Assembly Select Committee on Select Committee on Permitting Reform

Hello. Hello, everyone. Can you guys hear me? Is this working? No. Hold on. Maybe our support to our rescue. Tech support to the rescue. The gavel works. We know that. Okay. Hi. zero, yes.

Hi, everyone. How's everyone doing? Now you all can hear me, right? Great. Okay, perfect. Good afternoon. Thank you all so much for coming in the hearing today. And for those of you that are watching online, as well as my colleagues, many of whom. Scott Wiener.

Senator, we know how to travel from upstairs to come all the way down here. Folks from San Diego, East Bay, other parts of the district, Orange County. Thank you so much for being here today on this.

And I should also say we had a tour this morning with a ferry that took us around the bay, looking at how the challenges around permitting as it pertains to ensuring we can have climate resiliency, that we're thoughtfully developing our shoreline in a way that sticks to our environmental goals while still allowing for us to create an environment that can adjust to the dental sea level rise that we believe will be coming, while still allowing for housing and all the other infrastructure that we need to accommodate our working class families here in California.

Very eye opening for many of us. I know we're going to be joined by other colleagues as well, and I know some folks to leave early. Everyone's got a lot on their pipes day, so we're just going to get started. This is the second hearing of the Assembly Select Committee on permitting Reform.

I'm the chair of the Committee. My name is Buffy Wicks. I represent the East Bay, Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond area. And this hearing is focused on permitting reform to facilitate climate resiliency. As I mentioned, we'll be having other hearings as well, focused on other areas as it pertains to permitting reform.

We're going to do a transportation and housing hearing in Los Angeles, and then one focused on renewable energy projects in Southern California as well. Location PBD. But we would welcome attendance at those as well, if not in person and remotely. This one is focused on climate resiliency. We all know climate change is happening quickly.

I'm not going to share all the terrifying facts, but just a few to get us set the stage for today. The temperature in much of the state has already gone up by two degrees and is expected to go up by five degrees by mid century and up nine degrees at the end of the century.

Sea level rise is expected to be three to 10ft and cause up to $230 billion damage in just the Bay Area. The Sierra snowpack is expected to go down by one third by 2050. The number of acres burned annually due to wildfire is up 250% from just 30 years ago.

And to avoid the worst aspects of climate change, we need to remove up to 9 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every single year. Carbon sequestration companies are developing technology right here in San Francisco and then deploying them elsewhere because of the permitting challenges that we are faced with here in California.

It took 10 years to permit the sites reservoir even after it was funded. And you hear that story a lot, that permitting can take decades to be able to address some of these challenges. The expansion of the Los Vaqueros reservoir in Contra Costa County was recently scrapped as rising costs made the project economically unstable.

The project's cost had grown from $980 million in 2017, nearly 1.6 billion due to inflation and scheduling delays. Often the scheduling delays come down to the issues around permitting. As the parent of a four year old and a seven year old, this is the stuff that keeps me up at night.

Is our government serving the needs of our people. And when you look at what our needs are in terms of being able to adjust to the new climate reality, I don't think we're doing it as good as we can survive and thrive in a challenging climate.

California is going to need to build a lot of infrastructure in the coming years. Walls and pipes and catch basin areas to address sea level rise and flooding, dams and reservoirs and recharge basins to address drought conditions.

New ways of managing our forests and environment to deal with both of these conditions and embracing and deploying new technologies reduce and proactively remove carbon from the atmosphere. To build the infrastructure we need, we're going to need to get better at building infrastructure. Right now, we are not so good when it comes to permitting infrastructure.

Most of our governance structures are designed to be extremely cumbersome, opaque, and frankly, sort of set up to get to know. That is the status quo is what rules the day. Often when it comes to building new infrastructure, sure, it's understandable.

A lot of that regulatory environment was designed in a different era when there was widespread support for slowing down the state's rapid growth and the outside conditions weren't changing as rapidly as they are now. But these permitting regimes were not set up to address existing crisis we now face, including rapid climate change.

To address the problem we have now, our permitting system must become easy, transparent, and designed to get to. Yes, the cost of an action is just too high. The cost of an action includes trillions of dollars in damages from sea level rise and flooding, wildfire and extreme heat and who bears the brunt of these costs?

The millions of Low income households that cannot afford to crank the AC higher or pay higher water bills, or just move to get move altogether. Move. Also bearing the brunt are all the animal and plant species that are already struggling because of man made changes to their habitat.

That's why I think the work of permitting reform to facilitate climate resiliency is inherently equitable and pro environment. Today we'll be hearing from an array of experts and practitioners who will speak to permitting reform needs to address the sea level rise and flooding. And Mister King is joining us as well. Thank you.

Prepare for drought conditions and facilitate the reduction and removal of atmospheric carbon. While these folks will cover a wide range of topics, we recognize that they will not cover every issue that is important to people. And while we might hear of some useful changes, this Select Committee is not purporting to come up with all the answers.

Hopefully some of them, though, but maybe not all of them. The range of issues and answers is much broader than anything we could have taken on with just this one Committee.

But what I am hoping we accomplish today and throughout this process, is to highlight the fundamental need to change how we go about doing business, from one that's designed to get to know to one that is designed to get to, yes, more of a way of thinking than anything else.

We've heard that this is already happening in a lot of places. The Natural Resources Agency cutting green tape initiative that we heard about in our first hearing in June. But there's more work to be done. There's lots more work to be done. This is hard work. Structural change always is.

By shining a light on the issue of permitting reform. My hope is that we can speed up that process, encouraging those already making change and motivating those that have not started yet. We have to get this done.

We have to get it done right, and we have to get it done soon, because we know climate change is coming. With that, I want to first offer remarks by my colleagues again, some of whom may have to leave early. So I want to make sure we get them on the record.

And again, I think others might be joining. So I'm happy to take introductory comments from any of my colleagues who are interested. We have. Mister Ward, why don't you go first?

Thank you. Miss Wicks. Madam Chair. I really appreciate the invitation to be here in San Francisco.

Coming from San Diego, it's been nice to be able to come up here and be able to see some of the projects, some of the vision we have for the bay, some of the important work that needs to get done is the Assembly's housing chair.

I know that working on a lot of different areas of solutions that we need on permitting reform is one that is going to be able to help us answer some key questions, really going back to the drawing board to understand what is necessary without, you know, interrupting or without disrupting, you know, key kind of environmental or other other areas of review that we need to be able to make sure for the health and safety of our surrounding area that we're being, you know, thoughtful about development.

But we know we need to do a lot more. And the issue of permitting reform certainly is not limited to the subject area of housing. Working on infrastructure, working on climate related solutions, as you've outlined as well, is something that is a key priority of mine and important to the San Diego region as well.

So I'm looking forward to all the presenters here today to be able to hear about what's coming down the pipeline, what the experiences have really been trying to get through the regulatory process so that we can have a critical review of as we head back to the next session, what we need to do to be able to more efficiently be able to get from a to z while not compromising some of our other shared value.

Thank you, Mister Grayson.

Thank you, chair Wicks. Delighted to be here. And quickly, because I do want to get into the meeting as well, and hopefully it's not too far off topic.

However, permitting reform is desperately, desperately needed, especially when green and clean energy and manufacturing rise up within jurisdictions, and then they actually get CEQA approval, and then local jurisdiction or someone like that would take that project and use it to benefit themselves in the sense of add on, what we call add ons to the permit.

And that was very costly in the sense that company would rise up and actually clean energy sectors and then get caught up with a project that doesn't pencil out because of community benefits are being demanded of in order to give a permit.

So again, not trying to be off topic, maybe ranting just a little bit, but I've had multiple meetings in the past few months and weeks that involve projects that would have clearly penciled, that would have clearly helped us reach our climate goals here in California, but can't get through the permitting process because of local obstacles, and so looking for a way to create pathways through those obstacles so they don't get caught up in the fray.

Thank you, Mister Carrillo.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I do represent the high destiny in Southern California. I'm eager to learn more about the challenges that you have here in the Bay Area and along the coastlines in this broader state. For us, we have different challenges being the desert.

Nevertheless, I'm here to learn more about the challenges that you are facing here in the Bay Area and looking forward to working with everyone here to find the solutions to get the resources that you need.

And it should also be noted Mister Creo is chair of our local gov Committee, which is going to serve as an important role in this work that we do. So thank you for being here. Quirk-Silva.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm pleased to be up here. This is a beautiful area. And finally have a little fall weather. But as we have noted, the temperatures have been extremely hot. We don't have to be waiting for climate change to happen. We are already experiencing not only here in California, but across really the world.

I think one of the things that I've heard from my local government days now, 10 years into the Assembly, is simply how do we cut through the red tape? And we can call it green tape or red tape, but we know that projects infrastructure are taking two damn long.

And the longer we wait for these major investments and infrastructure, the longer we're kicking the ball down, not only for housing, but of course what we saw this morning with right there in the bay with erosion and so forth.

So I think it's exciting to be here and actually be out on the bay and see examples of how we can do this with environmental friends. But it must be done, and we needed to be doing this 20 years ago. So I'm excited for today. Thank you so much. Thank you, Senator Wiener.

Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you for including me, even though I'm in the, I guess the wrong house. But I appreciate you including me. And thank you.

We still like you.

Thank you, thank you. And thank you for your work. Just bottom line, permitting is horribly broken in California. And when it comes to climate action, our permitting laws, including laws that are supposedly environmental laws, are actually undermining and preventing effective climate action. And we have to be very, very hard nosed about that.

And these are local permitting requirements. They are mandates that are placed on local governments by the state. And they are also situations where far too many agencies have to sign off on a permit. A few years back, I did some work around mariculture and trying to promote mariculture, which is a climate solution in addition to other benefits.

And to get a kelp farming permit, I think you had to go through like 10 or 12 or more different agencies. And that is so emblematic of what we have allowed to happen in California, layer upon layer of process, and often process for the sake of process and process being valued over results.

And we have to always remember that it's the results that matter, not the process. And we have to stop with the valuing of process over everything else, which is what California has effectively done, and it's frankly strangling the state. We also need to acknowledge that there are various aspects of our permitting problems in California.

I mentioned local governments and sometimes too many agencies having to sign off.

But we have to also just acknowledge that the California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, is a big part of the problem, and that is a state law that is imposed on everyone, on state agencies, on local governments, on regional agencies, and everyone's required to comply with it. And we have CEQA.

Whatever its intent when it was passed, it has now become sort of a Frankenstein monster. It's the law that swallowed California. It is used overwhelmingly for purposes that have absolutely nothing to do with the environment. It is used. You don't even have to. You can file an anonymous CEQA appeal. It can be used to slow down.

Anyone who, who has the money to hire a lawyer can use CEQA to slow down, screw up, or kill a project. And we have to start refocusing CEQA as a climate action law and move away from allowing it to be used for completely non environmental purposes simply because someone has the money to hire a lawyer.

So I look forward to the conversation today. And again, thank you for your work, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Senator. Mister Ting, would you like to make some opening remarks?

Sure. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thanks for having me as well, and very much appreciate you focusing on this issue. Obviously, you and a number of other Members have focused on permitting as it relates to housing and really talking about climate change and in particular sea level rise and drought conditions.

We just need to look at what's happening in Florida to know that we are one natural disaster wave from potentially some catastrophic issues. You often see, sometimes many years we don't have enough water from the Central Valley, and then some years we have too much water, we see flooding.

And so being ready and prepared for a number of those issues, there is, and there needs to be a sense of urgency. These projects need to happen now, and as everyone had mentioned, takes way too long once we decide what they are to get it going.

So really appreciate you for highlighting this issue and bringing us together and also bringing many of these thought leaders very much look forward to the discussion.

Thank you. And I see Miss Papan has joined us. She chairs the Water Parks and Wildlife Committee in the Assembly. Did you want to make any opening remarks? You don't have to if you don't want to.

I got to keep up with Wiener. I'm just delighted to be here. There's a lot of folks I found in the Legislature that are very involved with the reduction of carbon emissions, and they're doing a fine job.

But I have long sought to focus my energies on climate adaptation, because even if we stop polluting in the morning, there is still a tremendous need to adapt climate changes here. And we come from being involved in a lot of infrastructure projects.

