Senate Standing Committee on Governmental Organization

Hello. There you go. I think. Can you hear me? Good afternoon. I want to welcome everybody for today's hearing, today's joint oversight hearing, Seismic Resilience, Functional Recovery, and a Multi-Hazard Mitigation Investment Strategy. I'm Assembly Member Freddie Rodriguez, Chair of the Assembly Committee on Emergency Management, Committee on the Joint Legislative Committee on Emergency Management.

I also want to thank my vice chairs, Assemblymember Davies, Senator Limon, and Senator Dodd, Chair of the Senate Committee on Government Organization, for joining us today. They'll be running short due to other meetings, but their partnership this afternoon is appreciated.

As I always say, California is a disaster prone state and we must be ready to respond to two major disasters at the same time. Then the next major earthquake in California is only a matter of when, not if the big one is coming.

Last year, our communities held an informational hearing on California's preparedness for emerging earthquakes following the devastating earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.

That hearing made us clear that in addition to California's need for a robust urban search and rescue program and mobile field hospitals, we urge you need to update building codes, retrofit risk infrastructure, and invest in hazard mitigation funds wisely.

I also remain committed to protecting our most vulnerable residents and buildings by securing funding to establish a soft story, multifamily seismic retrofit program. We must apply lessons learned from Turkey and not ignore similar risks we face here in our own state.

For example, the San Francisco Chronicle reported about 3900 buildings in San Francisco have the same type of construction as the buildings that collapsed in Turkey. Underestimating the potential consequence of a major earthquake is a deadly mistake.

Today is an opportunity to hear more about California's current building code strategy and what it should be moving forward, how California is strengthening the functional recovery of critical infrastructure, lifelines and housing. How California is preparing for secondary hazards like fire and floods that often follow a catastrophic earthquake and how California is becoming a more resilient to all disasters by taking a multi-hazard approach to our hazard mitigation fund investments.

And before I turn it over for our Chair for opening comments, please let me remind everyone that the public comment may be limited to the end of the hearing due to other business in the state and the Assembly. However, members of the public are encouraged to visit our Committee's website to submit written comments.

With that, we'll go ahead and start. But before start, I think we have. Senator Archuleta, do you have a few words before we start?

Mister Chair? Of course. Excuse our tardiness. We just broke up our caucus, so all the Senators are still in the building finding their way here.

And I'm looking forward to the reports because obviously what's happening across the world when we hear about earthquakes and the fact that in California, it's something that we all know it's there, but it's how we prepare.

And I think that's what we're going to hear about today and how California can maintain its, our flow of business and continuity with our, with our citizens feeling safer because we're taking action. And I'm looking forward to the meeting. Thank you.

Thank you very much Senator. So with that, let's turn it over to our first panel. Our first witness will be Ryan Kersting, principal with Buehler Engineering in Sacramento and Chair of the FEMA Organized Functional Recovery Task Committee. Mister Kersting, you may begin when you're ready.

Great. Thank you very much Mister Chair and Members. I appreciate the opportunity to present to all of you today and to share what's happening at the federal level and how it might be able to benefit the work we're doing here in California. As you mentioned, I'm a structural engineer here in Sacramento with Buehler Engineering.

I'm also a past president of the Structural Engineers Association of California. I'm also currently the immediate past president of the National Council of Structural Engineers Association. So what we're doing here in California is very much informed by what we're doing around the country. I'm also an active Member of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute.

And while I'm naming these names, I'm not speaking on behalf of any of them today, but these really are the leading organizations working to promote seismic resilience and earthquake mitigation programs. SEAOC, NCSEA and EERI together represent thousands of Members across California and even tens of thousands across the United States.

And they are the experts when it comes to understanding our building code requirements for earthquake design, the expected performance of buildings during earthquakes, as well as the effective policies when it comes to earthquake preparedness of our communities, of our organizations, and our fellow citizens. I want to mention a few other things happening at the federal level.

I previously served as a Member of the Federal Advisory Committee on Earthquake Hazards Reduction and was a chair of a Committee of Experts that wrote the report to Congress under the leadership of both FEMA and NIST, working to report on recommended options for improving the built environment in terms of post earthquake reoccupancy and functional recovery time.

And again, I'm bringing this back from the federal work to here in California because we have a chance to lead and take advantage of this work happening at the federal level. Now, as you mentioned, I'm also serving as Chair of the Functional Recovery Task Committee.

We are currently charged with developing design criteria to be able to design new buildings to meet appropriate functional recovery times instead of just providing basic life safety. And these recovery times are intended to support the post earthquake response, recovery, and long term community resilience by having buildings of different types recover at the times we need them.

For example, grocery stores or pharmacies that right now might just recover in months, be able to recover in a short amount of time. Many of you know this is not our first conversation about these topics, and so I'm thankful for the leadership that you have all shown to make sure we're continuing to talk about these topics.

But unfortunately, despite all of your great support, California has not yet adequately implemented the necessary actions.

And now, I know I don't have enough time to cover everything today, but I want to start with some of the basics so we can set the ground and understand the same, have the same understanding, and then give some more of the updates at the federal level so that they can be leveraged by the work here in California.

And the background document that was prepared for this Committee is great, has a lot of detailed information, a lot of good resources there, and I'll be hinting at a few of those things. And I hope that you can take a look at some of that and we can have further conversations afterwards.

So let's start with some of the basics. First, current building codes. They are aimed to provide life safety. They minimize the probability of building collapse during an earthquake. But this does not mean they can necessarily be reoccupied right away, if at all, following an earthquake.

According to FEMA, 20% to 40% of modern code conforming buildings would be unfit for occupancy following a major earthquake in California, taking months or years to repair. 15% to 20% of those buildings might be economically unrepairable. In other words, new buildings are built to code, but that does not mean they're built to last.

Second, newer editions of building codes do not apply retroactively to existing buildings, and I think we all recognize that. But it's important to remember that many types of existing buildings built to these older building codes are known to perform poorly in earthquakes and remain vulnerable unless strengthened to collapse.

Third, our communities really need something better than life safety. They need the functions and services that necessary to run their communities quickly following earthquakes. Now, to achieve that goal, we really need to start working on a function recovery building code, not just a safety based code.

We also need to be working on effective retrofit programs for vulnerable buildings. That FEMA NIST report to Congress had seven big recommendations. The most primary central recommendation was to develop this post earthquake recovery based objectives, and we're working on that right now. That report was written in 2021. It's hard to imagine it's already three years old.

But we've made progress on that central recommendation. We're also making progress on the three primary recommendations for the built environment. How do we design our new buildings? How do we retrofit existing buildings? How do we handle lifeline infrastructure as well?

