But a big thing we find is also just apprehension of going to a strange place of how they're typically, people of color are going to be received.

The explore the coast grants support our effort to get kids to the coast from Sacramento, where it's a good two hour drive, and it is critical to our effort. We'd like to continue taking kids to the ocean and showing them, without an effort to get them to go theirselves.

So I'm specifically asking about the explore the coast grant that is under the state coastal conservancy that you not cut the, I believe it was $2.6 million, which in the scheme of things is not a lot in the budget, but has a huge impact on the kids that get to go to the coast.

Thank you for your testimony, next caller.

Next we'll go to line 22. Your line is open.

Good afternoon. Chuck Mills, senior grant administrator for TreePeople. Thank you for holding this informational hearing today. I wanted to focus on one of the programs under CAL FIRE that was not mentioned but is pertinent both the climate resiliency and, of course, the CAL FIRE budget, and that is the urban and community forestry program. This program has been proposed for reversion of $20 million and an additional $30 million held back for fiscal year 2022.

Going back to some of your comments, Chairman Bennett, and aligning with them with regard to great outcomes with our tax dollars and early proactive action, $50 million for the Urban and Community Forestry program, which incidentally zeros out the program for fiscal year 22 translates into 66 awards provided over the last two years. In the program, 60,000 trees planted and 275,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalents stored. It is the preeminent program in California for urban areas and nature based solutions to address extreme heat and carbon sequestration.

One of the other things I'd like to raise quickly is the program, while there may be funding available.

Thank you, but we are running out of time here and we're going to have to go on. Operator, would you please tell me how many more callers we have in the queue?

We have four more callers in queue.

You said four? Four. Okay, great. Thank you.

You're welcome. Next we'll go to line 26. Okay.

Good afternoon, Chairman Bennett. This is Marc Engstrom, I'm the policy Director for Ducks Unlimited, and I will keep my comments brief. I just would like to echo the previous comments not only on the proposed cuts to the Wildlife Conservation Board and sustainable ag programs, but also, as you pointed out earlier in the hearing, the $40 million appropriation for the San Joaquin Valley floodplain restoration that may be made.

Whole resources agency stated that there are other funding sources that can supplant that reduction, and I look forward to working with you and the committee to see that come to fruition. Thank you.

Thank you for your call. Next speaker.

Thank you. We'll go to line 12. Your line is open.

Good afternoon, Chairman Bennett. My name is Adri Howe. I'm the Executive Director of the Channel Islands Maritime Museum in Oxnard. We're a small museum.

We've served the community for 32 years, and we are a proud member of the California Association of Museums. I'm speaking today to urge all of you to reconsider the proposal to cut 29 million of the previously approved $50 million in funds for the museum grant program. I'm talking about human resources right now. Here, we teach children and adults about the sea, nature and creativity.

These dollars have tremendous potential to make a huge impact at museums across the state and to expand educational offerings to underserved audiences of all ages and backgrounds, and improve safety and modernize accessibility to our facilities and really to expand our capacity to tell inclusive stories to people who may not have been part of the museum experience before. Our museum, for example, is surrounded by many disadvantaged areas.

And really we serve a lot of these people and really expose them to things that they may not be exposed to in other places. So these grant awards really make a difference and they really make a difference to a lot of museums. That not have endowments. So I hope we can count on your support to rescue this important resource. Museums are not a luxury. They really are a necessity, and they're part of the training ground for our next generation of citizens. So thank you for your time today, and thank you for your consideration. .

And I've admired the work that you guys are doing there in Oxnard, in that museum. So thank you for your call today. Next caller.

Thank you. We'll go to line 35. Your line is open.

This is Erin Gilbert, on behalf of the Pacific Crest Trail Association that manages the 2650-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada, of which 1700 miles are in California.

And I would echo the comments before me in support of 30 x 30 and to reject the proposed cuts. Thank you.

Thank you. Next caller, thank you.

We'll go to line 32. Your line is open.

Hello, my name is Meghan Hanebutt, and I am the Deputy Director of City Surf project that is based in San Francisco. Our work is to provide equitable access to the coastline through the sport of surfing in collaboration with other equitable access orgs here in the Bay.

With explore this coast funding, over the last three years, we have been able to triple our staff, hiring exclusively participants who have come through our programming as alumni instructors. With the funding, we have hired and trained 10 alumni instructors coming from various underrepresented, underfunded and climate-vulnerable program communities, effectively increasing our ability in our programming to have culturally representative instructors who look like them and come from their communities.

We are a San Francisco-based youth development nonprofit and out of our alumni program, our pilot alumni program that has been running over the last two years, 40 percent of our program participants either attend or intend to attend coastal colleges and or undergraduate programs that will be directly involved in marine biology and oceanography.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Operator, do we have any other callers?

There are no further public comment. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you to all of the callers. Sorry that we had to cut some of you off here. We have had a fairly extensive hearing here today. Next Wednesday, we will be discussing zero-emission vehicles, the California Air Resources Board budget, Department of Food and Agriculture. And we hope to those of you that are interested, we'll see you here, and we're going to adjourn this meeting. Thank you very much.