And so thank you, Madam Chair, for convening us so that we can focus on some of the infrastructure that's needed. I know it touches on housing, but have done this work yesterday. So I'm excited to get forward to get involved.

Thank you. Thank you. Coffee has arrived. Happened. If you would like any, let me know. You weren't here when we took the order, but great. Thank you so much for the welcoming remarks. Very much appreciated. We're going to have three panels today. The first one's going to be on the need to address sea level rise and flooding.

The second one's going to be on preparing for drought conditions. And the third one's going to be on the need to facilitate the reduction and removal of atmospheric carbon. So with that, would the panel one please come up?

Thank you. Know who you are?

So this is, as I said, panel one, permitting reform needed to address sea level rise in flooding. We'll allow each panelist to self introduce. Each of you have a couple minutes to share your thoughts, and then we'll do Q and A from Committee Members. We'll start here.

Thank you, chair, Committee Members, for the invitation to be here today. I am pleased to provide the remarks this afternoon that will provide the context and a Science Foundation for your discussion on sea level rise and coastal flooding. My name is Liz Whiteman.

I am privileged to serve as the Executive Director of the California Ocean Science Trust, an independent science nonprofit organization actually created by the California Legislature to bring science to this decision, shaping the future of our coast in the ocean here in the state, I'll share a little bit about what's causing sea level rise and coastal flooding, what we're experiencing today, what to expect for the future in terms of impacts to people, infrastructure, and natural habitats.

This is a summary of research from so many different scientists across the state, including Members of a science task force convened by the Ocean Science Trust and the Ocean Protection Council over the past couple of years to to provide a Science Foundation for the State's policy that was adopted earlier this year by the Ocean Protection Council.

It's easy to think of sea level rise as something for the future. However, California has actually experienced eight inches of sea level rise over the last century, and that rate is increasing. The current rate is already triple that of the 2020, the broader 20th century rate.

And put another way, what we've experienced in the last 100 years, we're anticipated to experience in the next 30 alone. Sea level rise occurs primarily as ocean warming causes thermal expansion of the oceans and additional input of fresh water as the polar glaciers melt and provide additional water.

Both of these processes result from the ongoing warming of the planet due to greenhouse gas emissions. So there's an interesting trade off that becomes part of this conversation.

Now that Science Foundation for the state's policy that I mentioned lays out a set of scenarios for the future, a set of possible futures that we may experience that really depend on where we are as a society in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, trajectories of global development, and incorporate the fact that we don't completely understand how much the polarized sheets will melt and how much that will then contribute to rising sea levels.

So we're going to be confronted with continuing uncertainty, but need to be able to take action despite that. So using observations, this is not just modeling. We can see how we're currently tracking along the California coast and project that forward.

This reveals that by 2050, where sea levels are most likely to rise by 0.8ft on average across the California coast, you might often hear that rounded to a foot by mid century.

We can use these scenarios to plan out further into the future, taking into account a project lifespan and the degree of risk that we're willing to assume for it. By 2100, average statewide sea levels are expected to rise between 1.6 and 3.1ft. That's the most likely, although higher amounts are certainly possible. So what?

So what do these numbers mean? And should we be concerned about that? Foot by mid century, sea level rise will increase the severity and frequency of coastal flooding events, with a particularly rapid rise in the 2030s. So we get a glimpse into that future during king tides.

I'm sure you've either seen or have seen the images of the waves overtopping the embarcadero. So what we experience today is a once in a lifetime coastal flood is projected to occur annually by 2050 and daily by 2100. So that just sets the magnitude of the issue here.

One of the things that we don't often think about is what's happening. Underground groundwater rise poses a threat to below ground infrastructure and freshwater aquafos. As sea level rises in some places, the groundwater will rise with it, mobilizing contaminants. Exposing our subsurface infrastructure to corrosive saltwater and foundations to saltwater, and threatening our freshwater aquifers with salinity increases.

The societal impacts of that shallow and emerging groundwater are projected to be about as much as the impacts of what you see visibly overground, even as we're still trying to understand the specific details of where and how much we'll see those impacts.

And finally, the impacts of episodic coastal storms are already worse than they would have been 50 years ago without sea level rise.

Think back to January of 2023 and the 11 or so atmospheric rivers that we experienced, and on January 5, wave heights reached 28ft offshore from Monterey Bay, made even higher by simultaneously happening with spring tides and with onshore winds that pushed the waves even higher.

This was the event that caused Westcliffe Drive and Santa Cruz to fall into the ocean and damaged an awful lot of public and private infrastructure.

Those kinds of events are expected to both get worse as a result of climate change and be made even more worse by sea level rise because they're occurring on top of a higher level of water. So I can understand how these sobering, frightening statistics, as the Chair already mentioned, can feel paralyzing.

And so would underscore that it has also been shown that there is a more significant economic cost to inaction, just in terms of the harm and losses that will be experienced through these kinds of events and sea levels rising.

But planning for an uncertain future is undoubtedly hard, and we need new frameworks and workflows to be able to act and make decisions. One possibility that may help is an adaptation pathways approach. This is an academically developed approach that may offer some avenues for exploration in your context. It's a pathways. I heard the Member mention pathways.

It may not always be possible for critical infrastructure to bear the cost of adapting all the way through the possibility of sea level rise at 2100 in one foul swoop.

So adaptation planning pathways sequence actions through the lifespan of a project so that you can take action now with full transparency of what options will remain on the table for you, and predetermined thresholds that you will start to take those actions and move along your pathway into the future. Two final points.

I was in Sausalito with colleagues yesterday as we brought together researchers with finance and insurance sectors, state and federal folk, to explore opportunities for creative financing and insurance to be able to unlock capital, reduce and transfer risk, and enable adaptation projects to accelerate.

The conversation, for me, really underscored the need for a new systems approach to how we are making these decisions in the broad context of the broad suite of community needs.

We're still digesting the outcomes of that really rich conversation yesterday, but I would be more than happy to follow up and share a summary and discuss the outcomes of that work.

And I'll just conclude with appreciation for the many scientists I work with who are helping us understand these complex processes and offer that the Ocean Science Trust, as an entity created by the Legislature, is here to serve and support. And we would be happy to engage with you further as this dialogue continues.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Whoever would like to go next?

Madam Chair, would you like us to proceed according to the agenda? Sure. All right, I'll go next then. Thank you. Good afternoon, Senators and Assembly Members. Thank you for having me here to talk. My name is Sahrye Cohen. I work for the US Environmental Protection Agency, and I'm here today representing the Bay Restoration Regulatory Integration Team.

There was a time not too long ago when our coasts and waters were virtually unprotected. People looked at the water and decided not to swim. Our bays did not support fishing or crabbing. Rivers caught on fire. It looked like public access to our incredible coastline and beaches would soon be impossible because of development.

That was before coalitions of citizens called on their representatives, like those here today, pass legislation protecting air, water, land and public health. These laws have led to transformative and generational change. Our existing regulations protect human health and the environment, and given the continued development pressures throughout California, they are still relevant today.

The challenge for regulatory agencies is to be able to quickly adapt to address sea level rise and climate resiliency needs while serving the whole public. Multi benefit restoration and sustainable development projects are complex, and competing interests must be carefully balanced, sometimes with difficult choices.

How do we protect communities, provide public access, ensure projects are balanced equitably that right historical wrongs, restore habitats, and protect water quality, all under the increasing pressure to act rapidly in the face of level rise and climate change.

The urban landscape, including important infrastructure, was built long before we identified many of these challenges or made thoughtful choices about how to design an equitable and sustainable future for all the communities of the bay. We need to innovate and pilot new solutions at greater scales while evaluating the effectiveness of our actions.

The San Francisco Bay Restoration and Regulatory Integration Team, or BRRIT collaborative effort of regulatory and resource agencies, the state Postal Conservancy and SFA Restoration Authority, and non federal public funding agencies, focuses on permitting for multi benefit restoration projects and the associated flood management and public access infrastructure in and along the bay shoreline.

In addition to permitting staff, corporate agencies have agency managers on the policy and management Committee works closely with the BRRIT to collaboratively identify and resolve policy issues and conflict.

This really is an effort that was started by permitting agency staff who saw the opportunities to restore 100,000 acres of tidal wetlands with the passing of measure AA and wanted to do what they could to lean in.

In 2017, multiple workshops and meetings were held to discuss the shared permitting and monitoring needs for wetlands around SFS jewelry restoration proponents, organizations and foundations identified improvements to the regulatory process as a focus that was needed to successfully accomplish the measure AA goals to protect, restore, and enhance San Francisco Bay.

Agency staff and managers work with the State Coastal Conservancy and SFBRA to propose a dedicated team of regulatory staff supported by funding from the restoration authority for projects that qualify for measure AA funding. Without this targeted funding, many agencies could not commit to dedicated, consistent staffing for these bridges.

BRRIT consists of representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers, US Fish and Wildlife Service, NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service, San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission.

We participate in the BRRIT on and cost for the permitting staff was approximately 1.5 million, with funding coming from the Restoration Authority, Coastal Conservancy, Bay Area Toll Authority, Valley Water, East Bay Regional Parks District.

In addition to supporting the initial funding for the team, postal conservancy and SFBRA continue to be absolutely critical in managing the funding and also coordinating agency agreements. It works by focusing on the pre application process and working with project proponents. Increase certainty by identifying critical parts, including contracting and construction deadlines, and trying to work towards those.

We engage with projects early and often to identify issues and provide guidance and requirements to help projects navigate the permitting process.

Because of their experience and expertise, BRRIT staff are able to guide applicants in what sea level rise information they should use when submitting projects and are able to expedite the permit process by helping proponents identify efficiencies like programmatic permits, expedited consultations, and streamline processes like cutting the green tape.

Found that when combining experienced regulators with permitting efficiencies and streamlining tools produces increased results. BRRIT finds flexibility within existing regulations to allow more efficient project permitting when there are conflicting requirements or policy that can potentially delay permitting. The BRRIT works with the policy and management Committee to elevate those issues.

Current workload includes 32 multi benefit projects and nine Bay Area counties. This includes 10 fully permitted projects. These projects will result in greater flood protection, public access, habitat restoration, and water quality improvement. BRRIT actively seeks feedback from project proponents through status action surveys and one on one interviews to improve our process.

In addition to permitting process, BRRIT and managers on the policy and management Committee work on complex policy issues that arise in multiple projects, including how to permit restoration projects that result in take for fully protected state species and also those that need to establish artificial reef.

Major focus is currently coordinating sorry, a major focus currently is coordinating the permit process for nature based solutions, including horizontal levees and ecotone levies. There is not one way to get to a climate resilient future.

Really is a yes and situation that requires multiple solutions, collaborative permitting, streamlined solutions and leadership that understands risk and uncertainty, and supports agency staff and managers who are making the necessary paradigm shifts and on the ground changes.

Everyone should be engaged, not just restoration practitioners, project proponents and regulating agencies, but also neighboring landowners, local communities, overlapping infrastructure, and interested parties that have historically been left out of the planning and design processes.

Increased collaboration will also enable us to build better streamlined processes where we ensure that sovereign tribal nations are not excluded from project on our land or ancestral territories due to regulatory exemptions.

We need bold action that uses regional priorities and science to rethink traditional great infrastructure and incentivize nature based solutions as USEPA studies have shown migration space for wetlands and coastal resources is critical.

Challenging decisions will need to be made around defending critical infrastructure and balancing where to create space for the rising sea and migrating baylands on the shoreline. In the BRRIT, we've seen that we can balance environmental protection with thoughtful climate resiliency. We learned iteratively and shared those lessons with pocket proponents and other agencies.

We need everyone at the table. This includes critical infrastructure like utilities and railroads, and also includes proactive leadership that supports funding for interagency teams, adaptive management, and innovative processes. Thank you very much.

Thank you Chair Wicks and distinguished Senator and Assembly Members for conducting today's hearing. My name is Len Matterman. I'm the CEO of the San Mateo county flood and sea level rise resiliency district. We're also known as one shoreline. They all briefly discuss what one shoreline is and does.