But I want to make sure this Committee also knows it's not just about the engineering of how we build our built environment. It's also about our social and human networks.

And that report also has three primary recommendations that focus on things like pre disaster recovery planning, education and outreach to enhance awareness at the public level and improving access to financial resources.

Even if we build the built environment to be quickly recovered, we still need our people and our organizations to be able to get back in them and to use them in an effective amount of time. So as an engineer, I'm focused on the built environment. I'm focused on that technical aspect of things.

But I want to encourage us to continue to work on the human and the social aspect of things as well, because those are just equally important, if not more so. So if I could leave you just with one key takeaway from that report. It really is focusing on functional recovery as our next generation of our building codes.

Building codes evolve in a generational pace. We used to do buildings that were brittle, and now we've learned about things like URM and non-ductile concrete. These are generational changes. Now, we've done a good job of providing safety in our new buildings. We need to start looking at recovery.

All right, so speaking of recovery, the Functional Recovery Task Committee that FEMA has organized, we're taking these recommendations from the FEMA/NIST report even further. We're working on developing design criteria that can be used in building codes.

These would apply to new buildings, and they will be focused on targeted recovery times based on the services provided by that building.

The goal here is to develop provisions that can achieve these recovery times instead of months to years of recovery, thinking about weeks to days, maybe even hours of recovery, depending on the type of service a building provides.

And the goal is also to reduce the total cost of ownership, total cost of ownership to the people who own and occupy the building, but also total cost to the community in terms of the response as well. If we can provide our buildings that can minimize damage and be more quickly occupied and up and running.

We're minimizing cost to society and cost to our emergency management programs as well. The first version of these provisions are going to be completed later in, sorry, middle of next year. So about a year from now, we'll have these first version of these provisions ready for consideration for future building codes.

Now, this is a FEMA organized effort, but it's important to remember that FEMA doesn't control what actually makes it into the building codes. So these are going to be called recommended guidelines or recommended provisions. But it's worth us here in California to be thinking about how we could use those recommended provisions to enhance our own building code.

Here in California. We need to control our own destiny. We shouldn't let someone else that will set up minimum standards for across the country dictate what's right for California.

The FEMA/NIST report to Congress recognizes that places like California and some of the other high seismic western states really do have risk that warrants additional action and additional code provisions above the basic national codes. So where do we go from here? Well, we all know the devastation that earthquakes can cause.

We know the toll that it can take on our communities and our society. But it doesn't have to be this way. Our colleague, Doctor Lucy Jones, likes to remind us. While earthquakes are inevitable, the disaster can be prevented, but it's going to take time and planning and energy.

For decades, California led the world in developing, adopting, and enforcing building codes and laws to improve seismic safety. Part of that process involves learning from earthquakes here in California, but also from around the country, or around the world as well, and then updating our laws and codes accordingly.

I just need to say, despite that global leadership in the past, we've actually now fallen behind. We're not doing what we need to do to protect our communities the way we could. We need to recognize that even California has more work to do. California right now is at risk. We're at risk of collapsed older buildings.

We're at risk of significant economic and social disruption due to prolonged recovery times of even modern, newer buildings. Again, your background packet contains a lot of great information, and toward the end of it is EERI's 2024 legislative priorities and actions.

Those summarize four different key areas of how to help us improve our resilience, starting with retrofitting vulnerable buildings, talking about how we adopt functional, recovery based building codes, looking at what we could do to protect housing and provide enhanced performance for housing in particular, and also upholding our current programs for earthquake preparedness of our hospitals.

As I'm mostly involved in that functional recovery building code development effort, I want to just call your attention to the actions that are listed there. In particular, California can be working right now to be ready to take advantage of the provisions that I'm working on in my Committee. That should be done by this time next year.

We need your help. One of those recommendations calls for the Building Standards Commission here in California to be prepared, authorized, and empowered to review those proposed code changes from FEMA and consider how to adopt them.

Here in California, due to our unique seismic conditions. There's consensus across the industry, there's consensus across various levels of government, and there's consensus here at home, at our community scale to start to design for functional recovery, not just safety. But we need your help to establish a path for us to partner with the Building Standards Commission to further that conversation and to think about how we can implement appropriate provisions in the California building code.

This really is a low cost, high reward effort. It can be pretty procedural. Quite honestly. It is going to take some legislative action, but it will have a simple goal and a simple result. In the end, we know our large earthquakes will occur here in California.

We know that we need to prepare now, and how we prepare now will impact how we respond and recover later. Our communities are vulnerable to those collapses, to those loss of life, to permanent disruption from our way of life.

And we must take action now to protect our future by retrofitting older, vulnerable buildings and by starting to design the next generation of buildings to a higher standard like functional recovery. Happy to answer some questions when time permits. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Now we'll move on to our next witness, Janiele Maffei, Chief Mitigation Officer of the California Earthquake Authority. You may begin when ready. Thank you.

Great. Thank you very much. And thank you, Ryan. It's a good setup to talk about building codes because the building code establishes essentially kind of fixes in time what the expected performance is of a particular building in an earthquake unless you step in and you do something retroactively or retrofit.

So I want to tell you about the California Earthquake Authority, our mitigation programs, and then touch a little bit about this whole idea of the building code and kind of using this mechanism of this insurance entity to promote mitigation in California.

The CEA go back to 1984 when the State of California passed a law called the Mandatory Offer Law that stated if a company writes insurance, homeowners insurance in California, they must offer earthquake insurance. The earthquake insurance policy is completely separate from the homeowners policy, but it must be offered.

The homeowner is not obligated to purchase, but it must be made available to them. Along came the Northridge Earthquake. Modeling of disaster was at its infancy. The insurance companies lost their shirts and they were going to stop writing insurance in California completely. Not just earthquake policies, but all insurance with that catastrophe.

Of course, it's not only an insurance catastrophe, it's a lending catastrophe. The state Legislature stepped in and created the California Earthquake Authority, a very unique entity. Not a state agency, but a publicly managed, privately financed instrumentality of the state.

When we talk about publicly managed, we report to a board that includes designees on behalf of the Governor, Insurance Commissioner and Treasurer, and the Assembly and State Senate. And we privately finance, though very important, not part of the state budget.

The money comes from 25 participating insurers who all joined the CEA, 13 at the beginning, and others who have joined, and policyholders premiums that we collect, of course, on an annual basis. So privately financed is very, very important.

We can't dip into the state treasury in the event of an earthquake, and the state, of course, can't dip into the California Earthquake Authority in a bad year, but very important because there was a very strong mission to educate, mitigate, and insure. Educate so that Californians make informed decisions about their risk. Mitigate.

So not only are we transferring risk through the core business of insurance, but we're trying to reduce damage as well. And I'm very, very proud that mitigation was part of the original charge to the CEA. And it's funded in a unique way in that the CEA, of course, as an insurance company, has a certain body of cash.

That cash is invested, and 5% of the investment income on that goes towards the loss mitigation fund, towards mitigation. It's maxed out at $5 million a year, and we're right about at 5 million now. That's how much comes into our program.

But we've been very, very lucky to be able to leverage our funding with, for two years in, I think, 2018-19 state funding, there were $3 million for two years in a row that came and then predominantly now it's FEMA funding. Our last grant was $84 million from the FEMA Hazard mitigation grant program.

Now, the loss mitigation Fund is managed, manages a program called, sorry for the long names, California Residential Mitigation Program. Terrible acronym, CRMP. CRMP, I think. But we manage that jointly in another unique fashion, jointly with the California Office of Emergency Services through a joint powers agreement. And so it's a combination.

There's our agents, a little bit of agency status that we get from Cal OES. It's been a very, very successful partnership to manage these funds. And let me tell you about the programs that we've developed. Our flagship program, Earthquake, Brace and Bolt, was started in 2013. I'm very proud to say we did nine houses our first year.

I was shooting for 20, so it wasn't too bad. 700 the next year. We are now at 25,000 and counting. And with our available FEMA funding, expect to hit 30,000 at the end of this particular grant. 30,000 homes retrofitted in California. This is really, really catastrophic kind of damage to houses.

The idea here is that these are these older houses that slide off their foundation. But the retrofit is really very basic, very simple. The cost benefit, enormous. Two days under that house to put bolts and plywood in.

And that house, we've significantly increased the likelihood that that house will remain on its foundation in the event of an earthquake. So very exciting.

To address the need to absolutely meet the needs of our vulnerable communities, we have a supplementary grant for people who are household income qualifying, that can get, instead of just the 3000 against, a $5,000 retrofit can get pretty close to the full amount.

And we introduced that two years ago and that's been very successful, very happy about that. We opened a second program for a second vulnerability. I think you all can picture the Marina District after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.

The houses that have now, this is not the multifamily apartment complex, but single family houses with garages on the first floor. That soft story condition can be actually very, can be catastrophic. Partial or full collapse earthquake. Soft story was introduced to address that. We've got 5 million from FEMA.

And then I'm very proud to announce that we have received $40 million from FEMA through the BRIC funding to stand up a multifamily soft story retrofit grant program. So we just got that announcement just recently.

So we've been given the go ahead for the tier one or phase one, which is to stand up the program, kind of tell them how we're going to do it, get together a list of buildings back to FEMA, and then we're pretty darn sure with our experience from our other programs, we'll be able to proceed with this program.

These programs are really, really very important. I wanted to end with kind of a, you know, Ryan set this up perfectly to talk about retrofits. Retrofits are for existing buildings, and existing buildings are not managed by the building code. The building code is for new buildings. There are separate standards that manage the retrofits of these older buildings.

And, in fact, the CEA contributed with FEMA to the development of some of these standards. And what's important about them is that the building code for our new buildings really does set the baseline for how we retrofit our existing buildings.

And I want you to think about insurability for a minute here, because, of course, I work for an insurance entity, but insurability, when FEMA comes in after an event, we have this image of someone on a white horse. The average is between $3,000 and $5,000 in individual assistance that goes to people. It is not an insurance entity.

They do not have the means or the purpose or the scope to make people whole. And all of this damage we see in single family residences and, frankly, in multifamily residences after an earthquake is borne by the individual building owners. And in many cases, the multifamily structures are not insurable.

I talked to a couple of insurance companies, and I said, do you insure multifamily soft stories? They said, no. I said, what if we retrofit them? Will you insure them? They said, no.

Now, California Earthquake Authority takes all comers, so we do, in fact, insure houses that have not been retrofitted, of course, with that drive to get them retrofitted as soon as we can. So when we talk about resilience in California, it's important to think of terms like insurability, of providing these mechanisms for funding.

And one way to do that is to think very seriously about the standards to which we not only build new construction, but to which we retrofit structures. So with that, I'll end with just a brief comment on functional recovery for houses, for residences. Is habitability. Habitability.

If you can imagine any one of our communities right now that is just struggling to put ADUs in and to find ways to build new housing construction, and then put on top of that a devastating earthquake that takes out and puts tens of thousands of people on the street. Habitability is extremely important.

We all work as a team in this earthquake engineering world. We appreciate that you're on our team. And with that, I would be happy to answer any questions, but also want to thank for this Committee's support in the past for our programs, and particularly for that multifamily soft story, which can be catastrophic damage.

So thank you so much.

Thank you very much for that. And so now bring it back to our Members. Any comments, questions? Yes, Senator Archuleta.

Good. Thank you, Mister Chair. I'm so happy to hear that California and FEMA had a joint venture in a little bit, but it seems like it's short, you know, $2.2 trillion from 1980 to 2021. That's a lot of damage. Lots and lots of damage.

And for mom and pop, you know, when they had that duplex or a young couple who just bought their first home, the retrofitting cost is immense.

So I'm hoping that maybe in the future you can increase that joint venture monies where this homeowner, brand new homeowner, can go ahead and look to FEMA for a grant or the state for a grant, because retrofitting in a standard 1800 square foot house runs anywhere from 10 to $15,000.

And it may not sound a lot to some, but to a couple or seniors, that's a lot of money.

And to be able to receive a grant that could be at least a portion of it as a grant and the rest of it can be paid over the life of a loan or whatever it might be, would really enhance things.

And I know in Southern California, Los Angeles County, we have the seismic shutoff valve that's required on four units and above. And that seismic shutoff valve is attached to the gas meter. And when the earthquake, that valve, that diode just moves from left to right and it shuts off the gas.

Even if that were granted as a precaution for further damage because obviously gas explosion, fires and so on. But if we could do something like that, that would be great. And I would, and I would appreciate you take a good look at it. Thank you, Mister Chair.

Thank you. Any other questions? Senator Limon.

Thank you. And thank you for being here and kind of walking us through this. I did have a question about the multifamily FEMA stand up grant programs. How many households does that touch?

I mean, we hear numbers like 40 million, and it might excite some people that it's 40 million, and it might concern others that 40 million is simply not enough for the magnitude of the state. And so I'm trying to put perspective on how much more we need to really be able to touch more households.

Well, thank you for that question. And we did some homework, obviously, to create our grant application to FEMA. And what cities who have mandatory ordinances and have, you know, many of these retrofits under their belt tell us is it's about $140,000 per building.

So, yeah, $40 million is going to be in the hundreds of buildings that we can provide grants to, not in the thousands. So I often get a little dismayed that my current job is a drop in the bucket.