Challenges are in terms of permitting, and a few ideas on how to address them now acknowledge Assemblymember Papin, who was on our founding board and on our board for several years and was a real leader in the formation of oneshore line and getting it off the ground. We were established on January 12020 in state legislation.

So just to the south of here, San Mateo county, like many areas of California, has already been severely affected by the water related impacts of climate change, including drought, coastal erosion.

Because we have a Low lying, urbanized bayshore line and an expansive and exposed Pacific coastline, rising sea level and groundwater that threatens more people and property in San Mateo county than any other in California, addressing this transformative threat requires multi jurisdictional, multidisciplinary approach doesn't underestimate on that's why, with the financial support of all 20 cities in San Mateo county and the county legislation, as I mentioned first countywide independent government agency to focus on climate in the state in addition to pursuing a stable source of operating funding, one core line has three priorities, all of which relate to permitting.

Not surprisingly, a top priority is to advance projects that align long term resilience across jurisdictions for developed natural and public access areas. The state's permitting regime to approve such project covers most of the definitions of the word regime, system process, or a bureaucratic and autocratic form of government.

A permitting regime is designed to reflect our values, and it is implemented at regulatory agencies by dedicated, impressive staff is too complex, uncoordinated, and discretionary.

Our permitting regime does not recognize the societal value of building climate resilience, and it is rooted in 50 year old laws that are understandably more focused on maintaining historic conditions and on creating habitat that can survive rapidly changing conditions. Our agency's second priority was not foreseen. That was established state law.

We were established as long term resiliency agency, but we immediately noticed that many existing and recently proposed or permitted developments along the shoreline and Crete reduce optimal stability resilience, especially resilience that incorporates natural infrastructure against flooding, sea level rise and groundwater rise. So I want to emphasize that last point.

Current permitting regime allows private and public agency development right up to the water's edge, not near door in the water. This makes it much more difficult and costly to build resilience, especially resilience that utilizes natural infrastructure.

So in a sense, the permitting regime is contravening the state's goals and local goals for building habitat because it is permitting projects that eliminate the opportunities for putting habitat in land.

To address that in San Mateo county wanted to rely on developed language for local governments to integrate climate resilience into their General plan, specific lands, zoning ordinances, and reduce reviews of private development. And now we're extending this to public infrastructure, providing guidance or stormwater, wastewater, water recycling, roads and parks designed for future conditions and not historic ones.

Right now, a lot of that infrastructure is still being designed for historic events. We need to think about future events when we're instituting new designs, park roads or water systems, wastewater systems, all of that. But today, it's still being designed for a historic event.

My goal for these assets is to function for their intended lifespan and contribute to regional resilience. But we cannot do this alone. Our resiliency requirements at the local level are more difficult to enforce when state permits don't support them.

When one shoreline state legislation passed in 20195 years ago also did not anticipate we would immediately be focused on climate driven atmospheric rivers, it was mentioned that it made worse by storm surgeons and higher tides.

But drought and deluge cycles in 20212022 and 2023 brought significant flooding as a result of Santa rainfall and our inability to safely drain that water to the ocean.

Final one shoreline priority relates both to the planning policy guidance I just discussed and to the permit we are now seeking to remove debris that's built up over decades in the most flood prone stretches of creek in our county. Importantly for this conversation today, most flooding events occur where Creek intersect with Peltran's roadway.

We're working with Peltgrand so that our permits enable them to maintain be maintained under and near Highway 101 in El Camino pace of our county.

In our work to secure this permit to remove debris in flood prone areas, we found that the only way to expedite such permits is to apply as an atmospheric river is barreling towards us or after flooding just occurred. And our permit application to remove this proven threat not recognize the inherent benefits.

That effort, it's treated as if it was a project that was completely unrelated to providing a societal benefit. In conclusion, we know that climate change is not waiting for a permit, and we need a state permitting regime that can meet this moment.

In some cases, a state regulatory agency needs to adjust their focus or make more efficient their process, as we discussed. While in other cases agencies should have expanded authority. Here are five ideas to consider that uphold our environmental values and would help permitting regime. I submit that permits should recognize the value of the project.

Projects that build climate resilience permits should support proposals to build Habitat resilient future conditions. Implicit in these, in these five comments is that they do not currently do that. So the first is that they should recognize the value of resilience projects. They do not do that.

Permits could support proposals that build resilient habitat to future conditions other than just historic conditions. Permitting clock regulatory agencies work under should not be easily paused or reset. Right now it is. You can just reset the clock. What's the point of the clock? You can reset it.

State agencies should have the authority to approve land use plans and project permits, such as for housing. We need housing, roads, parks, utilities, all the things that make our communities function through the lens of climate driven future conditions. Currently, that's not done.

Finally, permits to remove a proven thud threat from major storms to be easier to obtain outside of when that storm is on. I'm happy to get more specific on these points and look forward to your questions.

Thank you very much. Last miss for this section.

Thank you, Lynn. Thank you. Madam Chair and Committee Members, my name is John Bourgeois. I'm a wetland ecologist by training, if you may have deduced from my last name. I'm actually from the swamps of South Louisiana, but I have been working in San Francisco Bay marshes for about 25 years.

I've spent my entire career here trying to get habitat projects implemented in San Francisco Bay. I'm currently the deputy officer at Valley Water. Valley Water is a very unique water agency. We serve Santa Clara County, which is Silicon Valley. We have a water utility mission.

We have a flood risk reduction mission, but we also have a stewardship mission that makes us kind of unique among water agencies. My personal responsibility is ownership of that stewardship mission.

We also do all of the permitting, CEQA, NEPA clearance for all of our large capital projects, which is responsible for a lot of the gray hair you see on me today. Prior to joining Valley water, though, I'm not just here representing valley water. I'm also here because I personally want to be here. I am passionate about this.

I served almost a decade as Executive project manager for the South Bay Salt Pond restoration project, which is the largest wetland restoration project outside of Louisiana and Florida. I was naive going into that project when I first started as project manager, thinking, zero, permitting is going to be easy. This is a voluntary restoration project.

Everybody loves this project. Permitting should be easy and fast, right? It was not and I understand some of the reasons for that. Everyone needs to be treated equitably. And so they were not able to treat a wetland restoration project any different than a development or parking lot. And I suggest that maybe we should.

And I'm glad Sarai is here, because I think I was actually at the table in the development of the Brit. And I think it is a great model that deserves some further exploration and look at what's working and what's not. I think a lot of the concepts there are really strong and can be applied elsewhere.

I'd also like to call attention to what she mentioned is the policy and management Committee, which is the level above the people actually issuing the permits. And Larry Goldman at the time asked me when I was with the thought pond project. John, what are some of the things that are hanging you up?

What are some of the policy conflicts between the regulators? And there's a lot of them. Not everyone has their own jurisdiction and they're not always aligned and they're in conflict. And so that policy and management Committee is actually exploring some of those policy conflicts can hang up projects significantly. They're actually looking to resolve those.

And so I think that's definitely something that should garner a little more attention, is those efforts trying to resolve policy conflicts between the regulators, which can cause applicants a lot of consternation. So glad you guys got out on the bay to actually see some of the stuff.

But I'm assuming you kind of stuck pretty close to here around the North Bay. You had gone up into Suisun, you had gone down to the far South Bay. You would have a very different experience. And that kind of is a telltale sign of, you know, the variety of types of shorelines we have on the bay.

You look at the issues facing the embarcadero and the flood risk that they have to do. It's a very different than what Lynn's having to deal with in San Mateo coast. It's very different from what we're having to deal with.

And the Santa Clara shoreline Valley water is actually partnering still with the South Bay Salt pond restoration project. We have an unprecedented opportunity down there because of former. I think San Diego Bay has salt pond restoration as well. These salt ponds can be restored, so you can really focus on more nature based solutions.

But not all areas are created equal. They're not all have. They don't all have the same opportunities. And so we need to acknowledge that. We need to find a way to make sure that the goals of these projects are all very similar. Right. We're trying to provide flood risk reduction. And we are in a race. Right.

As Lynn said, he overrise isn't waiting for a permit, we are. And the longer we wait, the harder it's going to be for some, especially some of these nature based solutions to catch up. Right. We have to get these restoration projects up and running and the habitat established before it can provide those benefits.

So that's a real, that's a real issue of making sure that we are cognizant that time is of the essence. The one thing I've learned in my 20 plus years of trying to get large scale projects put in the ground is that large scale, multi benefit, multi jurisdiction means compromise, period.

And sometimes, you know, you can talk to, you know, leaders, you can talk to heads of agencies and everyone understands that. But when you get down to actually getting a permit, it's adhered to by the letter of the law. Right.

And so there's a little bit of lost in translation going on between the need for compromise to get these projects done and the actual execution of that. I'd also like something that Sarai touched on.

You may have caught Valley Water's name and her talking points about we are one of the funders of the Brit, so we actually pay. So we not only pay for Members of the Brit, we pay for Members, staff Members at CDFW, we pay for staff Members at the regional board. There is a staffing shortage.

There's not enough staff to get this work done. And I would also argue that we should also maybe look at the pay scale because there's a lot of turnover at these positions. I mean, these are, these are bright, passionate people that are doing important work and there's high turnover and that causes delays as well.

In the nine years I was with the South Bay Salt Pond restoration project, I won't name the agency, but there was one agency. I had five different analysts in those nine years. Every time I had a new person appointed to me had to start from scratch. Right. And that takes time, and that's happening at all the agencies.

Retention is really important at these agencies. Continuity for these sorts of things. And that's why the Brit having dedicated staff for this very specific type of project is really an important thing. So I could regale you with horror stories. I won't do that. I also have a list of potential solutions.

I can go through some of those really quickly, but I know you want to get to Q and A. I think stopping the clock is a big one. Right. All these agencies have timelines that they have to hit. But the timeline doesn't start until your application is deemed complete. So there's a little loophole.

So we would like to see maybe some limit on the bytes at the apple before that. I totally respect that these agencies need to have all the information at their disposal to make a decision, and they should have a couple of bytes at the apple.

But at some point I've literally been asked by regulators to provide the same information in graphical form instead of table form. Is that really the information is there? So I think we need to get away from those sorts of things that kind of prolong the timeline if information is missing. Absolutely, that's one thing.

But if you're just looking at it in a different format, and all the different agencies have similar information requests, then slightly different formats, the jurisdictions are slightly different. So I think maybe giving them a limited number of bytes at the apple. I think where jurisdictions overlap, agencies should accept the same mitigation packages.

I think that's a big one. For example, these landscape scale habitat plans, HCP's, NCCPs. Some agencies accept them as mitigation and prefer them as mitigation. Others don't accept them at all. So you end up sometimes double mitigating and having to coordinate that. I talked about staffing and. Yeah, I'll stop there, but thank you.

Great. Well, thank you very much to all of our panelists. I'd like to open it up now for questions from my colleagues.

Miss Papan, if I could just start. So I want to thank Miss Cohen for your testimony. It was fascinating to me how many different agencies you referred to, trying to bring them together, because I know, like in my jurisdiction.

Thanks, Len, for your history, if you will, because we've had agencies wait upwards of five years to get a permit and it just does not work.

So my question is, is there some merit, maybe, Miss Cohen, to you, with your involvement with Britt, is there some merit, what Mister Bouchard talked about, which is can we have overlapping satisfaction of information?

Because it seems to me like I remember waiting for BCDC for an eternity to get a pump and levee station done in my district. And this was when I was on the City Council. And the longer we waited, the more folks were in the flood zone and the more they paid in flood insurance.

And it was really, really difficult for folks that were of modest means. And flood insurance. Snow. Cheap date.

I know that doesn't have a lot to do with the building, but one thing I do want to mention is in our district, my district, we also tried to make it such that if people want to come in and build part of the building that they're going to do to satisfy some level of accommodation for sea level rise.

So there's lots that can be done on the front end of building as well. Doesn't make it any cheaper, but at least it prepares us for the future. But in any way, Miss Cohen, if you could answer about can we make the satisfaction of certain inquiries overlap among agencies?

Thank you for your question. So Mister Bourgeois was at many of those meetings in 2017 and expressed a lot of similar information, which is one of the things that helped guide us with the Brit.