25,000 sounds a lot like a lot to me when I compare that with what we estimate is a demand of a million houses in California needing this retrofit. I try and remain stoic and energized. What I'm hoping with these programs as well though, is we establish a culture of resilience where people know that these vulnerabilities exist.

They know when they buy a house, they should be looking for a retrofitted house. We start putting it in the MLS so that when they go to buy a house, it has value. So we need to have a culture and a vocabulary of resilience.

And I'm hoping these programs, although not bringing as much money as we would like, are bringing at least notoriety, awareness, and as I said, that culture of resilience.

And so I just want to repeat something you just said. We have over a million households in this state that need retrofitting.

So if you look at just that earthquake brace and bolt vulnerability, and I use age as a proxy, there are approximately a little over a million houses in areas of high hazardous that are that pre 1940 house. So unless they've been retrofitted, they are vulnerable.

Thank you. And then you also made another statement about some cities requiring it. Out of our 480 plus cities, how many cities require?

Right. I think it's in the neighborhood of seven statewide, maybe.

Seven cities?

Somewhere in that neighborhood.

Seven out of 480 plus?

Yeah, I mean the big ones. But I think there are, in fact, cities that are poised. They have voluntary ordinances ready to go, and they truly are waiting for some kind of financial assistance for their building owners. Thank you.

Senator Rubio, you have a question?

And, you know, I think I heard you say that most insurance just gave up and stopped operating here in the State of California. You know, I'm the Chair of the Insurance Committee on the Senate side. And, I mean, I feel like we can sort of equate this somewhat, maybe not exactly, to what's happening in the insurance market. Back in, I think it was 94. Right? The earthquake happened.

Correct.

I mean, that's what we had. We had, you know, this catastrophe where the insurance companies couldn't insure. The damage was so great that we were forced to create a separate entity because insurance market is, you know, they're independent. They're not. They're a business, and we could enforce them to stay. Right.

But at the end of the day, they came back, and they're paying into this CEA. They want to fund it, because the goal of an insurance company is to want to stay in California and write and make money in California. And so the reason they came together and, I don't want to say give up their money, but they are funding this right part of it. Because you want a healthy market. The more they share the risk, the better we are for it.

And when I think of what you're saying in terms of the deficiencies in structures, and you just said, I believe 1 million houses are in the height hazard area. I mean, all we need is an earthquake, and the entire infrastructure is going to crumble. Not homeowners insurance. Everything else is going to crumble.

And I say that because sometimes I have a hard time. A lot of people are struggling with insurance, and I often hear this comment, even from colleagues, why don't we force them? We should just force them to do it. And the hardest time I have is convincing my colleagues or educating my colleagues that we cannot force a private company to do anything. What we could do is collaborate and hope that we can figure out a structure where it's a win win, not only for our consumers, which is right.

The goal here is to make sure that, when that next earthquake happens, we don't leave our homeowners, just, you know, in an incredible position where they cannot recover. And the fact that we're also losing our homeowners insurance is going to be double hit, if you will.

They don't have the insurance on the earthquake insurance side, and they're not going to have homeowners insurance. But anyways, I want to take a moment for you to kind of explain how they came together to create the CEA, you know, and if you can go, I don't know if you were there at the time, but how did they come together to create it? And where did the discussions come from where they're all going to pay into this fund and be sustaining it for the rest of the lifetime of CEA?

Well, when I joined the CEA, the two founding fathers were still there. So I remember the stories. I mean, essentially it was a crisis in the financial institutions in California, and so it was the Legislature, and they created committees with the insurance industry and sat down across the table and talked about, okay, what kind of a policy should be made available and how much money should these insurance companies bring when they join and what should it look like.

And we have benefited from not having another earthquake collapse like Northridge for 30 years, you know, so there's been an ability to stand up a very substantial, healthy insurance entity. But we have, I think, something like 14% of California homes insured.

And my quick calculation for the risk is 80% of our population lives in counties that somehow touch the San Andreas Fault zone. 80% of our population. So, you know, there's always work to be done. I think, you know, mitigate our known vulnerabilities and insure for the unknowns is really where we want to be.

But unfortunately, we have these huge, huge populations. You know, we had huge construction booms around the World Wars, and those buildings are at risk, and across the board, not just residential. So I don't know that I offered you any answers, but there was a tremendous amount of collaboration and they were able to create an entity that allowed these companies to stay in the state.

Thank you for that. And the reason I wanted to highlight that, because I think the insurance crisis is our Northridge of this time in that we're struggling to figure out that piece where, you know, we are collaborative. Because, like I said, I'm the Chair, and I hear it, and I understand the mechanisms and how it's really difficult to mandate without sitting at the table and saying, oh, let's figure this out and let's come to the middle.

We kind of did that last year. But I just want to say that, in terms of education, I hope that we continue to be open minded because it does take collaboration and it's not one sided because we cannot force the insurance companies to stay. That is their choice. They walk away.

And our consumers, our, you know, homeowners are going to suffer the consequence. But I might engage you because I want to go deeper into that, but on a personal level, because we're working on a plan right now and your input would be valuable. But thank you for being here.

Thank you.

Thank you. Any other questions? I just had a question, a comment, really. Ryan, you said in your beginning that I don't know how long ago California was the leader. Right. And we fell behind. What do you think we should start doing now to get back up there? It would be like one thing we could focus on to try to get us back to be that leader like we were years ago. Right.

Because I always look at California, we like to be the leaders and a lot of other things when it comes to things like this, because I said earlier, we're a disaster prone state, and we should really be focusing on emergency preparedness response to earthquakes and everything else that suffers here. So what do you think should be something we should focus on now to try to get back in that number one spot like you alluded to?

Yeah, I mean, to me it's simple. We need to adopt a functional recovery building code. There's great work that CEA is doing on the retrofit side of things. There's great work that some of the cities are doing at the local level on retrofits. But we need to stop creating life safe buildings and start creating recovery based buildings.

You know, back to your point, Senator, about making sure homes are affordable for people. We need to be thinking about long term costs, and we need to make sure that affordable housing doesn't have this built in damage that's going to have to be paid for when the next earthquake strikes that people aren't going to be able to afford. That's going to knock them out of their home, too.

It really is an internal conflict for a lot of us structural engineers when we design only safe buildings because we know that a lot of those buildings can't be reused after an earthquake. And we think about the impact to our communities, to our neighbors, to our families, and we need to start doing recovery based building codes.

Makes sense. And just one last question. We talk a lot about the buildings collapsing. Right. From the earthquakes. But what about the infrastructure, the water, gas, electricity lines? How vulnerable are those, in your opinion? Because I think we never really talk about that. But that's also going to get, we're going to get cut off, right?