And so one of the things that we've really been testing through the Brit is to have a robust preapplication process to try to work out those intersections we initially really wanted to get to when have a project submit applications to all agencies concurrently. We haven't quite achieved that. We're still not able to get the sequence entirely right.

But it does engage project proponents earlier. So it is extending kind of their discussions with the agencies longer. But one of the things we're able to do is work out some of those overlapping issues about mitigation, about jurisdiction, about the questions of what information we need to analyze.

So it is improving the process about those overlapping issues and intersecting issues, but it is still something that the agencies get together to talk about. Otherwise you're getting sequencing, you're getting things one after the other instead of parallel. So that is one of the strengths of what we're trying to do.

Before you go. So you're talking about environmental review and the length of that takes, which is print and permitting per se.

So all six agencies that are on the Brit plus EPA are permitting agencies. So they either are issuance or federal permits or licenses or water quality certification, WDRs. So they're all some part of the, what I would consider the actual permit process.

Great. And Miss Petrie-Norris has a question. She is joining us, Philip from California. She's also chair of our energy utilities committee. So thank you for being here.

Well, thank you, Madam Chair. Really appreciate you convening us for this hearing and for bringing us together as part of the Select Committee.

I think the fact you haven't been a Member account, but a dais full of Members joining for this hearing and flying up to be part of it, I think really is a testament to the fact that we recognize that permit reform, I think, is one of the most important challenges that we face in the State of California in the years ahead.

It touches so many of our critical priorities whether it's housing, clean energy, or building climate resilience. And I represent a district in Southern California. Southern California, as in Northern California, sea level rise is a huge, huge challenge for our coastal communities and really the future of our coastal economy as we approach this hearing.

And I think we've got two more scheduled for the fall. One of the things that has been a goal for me is for us to drill down and get as specific as we can on pollutions, because I think we at a high level all understand the fact that we got to get good projects online more quickly.

We need to move faster if we're going to actually tackle existential priorities. We then, candidly, as policymakers, then connecting the dots from high level, we need, and some of you were starting to get specific, and I appreciate that. But going from, for example, we need to recognize the value of resilience to what does that actually translate into.

Into a change in state policy? So just as a starting question, I would love if you all could just get super specific on one thing that you would like to see change at the state level. One thing that you'd like us as state policymakers to take away from today's conversation.

One thing.

So much I was taking notes. I'm taking away more than just the one thing. But if we can get super specific on one thing, that would be a success.

So the valley, what I meant when I said permit should recognize the value of projects that build climate resilience is that, and John mentioned this when he was talking about he was building a wetland mounted parking lot, is when we build, when we propose to build levee wetland.

All of things that are in service to resilience or develop natural entrails. That proposal, as John said, is treated as if we were, no offense to the strip mall community, but as if we were building a strip mall right on the shoreline. It's not different.

And I think that the inherent societal value of building climate resilience be treated differently in our permitting process. That would be. So.

We almost need to then ask our state agencies, develop a permitting process framework and approach that is specific to resilience projects and differentiated from a typical development project.

Yeah, and I'm not suggesting that we're the only ones that are different. There are probably other types of projects that have greater societal value than others. Our area of knowledge base and activity is on climate resilience. I think that has a lot of value. So I suggest ours.

But the state permitting regime should look closely at what is being proposed and not treat everything the same.

As a science organization.

I'm not going to advocate for policy outcomes, but I will offer two things into the conversation, one of which is that I would have submit that workforce training and training of professionals currently in the positions trying to evaluate information in front of them as to what it means to embrace climate resilience as part of permitting should be, I think, part of the conversation.

Many of these folk are in jobs that were not written, job descriptions not written to accommodate the kinds of decisions that they now face on their day to day jobs. And I think we can lean on our University and education systems to provide training opportunities, opportunities for workforce professionals. So that's one specific.

The other is I hear an awful lot about how, you know, you end up in these conversations, whereas nature pitted against x, y or z. We'll see.

And I think we can again lean on our science colleagues to bring common currency into the way in which we're evaluating trade offs in making these permitting decisions so that we think about and we quantify in dollar values the blood risk reduction that Amash provides. And we put that alongside other dollar values of things.

And there are ways to do that that I think could then provide information in a common currency that would help the staff people trying to approach these permits. That's my science answer.

I'm not going to be able to give you one, but I'll go quick, I promise. I want to echo Lynn's comments. I think having projects in different buckets and that's why I'm glad the Brit is here because that's what it tries to do. But it's a very narrow right. You have to a very narrow type of project.

But maybe that model needs to be looked at for broadening into a secondary pathway, potentially of things that have greater societal value. I know that's going to be hard to wrap language around. I would say staffing, let's get more funding to these agencies, let's get more. All the regulators I know are super overworked and underpaid.

So I think that would attract more, they would stay longer. I think that would be important. And that's probably not a popular suggestion. I think maybe having the number of bytes at the apple on an application, you get two reviews and then either say it's inadequate, go back to the drawing board, or, yeah, we're good.

Like, I think just having some sort of timeframe around, you know, the number of times they're asking for more and more information would, would speed up the process. I'll add one more. zero yeah. And this is also what the British having, working, having these agencies working in concert instead of in sequence. Right. It's this complex domino effect.

Right? You got to have this one before you get this one and this one before you get this one. And this one has to come in from the outside over here. Right. Like can we. And again, the Brit is kind of a little bit of a model for that. So those are, those are some specific suggestions.

So I think that on my wish list we can certainly as regulatory and permitting agencies, accept more risk and uncertainty. But with that comes maybe on the back end, the need for funding, adaptive management and monitoring.

So if we're gonna take some of these innovative projects that have nature based solutions that haven't been tried in California, we're going to do those. But there's some real special status species here, there's endangered species, listed species, and sometimes we're not 100% sure what's going to happen to those. So we adequately Fund these projects.

And I think most large projects have a lot of challenges. It's very expensive to get work done and they're not doing that. Adaptive management and monitoring on the back end.

And so providing more funding and recognizing that as a situation if you get it in the ground quicker, that we need to be able to fix things that might not be working.

And also we found for the Brit that even when we work together as state and federal permitting agencies, we're finding that there's so much infrastructure, there's railroads, there's utility districts, not valley water, but other flood control districts, infrastructure that's under the ground already there.

And sometimes those agencies are really hard to contact and get to work with the project. And so being able to get them to the table is really critical.

I would like to just say the acceptance of risk, I think on both sides is really a hard one to get over. I've had regulators tell me point blank that they don't trust the adaptive management process.

And so even though we've committed to it and we funded it, and we've got the dollars in our CIP program for it, they're like, we don't trust it. So I think the compromise is on both sides.

Thank you Mister Ward. And then we'll go to Mister Ward and we'll see if anyone else wants to.

Thanks Miss Cohen. I wanted to sort of maybe dig in a little bit deeper since it seems to be that you're maybe a potential pilot model that others are looking toward for the kind of efficiencies looking for. You talked about that.

To kind of get up and running, you needed about a million and a half dollars over five years to be able to, I guess, have staff support to be able to do some of the permitting activity. But with that was there, have you analyzed what the alternative would have been like? What would you, what might you have.

Needed, you know, if you were still acting independently as all these different agencies in the form of staff support to be able to form the same outcomes? Is it more efficient, I guess, for this level of staff?

So we haven't done any economic analysis to kind of compare. If we were working with regular staff and these projects were dispersed among different staff at different regulatory agencies, how long that would have would take versus and how much it would cost.

The reason we settled on this model is because there were already examples for both state and feds of, for instance, valley water or other non federal entities paying for expedited permit review. And so that's really kind of the model that we used in order to form this group.

So we did look at data before we started, but it's only as good as it was entered. And so for restoration projects, we found anywhere from 27 to 2000 days. So it's been really hard to compare that and to notify it and then.

Define yourself as collaborative, permitting and being an integrated team. How are you approaching some of the decisions?

So if you're a collection of certain agencies about maybe who gets to analyze it first, how are you reducing maybe any redundant analysis that is maybe shared between any of these individual agencies that otherwise will look at it sort of independently and successively, and when the conflict arises, maybe between a competing goal between two different agencies, how does that get resolved?

So the entire point of the Brit is that the meetings are held together. So the pre application meetings are held together. Brit permitting team meets every week together to talk about the projects and work through those issues. There is some information that does be represented to different agencies differently, and the team is still working through that.

We have two staff here right now who are working on that. We also have a monthly meeting for the policy and management Committee for all the agencies, both staff and managers. And so that's where we raise issues both on a project level and a policy level to work through them.

And we really rely on the staff to elevate those issues to the manager.

Thank you. Any other questions?

Can I answer that from the project proponent side? Because I've taken projects through the process, both pre Brit and post Brit, and I see ally and Agnes in the audience.

I know if they're on my project, I know they know what the issues are, and some of the, it's not quantifiable, the benefit of that, because they've worked together, they know the issues are in the bay.

I'm not starting from scratch when I know I get the Brit team right, cause they've gone through this multiple times in San Francisco Bay to the base specific issues.

So some of the benefit is not really that quantifiable, but it is tangible for those of us that are coming in with an application because we know they already know what we're talking about. So we're not starting from zero. And that's hard to quantify.

If I could just add also that certainly the goals of the Brit are worthy and getting them in the same room adds value. But at the end of the day they have to go back. They, meaning each agency rep, go back to their desk, write their permit based on their agency's requirement.

So I would really hesitate this Committee to focus in on, well, if we do the Brit and we institutionalize it around the state, we're going to cover this issue. That is going to help. Not going to help enough because at the end of the day we still have to go to the regional board based on their requirements.

You have to go to the CDFW, the federate, the feds, all of that. And that's where we get crypto.

Thank you. Other questions. Mister King?

Thank you, Madam Chair. Just to kind of summarize, I mean, I heard this, you got one process where you get everyone together, they talk and you try to have a plan ahead of time.

What I heard a couple of you also say was it'd be great if somehow say this is a climate project and we can expedite that. But what I didn't hear is what is expediting or adding, you know, saying hey, this is a climate project versus what does, what does giving it that weight do?

How would you actually make it go faster? What it sounds like the feedback is we have too many agencies with permitting authority, you know, and as you all know, consolidating all these agencies are, consolidating these tasks is very challenging.

What I haven't heard is I've heard words, I haven't heard a solution that we could actually so do something with it. Perhaps there is not solution. I don't know, let's put it out there.

It's difficult. But I mean having, and Lynn's right, I mean the Brit's not a panacea, but it does have, I think it's a good starting point as a monopoly and just having a dedicated team. Right? So you're not going the normal pathway. You get whatever staff you get. You're on this other pathway that's supposed to be.

And the Brit actually has some metric for performance, right. Because it's funded through public dollars. So, you know, if they're not meeting their deadlines, you know, valley water is a funder. We could, we could stop paying for the service. The other thing, and I'll give you an example, is the South Bay salt pond restoration project.

The first suite of projects we sent through, we were having, this is a voluntary wetland restoration project. The primary focus of this project is habitat restoration and endangered species habitat. We were having to mitigate for that project, mitigating for a voluntary restoration project. Just wanted to make my head explode. Right. And so.

But isn't the restoration mitigation.

We had to do some very creative workarounds to make it pencil out, because technically, to restore the bay, to restore the tides, you have to build some sort of flood protection on the inland site, right. You can't just, you can't just let the tidal waters come in and flood the neighboring communities. Right? You have to.

You have to build some features. And those features require fill in waters of the state and waters of the US. And the no net loss policy says you can't. You have to have a net gain. Well, converting a salt pond to a marsh, that's a type conversion. You're just converting one type of water through.

There's no net gain in waters of the US. So there's all these. I mean, I'm sorry to get super nuanced here, but for a restoration project to have to mitigate, it was just, it was tough to swallow. And we had to get pretty creative with how to do that because you had to show no net.

You had to show no net loss of wetlands, of waters of the US. And so those sorts of things seems like there could be an exception for those sorts of things. And, you know, the balance goals just updated in 2015. And I was co author on two of the science chapters.

We're looking at ecotones, slope levees, so that we don't just build walls, we build gradual transitions of habitat. So as sea levels rise, the marshes can migrate up these gradual slopes. That requires a lot of fill in the bay.

And all of our policies were developed to prevent people from filling the bay, but now we're trying to fill the bay for habitat purposes. It's still a loss of waters. And so we have to mitigate, even though all the science documents say this is how you should build a mark. We have to mitigate for it.

We have to find mitigation within the project through some creative nuance. And it seems like things like upland transition zones which are a direct sea level rise adaptation approach.

Going back to. So, so we. Your second point. So we can't really say, I guess. How do you. The whole point, like you said, we establish all this law to not fill in the bay. And so are you saying that we should mend the Petriss act and say, hey, you can fill the bay under.

These circumstances and BCDC is looking at that. They are. They are looking at, you know, but it's, it's, it's a slope, it's a process. Right. So.

But we could do that too.

Yes, you could.

Right. So I think. I think that would be. I think what we, you know, I think what we would look for from you is, you know, most of what you said is not for us. And then we could take and go do something with.

But the more specific, going back to my colleague Florence County's question, more specific you can be with more specific examples, situations that could be addressed. And obviously the bigger the situation or the more situation covers more than one circumstance, that would be, I think, helpful. That's something that we can go address.

And all the other things that you all raise. None of it was, you know, none of it I could take or put into legislation or we could put into. It was just sort of. Kind of broad, broad language. Right. So I think that's what we're looking for is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the better thing is if there are bigger, you know, this happens, you know, or this happens or we see this happen over and over again. And maybe you don't see that, but that would just be. That's sort of what we are trying to look for.

Because I think we feel your pain and we want to address it. That's the whole point of why everyone's here today. Sorry, go ahead.

I was just going to say I think one thing though, I think that I noted, I think how the clock gets to stop. I think that is something we could work on legislatively. But yes, the more specificity the better because we are lawmakers hungry to do bills to be a part of the solution.

But I wouldn't let anyone react to Mister Ting's comment.

Yeah, but I think Len wanted to say something else.

Thank you. I think there are some other specific things here. Habitat. Right now the permitting regime is about restoring historic conditions. We understand that we're looking at a pre developed bay. We're looking at develop these marshlands. But as John said, a lot of those historic conditions are just going to be underwater.

And so I think we as a society need to be building a habitat for 2015 on a habitat for 1975. And I think that there are ways to do specific legislation that talks about the goals of our permitting process in terms of habitat.

And that's a pretty important, and as Sarah Wicks mentioned, these laws were developed in the early 1970s. We expect them to understand climate back then, but now things are different and there are opportunities now. This could be a Pandora's box.

You want to open it super carefully about these important environmental laws, but if not now, when to think about these questions.

Right. But even the folks who championed the legislation in the seventies, I think none of them would be opposed to habitat restoration. I mean, so I think that's the trying to figure out. We have issues that there is General agreement about. How do we actually carve that out and how do we implement?

I think that's where we need your guidance because you're in the weeds on these issues and you see where the barriers are and the hurdles are because it doesn't, you know, going back to, you know, John's point, look, habitat restoration is the mitigation, mitigating for all the damage that was done from taking away the habitat.

But to me, it doesn't make any sense. Like that is what the mitigation is.

So thank you. And I think we have. Miss Petey Norris had one other follow up question, as did Miss Pap, and then we'll wrap up this session. Okay, just a quick follow up.

So one of the things that Secretary Crowfoot Ed framed as one of his strategic priorities when he was appointed, I think, like when he was first appointed in 2018 was cutting green tape. And he has had a number of initiatives, task forces.

How much has that changed or improved the situation for folks working, you know, in organizations like yours? And it's okay if the answer is at all.

Say I haven't seen a benefit from it doesn't mean it's not a worthy effort, but I haven't seen a benefit.

Hasn'T affected my day to day at all.

So one of the things that we've asked the Brit staff to track is programmatic effort. So that includes projects that intersect with cutting the green tape or other programmatic efforts on the federal side, like programmatic biological opinions or the statewide restoration order for water quality certifications and wdrs.

And so I think one of the things that we've seen is that there are quite a few projects that are able to use kind of these programmatic efforts. One of the other things I think we've seen is that perhaps less complex projects are more easily able to use these programmatic efforts.

And so the bay is very complicated and we focus on that. So one of the things that might be a possibility is that there's staffing that's able to focus on more complex projects because of these programmatic efforts are making it possibly easier to review and permit some of the simpler projects.

That is a question that should be tested. It is one of the things that we're tracking in the Brit and is in our annual report to the SFBRA.

Captain, last comment or question.

I just want to follow up on Miss Whiteman's suggestion.

I agree with you that there should be some sort of currency, and I would, from a legislative perspective, like to look at that more, because since 75, we built a lot around the bay and part of why one shoreline was created, which because the vulnerability of not only public infrastructure, we've got a lot of corporations, big time corporations, that keep not only the state going, but keep the nation going.

And so I am very concerned that not only are we looking at it from a, hey, let's get back to wetlands. Sure, I'm with you 110%. But nonetheless, there are so many vulnerabilities that do need sort of that currency. In other words, how much does it mean dollar wise?

Who's going to be exposed, who has to pay x number of dollars, as I mentioned in flood insurance, whatever it might be. I think there may be something legislatively that not only looks at how are you going to achieve perhaps the best environmental solution protecting against sea level rise?

Also, what's going to be the most cost effective to save residences, whether it's operations, whether it's wastewater treatment plants, all of those things. So some suggestion about how we could legislate to look at currency. Very interested in that. So this is a way of evaluating these things. Perhaps once you metric, perhaps the evaluation.

Goes a lot faster, surfacing the trade offs in a way that they can be actually looked at together. What I'd love to do is to be able to follow up with you. Colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz are actually leaders in this effort in the new Climate resilience Institute headed by Doctor Mike Beckley.

I think I'd love to sort of regroup with him and convene and see if we could bring some ideas back to you.

If I could add 1.0 to that. We've done a lot of talking today about permitting as something that promotes our environmental values, and that's appropriate. We should also think about permitting as something that promotes our economic values.

And this is, I think, getting to Assembly Member Papen's point, and that permits are provided to facilities that are economic engines as they intersect with water or the shoreline. And right now, the state doesn't have the ability to enforce resilience towards economic values, only towards environmental values. And so that's something that I think is ripe for legislation.

And I'm happy to work with Bear Wicks and family Member Paplin and others to formulate the ideas around that. We need to think of our permitting as societal and economic value in addition to the environmental benefits that it accrues.

Thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you very much to our panel. Appreciate your participation today. And from the questions from my colleagues, we will. We can clap. That's fine. We're on the clap. Yeah, on the floor. We're not allowed to clap, so we're all trained to clap.

Our next panel will be permitting reform needed to prepare for drought conditions, and we will allow our guests a couple minutes for their opening remarks, and they will self introduce. If they could go in order of the agenda, that would be great.

We want to start with Miss Ellen Hanak. Good afternoon. Can you hear me okay? Yes, thank you. I'm Ellen Hanak. I'm a senior fellow at the TBIC Water Policy Center, Public Policy Institute of California. My colleague Brian Gray says hello to Assembly Member Poppin, his neighbor. And it's a real honor to be here with all of you.

Thanks for the invitation. So you probably know Public Policy Institute of California is a nonpartisan, research, policy oriented research group. The water Policy center does work looking at a range of water related topics, and that includes also land use and air impacts. Water. What I want to.

My charge today is to give you really quick, big picture overview of sort of the climate challenge for our water supply system. The topic is drought, but drought is also about having water from wet years to use during dry years.

So let's just think about it as a water supply a little bit on some of the permitting things that challenges, that hang things up in this system, and then some suggestions for reform.

I'm going to try to be as concrete as I can for you all, but it might be too small ball for you because sometimes when you get really concrete, it tends to get small ball. So, okay, so big, big picture. Our water supply system is vast, big state.

It's charged with delivering safe drinking water to 40 million Californians. It is also supposed to support a dynamic and diverse economy that includes irrigation supplies for the nation's largest agricultural sector. So big system and how it works. Mix of many, many, many local agencies, state and federal agencies own and operate infrastructure.

And this ranges from above ground reservoirs, groundwater basins that are actively managed, a lot of conveyance moving to move water around locally, regionally, across the state, and then just like huge miles and miles and miles of underground pipes to deliver water to, you know, if we have drinking tap water anywhere.

So that all is something that has to be maintained and kept going. And it is fundamentally designed, if we think about sort of our water system works for supply based on a couple of things about our climate, sort of longstanding things.

One is that it's dry every summer, so you have to have water socked away for the dry season, which happens to be the peak demand season, because that's also the peak growing season. And when we need water for landscapes. The other thing is that we have the most variable precipitation in the country, off the charts.

You've probably seen maps of this just because of where we are and getting hit by different kinds of storm systems from north south coming at us. And what that means is we've got to be ready for floods every year and drought every year.

And so we have to have multiple year storage available to manage that in addition to the seasonal storage. Now, seasonal storage is accomplished through reservoirs above ground, through groundwater basins, and through snowpack. That's been a really important part of the system.

The year over year storage is obviously not snowpack because we don't have glaciers, but it is surface reservoirs to some extent keeping water for that. But then groundwater is like a really huge drought Reserve. So this is the basic system. And then when you think about climate change and what's happening, it's kind of amping it up.

So we are, you know, you mentioned chair Wicks in your introduction, sort of a lot of the aspects of climate change that are hitting us. You think about the water supply system. The heat and the increasing volatility are key factors. Heat is getting rid of our snowpack. It's already disappearing in drier years.

If you look at the projections, we cannot rely on that nearly to the extent we used to, is changing the patterns of runoff, and then we're also getting bigger storms and drier dries. So we kind of need to figure out better how to manage our seasonal storage when we're not having that snowpack.

And then also just the increased volatility means that we're kind of growing flood risk. So our surface reservoirs are being taxed to both store more water for supply, but also not harm people downstream.

So what it all means, if you think about that together, is, and I should add, sea level rise, we heard about all the kinds of things that are happening in terms of risk to the bay. It's a risk for water supply, too, because the delta is a major hub.

Sea level rise is going to reduce water usable supplies in addition to impacting coastal aquifers, making that water saltier. All of this means we have to manage our water differently to some extent, to adapt. And that includes also some major investments to improve our storage and our conveyance infrastructure.

So, and when I say storage above ground, improvements below ground, big time, there's just a lot of cost effective opportunities to use our groundwater basins better, but also conveyance to move it around and such.

And then just dealing with all of the added needs to keep our pipes, everything, the whole system working in the context of bigger storms, flashier floods, those kind of things.

This all is on background of sort of over an overlay on current challenges that are, you know, that water managers are dealing with all the time, and one of them is upgrading aging infrastructure. You probably are aware of dam safety issues. Those are widespread valley water working on one right now.

And so that has to be dealing with climate resilience in addition to just kind of fixing for the historical climate. There's a lot of pipes that need to be upgraded to water safe. There are new water quality standards as we're, as science is improving on this.

So things like pfas that have been all over the news, new standards on that, that means new treatment requirements, and then there's getting groundwater basins into balance.

So 10 years anniversary now of the Sustainable Groundwater Management act, which I don't know if anybody, any of you on this panel were able to vote for that, but it's a big deal to be 10 years out on that. That is about climate resilience.

If you want to think about one thing to manage our water systems for the long term is having groundwater basins that are not just being depleted, depleted, depleted so that we have that available for the long term. And it's a heavy, heavy lift.

And especially you're going to hear from Sarah Wolf in a minute in places of central coast, which have heavily overdrafted groundwater basins, and especially in the San Joaquin Valley, which is our by far largest ag region.

So that means a lot of investments, a lot of costs across the board in California by local agencies and by, by state and state and federal infrastructure operators owners. When we do research at PBIC, we talk a lot with stakeholders.

And I can tell you that in the 20 plus years that I've been working on these issues, water system issues, the recurring consistent theme that we hear from everybody is permitting challenges.

So I was excited to see the preamble and the sort of the charge of this Committee because I think it is really important and I'm sure heard a lot of important things. Gotten feedback already. I say I'm encouraging you to get more. And the basic issue is preventing us from doing things in a timely enough way.