Yep. Absolutely. I mean, there's good work on leaders who've been thinking ahead of those topics, but there's a lot of work that needs to be done to lay the groundwork to really make some good progress on lifelines. The water supply, like you said, the power grid. There is a lot of work that needs to be done.

We talk a lot about. In my conversations, we talk a lot about carts and horses, chickens and eggs. We have to say, you have to make progress in parallel on both the building side of things and the infrastructure side of things. You can't wait for one to start or finish before the other starts. You really have to be making progress on both at the same time.

Okay, thank you. If there's no other questions, we'll go ahead and move on to our second panel. So thank you very much.

Thank you.

Our second panel will be Seismic Resilience and Multi-Hazard Mitigation Efforts. Our first witness is Robyn Fennig, the Assistant Director for Hazard Mitigation in the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. So when you're ready, thank you.

Noon, Mr. Chair and Committee. Thank you so much for having me today. My name is Robyn Fennig, and I'm the Assistant Director that oversees hazard mitigation, our entire statewide program at Cal OES. About a year ago, I moved from the fine State of Wisconsin to take the role here at Cal OES, honestly, because of, you know, maybe I have a different perspective coming from outside, but California really does set the precedent for what hazard mitigation looks like in my field, and I've dedicated my whole career to this field.

So being here to share a snapshot of the last 30 years of hazard mitigation and resiliency through the lens of Cal OES, really excited to be here with you today. The Cal OES hazard mitigation section, our goal is to bring in as much money as possible to support resiliency work for California communities, tribal entities, and organizations throughout the state because our goal is to make sure that folks have minimal impacts during disasters and can recover from them more smoothly.

Our whole program is a community driven and led approach, and it starts with local hazard mitigation planning. So these local hazard mitigation plans outline the risk to national hazards as well as the local strategies that communities come up with through an integrated planning process. And this approach makes sure that folks are contributing to those plans, the strategies to reduce risks, and then kind of leading with what projects will be funded through our grant programs.

From there, the communities submit those strategies they identified in their local plans to our office, and we work with them to try to secure as much FEMA Hazard Mitigation Assistance Grant funding as possible. We have kind of two different types of programs that we oversee. We have the nationally competitive grants.

I think those are getting a lot of press right now, generally speaking. There's the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC program, which is a nationally competitive program. We do submit every single eligible and complete sub-application to FEMA for the National Review Panel to evaluate.

And we make sure that we do everything we can at Cal OES so that every community's application is clear in plain language, and that reviewers can assign every point that we believe they're eligible to receive. Our communities have been extremely successful in the BRIC program, and actually, that was one of the things that brought me here.

California gets about 20% of the overall BRIC national competition grant funds. For states like Wisconsin, who have really bad building codes, to be able to contribute to this type of work is really exciting. 20% across three federal fiscal years is just under $780 million going towards resiliency for California communities and tribes.

And that's, you know, that's a pretty big amount of the money available for states to compete for last year. In fiscal year 22, all of our proposals were selected for further review. And I can tell you, my phone was ringing off the hook the day that those, the selections were announced, and that actually included two of the biggest seismic projects funded to date through the BRIC program. Janiele mentioned the CEA program for the Multi-Family Soft-Story Retrofit, you know, grant program, and that's really going to jumpstart that program again.

We also were able to pull in some funding for Kern County, just under $30 million to retrofit a hospital in Bakersfield. And so we've got states who are looking to us as leaders. We do also fund a good amount of mitigation for seismic risks through our post-disaster grant program, which is called the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program.

Janiele actually mentioned it. Because we do partner with CEA through a good number of grant programs and projects funded through the HMGP. It's a post-disaster grant program, which means we kind of get a set aside allocation based on the amount of damages sustained in a hazard event.

So we get a 20 million or a 20% allocation of all of the validated disaster claims. That's actually additional funding. Standard states get 15%. In states like California, who are enhanced states, receive an extra 5% of that post disaster allocation for all hazards mitigation that can be used statewide.

That amount is actually prioritized by Cal OES, but we don't do that in a vacuum. We do coordinate pretty closely with our state counterparts, and in particular with the Governor's office. We evaluate all the proposals that we receive using a publicly available notice of funding opportunity that assesses additional points for communities that sustain recent disaster damages.

Because, as all of you know on the Committee, that the best time to invest in resiliency is often after a disaster, when buildings are being repaired. And it doesn't necessarily matter what type of disaster happens, we have a really good opportunity in front of us and to do it in the most cost effective way possible.

We also do like to prioritize projects in communities that have both high social vulnerability and also experience high hazard risk. So we like that intersection of the both, because, again, that's going to be the best type of investment for California communities. We also factor in hazard ranking.

I think somebody mentioned the State Hazard Mitigation Plan when I walked in this morning. It's our assessment of all of the hazards that California experiences. But we don't just look at building exposure and infrastructure exposure, but we also look at the way that our equity priority communities are exposed to these hazards. And I say this because earthquakes are the highest hazard rated in this 2023 State Hazard Mitigation Plan. So that is our, you know, you'd hope to see that, with all those factors considered, that we're funding a lot of seismic projects.

And so between both the post disaster and the nationally competitive grant programs, we've had just shy of 1000 completed hazard mitigation projects. And of that, about 492 of them are specific for earthquake mitigation. So that's just under 50%, but it translates to $1.36 billion in federal funding that have gone directly to California communities to implement seismic mitigation.

And that's over 62% of our grant portfolio in the last 30 years. We also have about just under 100 active projects and projects coming through the pipeline that target both earthquakes and tsunamis, totaling about 618 million. So when all of these projects are all said and done, we'll have, in addition to the 25 to 30,000 structures that Janiele mentioned that CEA is targeting, we'll have another 9800 structures. And that also includes quite a bit of critical infrastructure.

It's kind of hard to compare apples to apples, since, you know, a water system or a dam, you know, might count as one structure, but we know that that might have a bigger impact when it comes to cascading impacts from seismic hazards. We've generally retrofit every type of structure imaginable.

You know, in addition to the single and multifamily residential structures, we're doing manufactured housing, dams, city halls, community centers, fire stations, and, of course, hospitals. I think that gets a lot of coverage as well. We also understand that it's not just about the buildings, but it's also about the community lifelines.

We do have a smaller pre-disaster grant, the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program, where we're working specifically with food bank hubs in Southern California to conduct seismic assessments, and then, based on those reports, funding seismic hazard mitigation through the HMGP, that post-disaster grant program I mentioned. And those really do target equity priority communities because we know that, you know, if there is, when the big one happens, we need to make sure that food security is something we're also thinking about.