And it's also increasing affordability challenges in context where this is already a big deal in our water system. I'm just going to give you a few quick examples from some recent research. One is groundwater recharge. This is a state priority, it's a local priority, it's key for groundwater sustainability, for climate adaptation.

And we did a recent survey in the San Joaquin Valley, which is kind of, you know, recharge central in a way.

And what we found was that while there have been some improvements in the permitting process or in the process for getting permissions, let's say sometimes it's not an official permit in order to be able to divert floodwaters. So 2023, big wet year, folks saw some, some improvements there.

The big complaint, the bigger complaint on the permitting side was just getting permission to build and then to operate projects. So this is other kinds of permits, you know, about whether or not you can alter a stream bed, that kind of thing. Second, repurposing farmland.

We estimate that between half a million and 900,000 acres of irrigated land is going to have to come out of production less if we do more on recharge, but still a significant amount if you don't manage that well, it's a huge public health risk, in addition to being a really big economic hit for that region.

So there's a lot of creative energy going into now looking at how to repurpose it in ways involving solar, involving different kinds of land management that may be not going to be bringing in as much money as certain crops, but can at least be productive in some ways.

And right now, there are a number of preexisting regulations and laws that kind of are cross purposes with that because they think it's bad to take any farmland out of production. I'll have some concrete suggestions later if you want them delivering safe drinking water.

Heard from a number of urban water providers that getting the state and the local permissions to do what they need to do to deal with PFAS, to deal with chrome six and just to keep their pipes healthy because they're getting old, can be a nightmare. And I think that the Member who mentioned add ons might have left.

But, yeah, Member Grayson, that's a huge issue at the local level for things like this. Fix your water pipe and you might be asked to build trees somewhere else in town. So maybe reasonable mitigation requirements.

We had a deep dive study on that, looked at advancing restoration projects a few years ago, and my written testimony, which you have, which is available online on the PPIC website, gets into that more.

That was led by the center's Director, Doctor Leticia Grenier, that was looking at exactly some of the topics that you heard from the prior panel about how even restoration projects are hard. What Letitia and her team found was that there are some bright signs there in terms of possible models. Britt was one of them.

Through this idea of coordinating teams that have to do different permits, I would say that the governor's strike team that he set up for the storage project, that seems to be working in that same way of getting the different agencies together so that they can work it out.

Also, folks talked about programmatic permitting and sort of some specific ways, especially for simpler projects to get done, has been helpful on ecosystems. Somebody from sustainable conservation is here. They've been working a lot on that. I think there's room for doing that kind of thing, for things like ability to do local research projects too.

And it makes some of that stuff simple. It shouldn't be so hard. And then permitting at scale to do big things if you haven't had the opportunity yet to get input from Heather Dyer, who's the General manager at the San Bernardino municipal, San Bernardino Valley municipal Water District.

He's been leading a multi agency effort to do a habitat conservation plan down in the upper Santa Ana river area. And this is simultaneously to do restoration under, under the federal law. It's not an NCCP, it's not an, it's not under state law, but under federal.

But then allowing like, I think, 100 different water supply projects to happen at the same time. She would have insights for you on how you could make that easier on the state side, too, I think volunteering her without having asked her, but she always loves to talk about that stuff, so. Okay, so what can the Legislature do?

Some of this is clearly about making agencies work better. And so I just want to say there's no substitute for strong Executive leadership on this. And I think, you know, that's why it's good that the Administration has been focused on some of these issues. And I mentioned the strike team is one thing.

Sometimes the Administration has been able to do some things that have been hard for you all to do, and it's been happening through Executive order initially. But there are ways when that stuff is good, turn it into legislation.

And one example of that right now that's helping with groundwater sustainability implementation is there's an exemption for the CEQA, exemption for certain kinds of projects. Why should hazard following on a farm not require a permit? But if there's smart, organized following to do something good, that has to go through CEQA.

So that's something that is worth working on. I want to also just highlight something that you all passed last year, that the Governor signed SB 149, which was basically streamlining judicial review of CEQA challenges.

The sites project, which is the largest project for storage that's still on the table, is recently benefited from that, and that's shaved years off of that. And I'm sure it's shaped a lot of costs because of the uncertainty. So those are the kinds of things that can be big. In our San Joaquin Valley work.

We have a lot of small ball things, too. Suggestions? I don't think there's like, there's not one, like, big fix. We've got a lot of different statutes, and so we might, some of them have to kind of just be dealt with one by one, but that can add up to making something work.

And so I have taken a lot of time, but I can give you some more examples if you want later. And it's also linked in the testimony. Thank you very much.

Okay.

Can you hear me? Hi, thank you for having me here today. Sarah Wolf. I'm a farmer in the San Joaquin Valley and also a water consultant.

I work primarily with agricultural water users, and really, my business developed around SGMA and the need that we all had to do new projects and do things with our land that we had not done before or contemplated as our role.

And so there's a lot of excitement, has been a lot of excitement and interest in doing many of these projects, whether it's land repurposing for purposes of habitat or recharge projects or floodplain expansion. Farmers are very, very interested in doing this, capture flood flows whenever they are available and get them into the ground to benefit the aquifer.

They have been, since 2019, easily submitting applications for, you know, half $1.0 million applications for appropriate water rights to be able to divert these flood flows, only to learn quickly that the State Water Resources Control Board really was not ready for us to do all of that because they did not have a process for groundwater recharge applications.

And so we've been working through a myriad of problems that have arisen through this that I think we're not in anyone's specific agenda, but just learning that we're looking at our water supply system in a much different way today with respect to climate change and how we manage the overall supply.

It's not just in storage, it's not just in snowpack, it's also in recharge, other activities that we have to do all of these things differently. And I think it was said earlier, our laws are not written to look forward thinking on this and how things may look into the future.

So there's a lot to be done, and I'm going to touch on just a few of those items that I've personally had to deal with, with some of these projects that we're working on on farm. And, you know, some of these are happening through government programs like the, of conservation.

Multi benefit land repurposing programs that are initiated by the state are still being hindered by these permitting processes that have held us up. And I think one, you know, I mentioned that we do a lot of floodplain restoration, expansion of floodplains in some of these historically dry creeks.

They get flash flood events that you can easily spread out, make wider to slow the water down, allow more water penetration to occur as it's coming through in a storm event. And you need stream bed alteration permits for all of those.

And to get a stream bed alteration permit takes years, and then you have to go and get one every year after. And so there, I mean, that is a specific thing that I think legislatively we could change the floodplain expansion increase that are, you know, typically only filled during flash flood events.

That is utilizing our system better than we have before, and we need to fix that. So I think that is a major one that could easily be fixed. SB 122, that was passed due to the Executive order that the Governor did in 2023, was extremely helpful.

We would not have recharged the number of feet that we were able to do in the San Joaquin Valley that year without that legislate, without that Executive order. However, the legislation passed, and there are some concerns around the clarity of what we can and can't do within that legislation.

One of which that's a major concern, is fish screens. A lot of these projects are happening on flood diversion infrastructure. So not off the natural creek in many places, some places off the natural creek, but fish screens are required for any diversion. And what Fish and Wildlife wants in a fish screen is very nebulous.

We have not been able to clarify what that is. So that is something, you know, these are major investments for the landowners to prepare for these flood events. They don't know when they're going to happen, but they need to prepare ahead of time and have that all in place.

But we need clarity on what will be required of us, and we're not getting that at this point in time. It was said earlier, and it's true, in all of these permits on agricultural well, we submit applications for permits and hear nothing. There's no time frame, there's no response time.

We have submitted millions of dollars in fees, and yet we don't know if our application is even acceptable to be submitted for many years in many cases. And so we are sitting on these permits, unsure what we can do with them. And it's at the bequest of the agencies when they decide to engage with us.

And that is very, very challenging. And it deters people from doing the projects because they just simply don't have the time. And we have a timeline to meet on groundwater management, and we will not meet those timelines if we're waiting on permits. So again, I hearken back to SB 122.

We were able to do a lot with our aquifers because of that. We had all put in applications for appropriate water rights, but couldn't act upon them because nothing has happened with them. So it's just a real live example of we're missing opportunities if we don't move these permits along.

Also, on the appropriate water rights, which I do a lot of work in, the 9020 rule, which is one of the options that the State Water Resources Control Board has put forth as part of their streamlined process, is not applicable and implementable in most cases on flood diversions, because you don't have the gauging stations that you do on most streams.

There's a lot of locations that that just doesn't work in because you can't regulate the water, the water flow that's happening in that particular stream or infrastructure. Also, the diversion windows are askew and not in line with climate change. We're having a lot later flood events. And the window of opportunity for diversions is January through March.

So, I mean, even as granular as that, getting down into opening up how we operate the system and when we're able to take some of those diversions is important. And then lastly, I'll just touch on the increase in fees, which is to be expected.

But we have had increase in fees of permitting of 1800% over the last few years. So significant. And as I mentioned, the appropriate water rights applications that we have applied for have been application has been a half $1.0 million each. Because of the amount of water that we're.

We typically go after an application for an entire region so that we're working with the system as a whole. Cause there's a lot of expense in including that appropriate water. Right. And just engineering work that has to be done along with it.

So we've done them as groups, but those fees have gone up exponentially in just this year. With that, I will stop and welcome questions later.

Thank you. Well, good afternoon. My name is Matt Gias. I'm the President of the California Forestry Association. And I do appreciate the opportunity to be here. And I do appreciate the opportunity to speak about forest. It's a really important issue to me, and I'm glad to be here because it appears to be an important issue.

You as well. I have changed my testimony here based on what I've heard to date or this afternoon, because it's clear that you guys are looking for very targeted measures, very targeted outcomes that could be contemplated, right? But to get there, I got a couple different things I wanted to cover.

First of all, I just wanted to set the table in terms of context, because we live in a state that's 104 million acres. We talk forestry, we always talk acres. The State of California is 104 million acres, and approximately 31% of the state is covered by forests.

And in the context of this testimony, and this panel route has been very hard on forests in California. And chair Wicks, you made the mention of the increased wildfire 250% over the course of the last several years. That is the outcome of drought. And I'm not going to get in the life history of forest.

And this is not a science class, but nonetheless, the relationship exists throughout distressing forests. Forests in many cases are overstocked, and we have tremendous impact from wildfire on not only the natural resources of our forests, but the communities that are around those forests.

And so the other piece that I think is really critical is the fact that we have so much federal land in California. So of the forest and landscapes in California, I'm not going to speak in broad context here, but just over 50% is federal and 50% is non federal.

That non federal is a mix, if you will, of industry, who my represent, non industrial, small mom and pops, if you will, state parks, some other state lands, local jurisdictions speaking.

So when we think about permitting in California, we can't set aside the federal permitting nexus because every project that happens on federal lands is moving through a different permitting process. In their world, they're operating under NEPA. In our non federal lands, we're operating under some permitting regime that is generally predicated on CEQA.

Okay, so, and then amongst that, when we have commercial types of operations, when we have fuel hazard reduction work or force management activities that have a commercial nexus, we have a forest practice act, we have a forest practice rule that is your nexus to CEQA.

On the flip side of that, we have non commercial projects that are happening throughout the state as well. And State of California has done a very good job, in my opinion, over the course of the last several years of investing in non commercial projects. But the pathways to get those done is different.

So I think about, when I think about force as a whole and projects as a whole, you cannot set aside one permitting pathway to the other, because in California, we have seven to 10,000 miles of shared property lines, if you will, in jurisdictions.

And everybody is moving under the premise of the million acre strategy, which was set forth by Jerry Brown at the end of his term and now carried forth where the federal and state partners and private partners and indigenous voices, everybody is working to try to hit this million acre mark.

So where we're putting projects together, we have this issue of jurisdiction, and you have so many acres that you want to get treated, and you hit a property line and things change.

The tides change, the permitting timelines change, the culture changes, and you could come to a stop, or you could try to negotiate and build something, build a coalition that's going to continue that project beyond just food for thought.

If you are in the unenviable position of trying to put together a non commercial fuel hazard project in the coastal zone, your permitting needs become all that more challenging. Right. So I'm just going to kind of give you guys some ideas. That's a very broad entree into the forest world. Right.

But you guys clearly have an appetite for targeted ideas that you can think about. So I'm going to give you guys some targets to think about. And I'm not suggesting in terms of priority that one's better than the other, but I think that these are all opportunities that you as a body can think about.

That chair wix, you can think about amongst your colleagues, and one of them is not focused on California permitting so much, but falling back on that issue of, we have so many federal acres in California, and we're all trying to achieve a benchmark of a million acres.

We're trying to motivate the Forest service to do more on their landscapes to a certain extent.

And there might be some opportunity, not that you can change the federal landscape per se, but as Members of this Committee or your colleagues, I think it would be fair to say that you could reach out and express concern amongst your federal partners and say, we actually do have a concern in California that we want to mobilize and have more acres treated in California because we recognize the problem is so dire.

Okay, so there is that. There are emergency authorities that the federal partners have. And you could reach out and say, we would like to see the Forest Service use more emergency authorities and work with private landowners out there to have more nature based practical options for fire suppression built across the landscape.

AE fuel breaks, don't hit a property line and stop. Keep going.

And like so you could motivate, I suppose, to a certain extent, I think, about programmatic approaches, and I was touched by the first panel because I heard, I can't remember the exact palace name now, but I heard that we're trying to do nature based and we're building resiliency through projects, and we're having to pull permits at the federal level and the regional water quality control boards that we heard about green tape with Secretary Crowfoot.

And so there's all these cross jurisdictional issues there as well. That is a challenge. And that challenge resides within forestry as well, where if you're doing commercial work or non commercial work on non federal lands, you do have permitting through the resources agency, green bed alterations permits being one of them.

You do have wDRC, Cal, EPA, and you do have permitting through CAL FIRE. Those timelines do not all coalesce. The information needs are not exactly the same, but they're very close. And so I think that there's a way to look at that process and come out the end with something that's more coalesced, timely and efficient.

So there's a piece for you to contemplate. We also have this issue of, again, kind of falling back to regional approaches. There's certain agencies that have regions within them and have different permitting under same authorities for the same types of projects.

But at the same time, we have statewide agencies that have oversight of those agencies that have programmatic statewide permitting mechanisms.

Why could we not think about looking at statewide programmatic coverage for permitting that meets all the needs across the board and kind of not usurp the regional authorities for inspection and compliance, but build a statewide umbrella program that inspection and compliance is working underneath? There's a thought for you, I suppose did make mention of the coastal zone.

That's a very contentious, it's a very easy, nuanced change in statute, but very contentious issue as I can imagine. Many of my partners here working on sea level rise and so on and so forth, very challenging. So I bring up these issues. I really think that this is coalescing of permitting is really something to think about.

I do like the idea of the pause that was brought up earlier, not having this iterative nature. Bring me another rock scenario. Be reasonable about it, be thoughtful. That resonates with me to a certain extent.

And I really think that the state needs to lean in hard to a certain extent in an appropriate and diplomatic way and try to incentivize our federal partners in the forces space to get more done within the context that they can or invest in projects.

And that investment for the state is contingent upon certain actions at the federal level that's going to incentivize actions. So I'm going to stop there. And if there's questions, I'll be happy to answer questions for my next colleague here.

Thank you very much. Excuse me. Good afternoon, Madam Chair Committee thank you very much for having me. I'm Joanna Lassard. I'm the watershed manager at the Yuba water agency. Yuba Water agency has five primary mission areas. We're first and foremost a flood risk reduction agency.

We also provide sustainable water supply, hydropower generation, fisheries protection enhancement through the Loyuba river, and recreation at new Builders bar reservoir. So Yuba county is a small, Rural County, and the Yuba development project runs right through it. But like most of Californians, our water supply is upstream and outside of our jurisdiction.

Our water supply comes from the North Yuba river. It's primarily in federal ownership. It's unique in that it is one of the last large watersheds in California that has yet to have a megafire.

So we are very focused on pace and scale of restoration, and what that restoration will entail is significant amounts of thinning of the forest to undo what 150 years of fire suppression has done. We got involved in this work through. It's really kind of an interesting origin story through financing a single project in our upper watershed.

Again, it's in federal ownership. Blue Forest conservation developed a tool called the Forest Resilience Bond, and the idea was to have state and federal funding agencies come together with a downstream beneficiary to pay back impact investors who would pay for the money to get on the ground more quickly. This project was completed in just over four years.

So in that sense, the forest resilience bond worked. That project would have taken 10 plus years to complete normally. More importantly, the forest resilience bond developed the relationships that led to the creation of the North Cuba forest Partnership.

Those relationships led to us agreeing to work at the landscape scale to get the entire 275,000 acre north Hebel river watershed into resilience. We now have two forest resilience bonds in that watershed. There are actually others in the state now. East Bay Mudd and metropolitan Water now invested in similar types of bonds to increase pace and scale.

We're doing planning at the landscape scale up there. There was a recent NEPA document that covers 210,000 acres. There'll be multiple records of decisions. So using planning tools to increase pace and scale with our federal partners has been a part of the North Heba Forest Partnership.

One of the ways that CEQA has supported that effort is SB 901, and that's a CEQA exemption. So if you've already done Nepa, you don't have to do Ceqa. So that was an example of a CEQA amendment really supporting that work.

When you move down into Yuba county, we're also working with private partners, mostly industrial, non industrial timber companies, to do similar types of forest health work. Upper Yuba county is a significant hazard zone for fire, and we need the similar kind of work in the state responsibility area we've used.

We were the first project to use the California Vegetation Treatment program project specific analysis as our CEQA document that came from a programmatic EIr focused on forest health projects. And we did find that that was definitely an avenue toward increasing environmental compliance so that we could start implementation more quickly.

In fact, it worked so well that we just received a new CAL FIRE grant. And in the that grant, we're including a landscape scale calv TP document to cover all forested acres in Yuba county.

So this will supersede those other previous project specific CaLV TPS, and new projects will be able to use that document to get shovel ready more quickly and more affordably. So, in those ways, we're really trying to use kind of creative planning to increase pace and scale.

We've been very successful both in our upper watershed and in the county for attracting new partners, attracting new projects, and specifically attracting significant amounts of implementation funding. The North Yuba landscape was selected as one of the wildfire crisis watersheds, and it received 130 million in implementation funding from the Bil Inflation Reduction act.

So a lot of money for implementation. But now we're up against bottlenecks that I want to spend the rest of my time talking about the implementation funding alone doesn't solve. And actually, there's an avenue for policy and permitting to support these bottlenecks. So these bottlenecks could be described as the three w's. It's Wood, workdays and workforce.

Wood is biomass utilization. When we're doing these forest health treatments, most of it's not merchantable timber. Most of it's small trees, branches, scrub material. When you work at the landscape scale, you're creating mountains of it, which is essentially a waste product. There are very few biomass utilization projects in the state.

There are very few places to take this material for one project in one season, it's easily $2 million in trucking fees to get that material to a place, even if they'll take it. Every time there's a fire, there's a glut of this material.

And so we often run up where not only is it very far away, but they're not even taking new chips. So this is a huge problem. We need investment in biomass utilization infrastructure, and combustion based biomass infrastructure is one of the only commercial ready bioenergy types of projects that exist.

There's a lot of pilot level projects working on other types of end products, syngas, other biochar, other end products. But using biomass to bioenergy with combustion based technology is the only commercial ready type of technology. And it's actually very hard to permit a large combustion based biomass project in California. So that's one huge bottleneck.

The next one is workdays. Our implementation partners are stuck between waiting for the land to dry out enough so that they're able to go out and start using heavy machinery on the land. And that's managed through state waterboard soil runoff and compaction rules.

Then you start your implementation treatments and you quickly run up against the it's too hot and too dry, and that's called an e day. I believe it's an Alphabet type system, a through e, e being it's too hot and too dry down tools, no mechanical thinning whatsoever.

So in some years, when we have an extreme winter and an extreme summer, that implementation time is like 18 days. You cannot increase pace and scale and you're not going to be able to spend the money quickly enough with just a few weeks of implementation time. That brings us to our third bottleneck, which is workforce.

Workforce is heavily impacted by workdays. We're not recruiting enough people into the restoration economy that we actually need to build if we're going to achieve a million acres per year. And the workforce that we do have are spread pretty thin.

They often get pulled into fires with their machinery when there's a fire to help work on those fires. There's a lot of watershed groups now with huge amounts of implementation money trying to get those people to come to their watershed and help work on these treatments.

And when you have them mobilized in your watershed and then you have an e day, they're out there mobilized with crews, they're in tents or they're in hotels. They have labor costs, food costs, housing costs, and they don't get paid when they're not working on the treatments.

So they have to decide if they're going to stay there and wait for the conditions to improve or demobilize and go where they can work. They're increasingly talking about leaving the state entirely. We can't go faster if we lose our workforce.

So there are policy and permitting discussions to be had on all of these bottlenecks that would really help us. We still need the implementation of funding to keep coming, but without these bottlenecks being addressed, we are not going to achieve our goals. So I would. Sorry, I'm done. Thank you. Thank you.

We'll now turn over to Members of the Committee for questions or comments.

I knew you'd have one.

Okay, so can you, for those of us not as familiar with the world of forestry, can you help us understand a little bit the logic but behind the constraints for, you know, wet period, dry period? And you said there are folks that are talking about leaving the state.

Are those constraints very unique to California or are they similar in other geographies?

So my understanding is that the E day protocol is a federal rule. So that would be similar across federal landscape. But our conditions, I think are a bit more extreme in some years. So we tend to have more e days. And that's obviously increasing with the increasing summers. But there would be mitigations.

The whole thing with the ED is that you, in order to proceed, you would need to get a variance that variances are only allowed in very specific conditions, specific humidity levels, and those are based on weather stations.

We're working with the forest Service to try to look at more localized weather to reduce sort of regional e days when you could actually keep working because conditions aren't the same where you're actually at.

But even then, with the increasing climate change and increasing hot dry conditions like we are going to run up against this time, where we're going to have to have mitigations to keep working. We're going to have to figure out how to work all year when it's not snow covered.

And that is achievable with training by crews and on the water as part of the project and wetting the area before you start treatment. Like there would be mitigations. And this isn't insurmountable, it's just currently not allowed with the wet period. And again, I'm not a forester, I'm not an expert.

This is what I'm understanding from my teams. This is managed through the regional board. And again, there would be mitigations with permitting changes. You could complete your treatments and go back and do some sort of soil amendments, erosion control. This is also solvable. But the down tools are waiting. And then again waiting.

That's not really part of the solution in the long run. A fire will come. Before we get done.

A couple other clarifying questions. As long as I have the stage. I think you said that. I think you said it's very difficult to get a biomass facility permitted in the State of California. I think that's quite an understatement. And I think sometimes there's a lot of reasons that those projects, I think, run into difficulties.

But I do think one of the reasons is that many people think that, zero my gosh that's going to somehow encourage deforestation and incentivize operations to the forest.

Can you help us understand, just in order to meet the goals that the state has set over the course of, say, the next five to 10 years, what volume of biomass is that going to create if we're just on a glide path to hit the goals that we need to hit in order to provide adequate fire mitigation strategies, or ballpark.

Yeah, please. Because I know it's a gigantic mountain. It's a big number. Yeah, yeah, big number.

So two things, I think the next thing on biomass. Zero, great. I think that's true. I will tell you real quick. General numbers is if you're doing a project, this is a broad number.

If you're doing a project in the woods for the purposes of fuel hazard reduction and you're treating and creating biomass and creating about 15,000 bone dry tons an acre, that's an average.

And I would even call that, if you want to be fair, you call that on the high end, you're guaranteed you're going to be 10,000 to 15,000 bone dry cuts an acre, given the variability in the states. Fourth, right. Now, balance that against the million acre strategy and you can start putting numbers together.

They get to be very big. Can you speak closer to them all, please? I'm sorry. You could get to numbers very big very quickly. There is a study recently published by the State Board of Forestry and Fire Protection. They're talking about a million bone dried tons stored on the landscape as we speak.

Like actually stored, that's not being created, that's stored. Not every single one of those is accessible, but that's stored on the landscape. So the problem that my colleagues, I'm sure, will speak to is dramatic.