I'll also mention we fund a lot of earthquake early warning systems, such as the one installed for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West Hollywood because this one is a facility that was directly impacted by Northridge. And they've had to, you know, use it in some capacities since it was completed.

But they provide that valuable couple of seconds notice to the occupants so that they can seek shelter, but also so that folks can take those life, safety, and protective actions to protect inventory workers and other folks in the buildings before the shaking arrives.

I'll close with mentioning that, you know, with building codes, FEMA and other federal agencies are starting to realize that they need to put some focus on building codes. So FEMA is now sponsoring applications to enhance local partnerships and support the development, adoption, and enforcement of local building codes.

Like I mentioned in my opening, California does have some of the best building codes. Again, I'm coming from a state that doesn't necessarily have the best track record when it comes to adopting a very old version of the International Building Code. But this year's BRIC program included this new state set aside allocation specifically for building codes.

We were guaranteed $2 million in federal funding to support communities and state partners to do building code work. We did fund one of the proposals from the City of San Diego, and they're locating inventory and assessing conditions and their structures of at risk seismic hazards because about 33% of their housing stock is at risk, even for minor shaking incidents.

So the proposal will take the data collected and assessed to amend its local building code, hoping to not just be a model for California communities, but for all communities across the country. And I think the last proposal that I'm the most excited about is actually for the Seismic Safety Commission.

And they're going to be reviewing and evaluating the existing California code of regulations as it relates to tie down earthquakes resistant bracing systems and foundation systems for manufactured housing, as well as assessing historic performance across recent earthquake events for those systems.

And this is important because about 6% of Californians, or about 2.3 million folks, live in manufactured housing. And we also know that, historically, those households tend to have the lowest incomes in our communities. And after shaking events, manufactured housing events, or manufactured housing units suffer a very disproportionate impact because occupants have the most difficult time recovering.

We'll definitely continue to work closely with our partners in this room and beyond the walls to make sure that Californians in our communities are informed about their hazard risk and have the support necessary to take actionable steps to reduce their risk to hazards, including seismic ones. I'm happy to take questions at the end of the panel. Thank you so much for having me.

Thank you again, Ms. Fennig. Now, our second speaker is Brian Strong, the Chief Resilience Officer for the City and County of San Francisco. Mr. Strong, you may begin.

Yeah, hi. Thank you very much. I am sorry I'm not able to be there in person, but I really appreciate the opportunity to address you and to talk about these issues. I could probably talk about any number of them for hours. These are things I've been thinking about a lot.

So I started this, my role as a Chief Resilience Officer in 2016. But I've been doing infrastructure planning in San Francisco since 2005-2006. And originally, the big concern was earthquakes. And that kept me up at night just thinking about how we're going to address all the vulnerable buildings in San Francisco.

We're talking about a very dense city that is sitting in between two major earthquake faults and a city that's experienced some massive earthquakes, right? Not, you know, 1906, and then the 1989 Loma Prieta. So it is part of San Francisco culture to be earthquake aware.

But then in 2017, you know, we had seven days of 105 degree plus weather, which, you know, if you're from San Francisco, we do not have air conditioning. This is not something that we experience. And all of a sudden, you know, heat became a massive, another big issue we had to add. We knew sea level rise was happening, but it's going at a much, much higher pace than it had in the past. We all of a sudden have seen some massive storms.

We had hurricane level winds, which we've never experienced in California this past year, where we actually had some cladding or some glass windows from skyscrapers fall down, not very many of them, and that's good. And they were really not designed to withstand those winds, but now we're seeing them.

And then on top of that, we're also, we're also experiencing, I was going to say more flooding, more extreme rain, and we just recovered from drought. So the idea of thinking about one hazard was a luxury, which no longer applies. Now I'm really trying to focus on how we address multiple hazards together and there's not enough resources.

And I really appreciate what Robyn was saying about FEMA funds and so forth, but it's really a drop in the bucket. And I think Janiele, the conversation with Janiele Maffei from Senator Rubio sort of emphasized that. There's just not near enough money. When you're talking about a $5 billion Building Resilience and Communities Program for the entire country, it's just not nearly enough. An example I can provide is, in San Francisco, one of the programs that we have is our Waterfront Resilience Program to address the seawall.

San Francisco Seawall was constructed over 120, 130 years ago, and it was actually originally a state program. And that seawall, we know, suffers from two, potentially two major deficiencies. One is it's not high enough now as a result of sea level rise and some of the extreme rain precipitation we're seeing.

And the other is that it's not seismically strong enough. So we know we're going to see lateral spread in those areas. So as a result, San Francisco was one of the only, I think, one of two cities in 2018 or 2019 to receive a new start from the US Army Corps of Engineers to start evaluating flood resilience along with earthquake resilience.

We also managed to get new legislation that allowed the Army Corps to think about earthquakes. Prior to that, they were not allowed to. They were only thinking about, really, floods. That was all that was in their jurisdiction. As a result of that, we have a recent flood study that was completed, and we're looking at the retrofit and raising the seawall numbers, and they're going to be in the $13 billion range. That's what they're estimating, and that's $13 billion in today's dollars.

The city and the state or local government would be responsible for one third of that. So there's a one third match requirement. So again, that's $4 billion or so. Just our maths requirement. That is our 10-Year Capital Plan. You know, do bond program times two. That's a 10 year program.

So again, where, where we begin to come up with the funds to support this is the big question. And are there enough money in some of these programs, especially around these mitigation type programs, to really make a difference. And I would suggest that right now there is not.

And that's one of the things I would love to see you help us do, or we start reaching out more to the federal government to think about ways we can increase funding. Now having said that, San Francisco has had a number of successful programs without federal funding, I should say, and it's through our Earthquake Safety Implementation Program

It's a 30 year plan. So that's the other thing to think about with these things. They take a long time. Within that 30 year plan, we've addressed soft-story retrofits, and I should emphasize those were just multifamily soft-story retrofits. We've not addressed the 1, 2, and 3 unit buildings that Janiele was talking about.

These are the multifamily five plus unit buildings. We retrofitted. We had a mandatory program. It took eight years in four different tiers to get there. So we were moving judiciously along. It was approximately $382 million or so is what we think private property owners needed to invest. It came at a good time, I should say. It came at a time when the economy was relatively strong and when people's home values were going up consistently. So as a result, building owners were able to absorb a lot of these costs.

We did have some additional programs to provide financing for them, but largely this was on the back of building owners to do it, and we're very proud of the effort there. We have a 93% compliance with it. But now that we're beginning to think about some of the more difficult programs like concrete.

Ryan mentioned the Non-ductile Concrete Program. San Francisco, we have probably a little over 3000 buildings, it's still to be determined, that are going to, that are subject to failure because they're made of concrete, but they don't have enough steel ductility in them. That program is going to be much, much more expensive, not as many buildings, but much, much more expensive to address.

And at the same time, we are very concerned about making sure that we're not disproportionately impacting the vulnerable populations that we have that don't have the opportunity after an earthquake to go to a hotel or to find other type of lodging, that are really dependent on, on these homes or these businesses for their livelihoods.

The other program that we've done in San Francisco is really through our Lifelines Council. And this gets to some of those questions thinking about infrastructure. And again, this applies to all kinds of hazards. But we initially looked at how our lifeline providers work together. We meet with them quarterly, and we talked about interdependencies.

And very quickly, one of the things we learned, especially about that seawall, is that it's also where all of our utilities come in. It's where BART comes into the San Francisco, comes into San Francisco. So it's a major focal point for a number of different types of infrastructure.

And as we were talking about before, you could have a very well retrofitted building or home. But if you cannot get utilities there, if the sewer system isn't working, if the streets aren't functioning, then it really is not, it's really not effective. Right. You need to have both the infrastructure and the buildings, both to be in a state of good repair and to be functional after an earthquake. And that's really what we look at is sort of functional recovery, and how can we reach that?

Some of the other tools that we have is we do a Hazards and Climate Resilience Plan, which is our local hazard mitigation plan. That is something that all jurisdictions in California are required to do. It is really where we set out our objectives and we try to communicate to the public again about what we're facing, about what kind of hazards they're subject to, and about what the city's doing to address them.

We have a 97 strategies, which seems like a lot, and it is, but for a city and a county, that's another part of our effort here, is that there's a lot of coordination that we need to do. And we have a number of different departments that are working on these issues. So those strategies are important.

That document is important. It's how we communicate. It's also how we are eligible for FEMA funding and those other types of sources at the federal level. But also it's important for communicating to our population how we're thinking about these issues and how we're moving forward and trying to address them.

We also have a 10-Year Capital Plan where we really lay out what, where the city is going to be making its investments in terms of infrastructure. And seismic has traditionally been, you know, 50% or so of that capital plan has been dedicated toward doing seismic work.

Now we are also trying to figure out how we can, you know, incorporate the adaptation measures for extreme floods and sea level rise. We're also looking at how we can, how we can address some of the Climate Action Plan goals that we have in terms of reducing greenhouse gases. And that's another cost that we're seeing. But ideally, we're talking about having resilient buildings. We're able to do all those things at one time.

Finally, I just want to mention, you know, in terms of how I think about this work is, you know, a lot of what I'm doing is trying to connect people, connect people to resources, connect departments, get people to people, decision makers, our Board of Supervisors, to understand the trade offs that they're making when we're thinking about infrastructure investments and policies.

I could say mandatory programs or those types of things. So that connecting and then coordinating. And I think the state has done a lot of great work in terms of requiring, you know, what to require in our hazard mitigation plans. But I would really like to see more work done around identifying, helping us identify vulnerable buildings.

We are having a heck of a time identifying which buildings are concrete in our city. It's not written down anywhere. We had to use old Sanborn insurance maps and compared them to Google with a lot of intern help. And it's still not a very complete list. And having some of that come from the state level would be very helpful, especially from one local jurisdiction where often the businesses and folks say, hey, San Francisco, why are you requiring this? I can go to Oakland, I can go to some other part of the state and not have to do it.

So that evening of the playing field and thinking about things across city jurisdictions is really important. Finally, I just wanted to end with, I guess bringing it back to the resource question and the time. When we talk about the concrete building program, you know, Los Angeles has a 20, it's a 25 year program.

We're thinking our program in San Francisco for those 3000 or so buildings is going to be another 20 years. And we're going to have to have the same type of thinking when you're talking about flood or multi-hazard efforts. The reality is that, for the most part, it's our existing infrastructure that we're struggling with.

I think that that newer infrastructure does need better codes. We should be thinking about recovery based code structure so, or immediately, maybe not immediate occupancy, but short term repair so people can get back in. But we also need to be thinking about the vulnerable populations that we talk about that are really in a lot of these existing buildings that are at risk for being displaced.

And that to me, again, comes back to requiring wealth out programs and plans, but also resources to help make those programs work so that those local mom and pop shops and those affordable housing units, many of which are just affordable by default because it's old housing, but that they aren't that we don't lose them either after an earthquake or that people aren't needlessly displaced. So with that, I'm happy to follow up on any questions that you may have, and I really appreciate the discussion and thank you all for putting this together.

Thank you, Mr. Strong. Now we'll move on to our final witness is David Ambuehl, Chief Deputy Director for District 4, the California Department of Transportation. So David, when you're ready.

Good afternoon, Chairs Rodriguez, Dodd, Vice Chair Limon, Assembly Members, and Senators. My name is David Ambuehl, Chief Deputy District Director for Caltrans District 4 in San Francisco Bay Area. I'm pleased to be here today to present on how Caltrans builds resilient transportation infrastructure.

When Caltrans develops projects, we consider how we can meet multiple objectives ranging from pavement and bridge maintenance, to safety and active transportation needs, to seismic and climate resiliency and habitat restoration. Improving seismic resilience of the state's transportation network has required a long term commitment.

Likewise, we've begun a long term commitment to addressing climate stressors and how transportation infrastructure is planned, designed, built, operated, and maintained to ensure overall resilience of the transportation system to climate impacts. Our efforts align with the state Hazard Mitigation Plan by the Governor's Office of Emergency Services and the California Climate Adaptation Strategy.

As been noted, it's been 30 years since the last catastrophic earthquake occurred, causing considerable damage and loss of lives. Since the 1989 Loma Prieta and the 1994 Northridge earthquakes, continual improvements in seismic design strategies and methodologies have drastically reduced the probability of a bridge collapse due to an earthquake.

Caltrans works with the US and California Geological Surveys, Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, and academia on continuously updating seismic research and design standards. With their help, Caltrans has developed seismic design criteria, a compilation of state of the art seismic design and analysis methodologies for designing bridges in California.

Caltrans has invested over 12 billion in the retrofitting of replacing or of retrofitting or replacing of more than 2000 bridges on the state highway system using updated seismic design codes. Improving seismic safety is an ongoing effort. Caltrans continues to perform risk assessments of existing bridges, fund the seismic retrofit of bridges to meet ever evolving design codes, fund additional research and update design standards. Caltrans is also working to address the impacts of our changing climate.

To that end, Caltrans completed climate change vulnerability assessments in 2019 to identify segments of the state highway system vulnerable to climate change, effects of precipitation, temperature, wildfire, storm surge, and sea level rise. Caltrans launched an update to these vulnerability assessments in 2023 to keep pace with the latest climate science.

We also are working to broaden the analysis to include transit and rail infrastructure and apply an equity lens. This information informs project development under the guidance set forth by the California State Transportation Agency in its Climate Action Plan for Transportation Infrastructure.

This plan presents a holistic framework that aligns the state's transportation infrastructure investments with the state's climate, health, and social equity goals. Additionally, the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 established the project funding program to help make surface transportation resilient to natural hazards, including climate change impacts and earthquakes.

The most recent State Highway System Management Plan makes a 10 year investment in climate focused objectives in the amount of $4.6 billion. This funding will address sea level rise, coastal cliff erosion, as well as projected climate induced damage from major storms and mitigation of climate change.

This funding level has increased more than fourfold from the 1.1 billion 10 year investment identified in the 2015 plan showing our commitment to climate action. Yet more will be needed for resiliency as climate change impacts accelerated. An example of these needs is a 21 mile highway segment along the northern shore of San Pablo Bay Highway 37, linking Highway 101 in Nevada in Marin County with Interstate 80 in Vallejo in Solano County.

Frequency and severity of flooding are expected to increase to a point where most of the existing roadway will become inundated often by 2050. To address this need, Caltrans conducted its first planning and environmental linkages study between 2020 and 2022. The study helped build consensus with the public, resource agencies, and stakeholders.

Together, we identified environmental constraints and mitigation strategies and identified strategies to reduce schedule and cost risks. This award winning study recommended, recommends constructing an elevated causeway along the existing highway in phases of eight smaller projects, with a total cost estimated to be in the billions. The plan calls for Highway 37 to be rebuilt.

This is now more than just a transportation project. Through collaboration with the many federal, state, and local agencies, tribal nations, and community partners, we are realizing opportunities to open the upland area for ecological restoration and broader community benefits. We are crafting a holistic approach to meet seismic flooding, sea level rise, economic prosperity, and conservation goals around San Pablo Bay.

The project is but one hallmark of who Caltrans has and is becoming as we adopt a new model of community collaboration to find innovative solutions that help California communities adapt to climate change, mitigate further climate change, and address the ongoing seismic risks and ecological conservation needs of habitat long affected by urban infrastructure. This is a long term commitment, and we are dedicated to this cause as we work to improve lives in communities across California through transportation. So thank you for your time today, and I'd be happy to join in and answer any questions.

Thank you very much, Mr. Strong. So we'll bring it back up to the Committee Members. Anybody have any questions? Senator Dodd, you have a question?

This one's for Mr. Strong. So I really appreciate the recent Highway 37, SR 37 partnership agreement that set the national model for resilient infrastructure by integrating, as you said, the ecological restoration, public access, and climate resilience into these, into this transportation projects. How are we going to get that funded?

I think the question was directed to me, but I didn't know.

I'm sorry, do I have the wrong person? I did.

I think it's probably the Caltrans guy, but I want to hear the answer too.

So do I.

Sorry about that. I did get that wrong. So I'm looking here for Mr. Ambuehl. Sorry.

Yes, it's alright.

Thank you.

You're on mute.

I believe you're still on mute. Is there any way you can unmute yourself?

Am I unmuted now?

We can hear.

Okay. That is a major challenge. As far as the long term solutions, we have funded the first project, which will be the Nevada Creek Bridge, which is addressing flooding on the Marin side. We have been working with four North Bay counties and MTC to apply for the various grants and federal funding.

So this is going to be a staged process, and we realize that it is going to be a lot of money. However, much like the challenges of congestion, flooding, sea level rise, ecology, you know, we're working together in this partnership to try and bring funding in to get these projects completed.

Thank you very much.

Any other questions? Questions? No? I just had, I just had a quick question for probably anybody in the room. Obviously, we're in this budget deficit as we're having for this year and who knows how long we'll have it. But as things get better in the couple years, anything we should start working on now?

So that way when things do get better, we can start focusing on, whether it's infrastructure projects or what, just kind of throw it out there for anybody thinks something we should look at down along the road when things get better.

I'm happy to jump in on that because I think we have an opportunity at this time. I know the budgets are struggling. Certainly we're seeing struggles with our downtown in San Francisco along with other places, and it does provide an opportunity. Right. So we're looking at changes of use.

I see the state is looking at this as well. You know, enabling people to shift from office buildings to residential buildings and those types of things. Those all provide, I think, opportunities to do some of the seismic work and to do the work around, you know, addressing multiple hazards.

So I think any way that we can build these in, and I think it was Janiele Maffei who mentioned the resilience sort of mindset or resilience culture. So the more you can build that in now, I think the better off will be when we do see the economy start to turn around and we do see additional dollars and people are able to make the improvements.

The other thing I will just quickly add to that is that planning before you get, before the disaster happens, or planning dollars for this work is the hardest money to get. It's much easier to get money to do a retrofit. Once you go to FEMA or you go to a federal agency and say, we're going to build this hospital, it's a lot harder when we just need money to plan for how we're going to address, you know, an area or anything like that.

With the idea that we really need to have shovel ready projects or have projects that are ready to go. And that's where I think we should be doing more of an emphasis, that pre-planning so that projects are ready to go when the economy turns around or when the money becomes available.

Thank you. Anybody else?

I was just going to. Sorry, Robyn with Cal OES. Sorry. One thing that I can say is that the communities have an appetite for mitigation. One thing that we are able to support is, and again, because FEMA is, I think, recognizing, especially in a tough budget climate, that there are a lot of different ways that folks can kind of get ready for those shovel ready projects. You know, funding studies or offering assessments.

We're looking at trying to fund some building code enforcement activities or things like that where folks can actually leverage in kind services, staff time, those types of resources to help leverage grant opportunities. Even though they're not the really big, exciting $50 million projects, those are the types of things that enable communities to take advantage of those grant opportunities when the budget climate does improve. So we're looking to continue to support communities in studies, assessments, and building code activities, as well as establishing partnerships at the local level to kind of create and really build the culture of mitigation at the local level.

Okay, thank you. Very appreciate it. And with that, I want to thank all the witnesses. I really appreciate all the work you do to keep our communites safe. And thank you all for participating in today's hearing. We will now have a brief opportunity for public comment, though the time we have is limited.

However, I encourage anyone seeking to provide additional comments to visit the Committee's website on Assembly.gov to submit your comments. And with that, anybody in the room for comments? Seeing none. Once again, I want to thank everybody for participating.

It's been a very educational hearing, a lot to learn, and I want to thank my colleagues for taking their time out and joining me here as well on the dais to address some of these very important issues pressing California. So thank you all, and this hearing is adjourned. Thanks.