Right. One more question, one more follow up. All right. So, Miss Honeck, it sounded like as you were wrapping up your testimony, you were suggesting that there's some reforms needed to the Williamson act. Is that what you were getting at?

I'd be interested in digging a little bit into some of those specifics and then also hearing, Miss Wolf, your perspective on that.

Right.

So the Williamson act is kind of a, it's a state county partnership. And so the specific ways that it gets implemented depend to some extent on county policy. And some counties provide more flexibility, let's just say, than others. There are some overall challenges of, you know, this is really about thinking about.

So you get tax breaks if you are keeping your land in ag, right. And sometimes in open space if you are, as Sarah's neighbors and maybe even you yourself are experiencing.

If you are really now in a situation where you're forced to ratchet down the amount of irrigable acreage, the irrigated acreage that you've got, you ideally want to repurpose it in some way that is going to be beneficial, and you at least don't want to get penalized for not using water on it.

And so some folks say involved in solar development have been hoping to be able to retain that, and some counties allow it. And so there may be ways to sort of standardize that, although I know some counties won't like that.

But there's also, there are ways of sort of making sure people, if they're going into sort of more habitat Recharge Basin kind of thing to make sure that they qualify for the open space provisions of it, those are not standard across counties.

But then another really big thing is that if you want to opt out of Williamson act, you have 10 years where you got to wait. And I, I don't think everybody who's going to have to take land out of production is going to have 10 years to wait.

So changing the penalty structure, that's something I think that the state could provide some across the board on and maybe help counties at least with sort of rationalizing a framework so that not every county needs to go and go through their own local legislative process, because that's hard.

Agree with Ellen. Those are all great points. And I think, you know, we are, we are all trying to be as creative as possible with the land that we need to take out of production to ensure we can still farm a portion of it. Solar is a big component of that.

Many water districts have deemed that as an agricultural use at this point in time to try to help with that transition. So Williamson in some counties, I think, is recognizing it in that way. That would be helpful. I think the penalties, the early exit or would be getting those addressed would be very helpful.

But these recharge ponds, or even valuing for purposes of recharge when and if it's available, is still active farming. So, you know, making sure that we broaden what the use of that land is, that it's not just so limiting because it, in many cases, it may just be followed in a rotational system.

It may not be that field is followed for the next 10 years, but it is for the next three years, and then another section of your property maybe will be. So this allowing for that type of broader flexibility.

And I think also one thing I didn't mention earlier, but plays into the solar, you know, the permitting for all of the transmission lines that are necessary, that need to be put in place if we're actually going to meet those green energy goals and put in all the solar as a conversion from ag production.

There's really a standstill at this moment in time that without transmission, there's no ability to put in more solar.

We are going to do a whole hearing on that, actually, Nick, so thank you for that. Do you have anything else? I have one question, if you're. No, you go ahead.

I want to talk a little bit about the fees and them going up 1800 percent. Excuse me. So I covered this before, but is it that all those fees must be paid on the front end of an application?

They are on the application, the ones I'm experienced.

And you pay at application. So that money just sits there and you wait and you wait. I kind of feel like you might. It might be fair to charge as one goes along the process.

Now, the second thing that I wanted to make a comment question is, as it relates to capturing water, because a lot of what the chairperson has tried to accomplish here is, do we have enough water to afford to service the housing we might contemplate.

And I, like yourself, I'm very pleased with governor's emergency order becoming an actual statute. So that short of 10 years and a half $1.0 million is an ability to divert in the good times, if you will.

And so that we have enough water, perhaps, to either recharge groundwater or there's water on stock, should we have something that needs to be filled? So that's more of a comment than a question, but I guess I'm wondering, have you seen a big increase in people's ability to meet their groundwater repair requirements because of the emergency?

Greater ease, if you will, when we have these atmospheric rivers and all that good stuff.

2023 was really our first opportunity.

And I will say, because we had not been granted any of those permits that we were going after, a lot of the money that should have been sent to install the infrastructure to get those up and going were either not in place or not even accessible because there just was such a big need and there just weren't the pumps and the facilities available to bring that all to bear.

So we could be doing a lot more, a lot more than what we did in 2023. But it takes that prep because, like I said, it's a motor that you have to have sitting there, the fish screen. It's a piping infrastructure in some cases.

We're connecting various non like entities together, so that when those flood events happen, we can push it out further into the landscape than just those adjacent. And we need to do that ahead of time. And so I think. I don't think that we are close to meeting our goals at this point in time.

I think was your original question with respect to SGMA. We did a lot in 2023, but it's nowhere near what needs to be done. It is surmountable, almost, and I think Ellen would even agree. The amount of flood flows available in all likelihood will not fix our problem.

We will still have half a million acres of farm ground or more going out of production. And it already is. I mean, there just are not solutions in place for many of these lands. And so there is a lot of land already out of production on a permanent basis that will not be farmed.

So, you know, those are major economic impacts to the communities, to the counties, to the state. And I think we are behind on supporting the legislation for the Groundwater Management act. We passed it, but we didn't have the implementation support from the agencies to put all the things in place.

I don't believe that we could have, but there needs to be a lot faster movement towards supporting those activities than there has been to date.

One more I may on the forest. Matt, I won't get to you for a second. You mentioned something that really caught my attention, and that was perhaps state incentives to get elaborate just a little, what might be in our wheelhouse.

In other words, don't invest until you get that commitment from the feds, because they have gone and seen the thinning of forests and how that really creates a much healthier forest. And I appreciate that. Educationally, great actors. So what can the state do? What is this incentive thing that you teach on?

I have a lot of friends that work in the federal system. They're good people that are in a tough spot, if you will.

And California has invested in projects this year in Nevada conservancy, through CAL FIRE, developing partnerships to try to support the Forest Service to get moving forward on projects that are connected in nature or necessary as it relates to resiliency, so on and so forth. I think that there's a real capacity issue within the Forest Service.

And right now there's not good opportunities for relationships between private entities and the Forest Service. It's always a government to government type of relationship in many instances that now lends itself to having like building the triangle and having a private partner in there helping. And I think that we could break that model to a certain extent.

And be more efficient. The Forest Service does have new authorities that have been granted to them. And I believe that the Forest Service could rely upon those authorities, but they have an issue with recognizing at times that those authorities exist. Right. And so it's a very large organization. In California alone, there's 18 national force across the nation.

There's hundreds of them. And so to have that, that message resonate across the entire nation or even throughout California is tough.

But if we don't have legislative support for those types of initiatives from leaders like yourselves along with, like myself, if you will, and others, not that I'm tooting my own horn, but building a coalition with that kind of messaging, we're not going to change the culture.

So I do believe that there's an opportunity to think about how do we reach out to the federal partners through the, and let them know California wants to invest, but we need to see outcome. And what does that mean? I think that that means relying upon your emergency authorities and building new partnerships with better outcomes.

And that's kind of where I, at the broad level. That's the way I think about it.

Thank you. I had one last question as we wrap up this panel, too, for Miss Hank. You said in your testimony that you've been doing this for 20 years, and permitting issues and permitting challenges is constantly, consistently coming up.

Can you give maybe some of the most egregious examples of, because of permitting, there's been inaction on something and maybe what the cost of that inaction has been. You're going to put me on the spot.

Put me on the spot.

Or even some examples of, like, how that manifests itself in our inability to actually solve problems.

You know, I think I'll give an example just from the restoration world, which is kind of doing restoration is key to having our water supply also be healthy. Right. We've got to do work in the Delta watershed to be able to do that. You know, there are examples of cases where everybody agrees, pretty much.

Pretty much everybody agrees that there's, you know, some land that should be restored and you still can have 1015 plus years of just it, not water, you know, and so when you have that for something, that's where everybody agrees.

You know, it makes it so much harder for stuff where you've got folks who, you know, interest gray infrastructure. You know, not everybody agrees, even if we do need it.

So, you know, I, yeah, I'm encouraged by some of the things, you know, what we heard on the first panel, I think you're, there have been some great progress in recent years on trying to simplify and go more programmatic. But there are just ways in which we still have a lot to do.

And I think we should do that not just on restoration projects, but also something like the streambed alteration agreements. If it's not a megaproject's okay, they need bigger looks. Right. But if it's not, if it's a lot of distributed groundwater research, let's find a way to simplify that.

Great. Thank you. Well, thank you very much to panel two. We're allowed to flog. Okay. Our last panel will be on permitting reform needed to facilitate the reduction and removal of atmospheric carbon. If we could ask our panelists to keep their remarks concise, because we will have questions for you all after. And.

We'Ll let you all self introduce. And if you could go in order of the agenda, that would be great.

Thumbs up. zero, I don't know if the mic's on. Can you. There we go.

Okay. There we go.

Perfect.

Thank you, Jay Wicks and Committee Members. My name is Casper Donnison. I'm a scientist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and my area of expertise is in carbon dioxide removal and management.

And I'm going to be playing the context for the need to withdraw carbon from the atmosphere and drawing on our reports, getting to neutral, which you will have on your desks.

And if I can ask you just to join me, several pages in page one of the Executive summary shows a lovely figure with some bar charts on it. And this will help us understand the scale of the need for carbon dioxide removal. So, to achieve the 2045 carbon neutral target, we need aggressive emissions reductions in California.

That involves things like electrifying transport, renewable energy sources for electricity. But they will only get us so far. And the rest of the job needs to be done by CO2 removal. And in the report, we estimate around 100 million tons of CO2 removal is needed to achieve that target per year by 2045.

And to put that into context, that's somewhere between a quarter and a third of California's greenhouse gas emissions today. So the scale is large. And the starting point, we're starting from pretty Low base the three pillars that we've put forward in a report of how to achieve that 100 million ton target.

I'll give an overview of those three. The first one is around the strategies on natural and agricultural lands. And I won't give too much detail, because the previous panels have put forward some of these projects.

Ecosystem restoration, farm activities, for example, crop rotations, cover cropping, bioterrori applications, and also going out into forests, those forests at risk of fire and doing some management treatments there, I'll just say on this pillar, these are measures we can take today. There isn't a significant amount of infrastructure needs to deliver them. They're relatively cheap.

In the report, we estimate they average around $11 per ton of carbon dioxide removed. And that's great, but they will only get us so far towards that 100 million ton target. And so the second pillar, this has also been mentioned, this is biomass utilization. This is really the big enchilada in California of CO2 removal.

And this gets a lot of focus in our research. These strategies involve collecting biomass resources from vast forests, from agricultural activities, from cities. So it doesn't matter what district the Committee Members represent, there'll be biomass opportunities in your district.

And in fact, if you join me a few pages further, page four of the report gives a map of California, and you can see those bars there representing the biomass resource availability and the different origins that come from them. So what can we do with those resources?

You've already heard that they're not being well used today, and in fact, their decay is also leading to greenhouse gas emissions. But if we use them well, we can get both useful energy sources and CO2 withdrawal. That's a real, real good double win.

The process we can do that by, we can collect those and turn them into electricity, hydrogen fuels. There's a range of options we can use to deliver that. The cost is greater than the first pillar. The natural approaches, between $30 to $90 per ton of CO2 removed. We're getting that useful energy resource.

We can also get investment and jobs creation across California communities where that sector would scale up. And that will require much more infrastructure than the first pillar. We're looking at developing the supply chain. We estimate building between 51100 biomass utilization facilities.

You heard in the previous panel how it's challenging to get those permitted, and a large number of facilities that need to get built to reach that potential. These technologies are also relatively mature, so they can be used soon as well.

The third pillar that we look at to help achieve that 100 million ton target, this is the direct capture of CO2 from the air. And I understand that the Committee may already be familiar with a project in Tracy that does this technology. This approach is the least mature technology, also the most expensive.

We estimate somewhere over dollar, 200 per tonne of CO2 removed, but it could be an important backstop. The other two pillars don't get us to that 100 million ton target, and that's why it's worth exploring.

The second and third pillars both require much more infrastructure and they both require permitting for CO2 storage, which has already been touched on so far. And I will try and limit my remarks to some measures you could consider that could be helpful to spur that on.

There are great opportunities in California, amongst the best in the western United States, for the storage of CO2 pumped in liquid form, deep underground, permanently safely. The technology has been proven and used elsewhere, and the challenge is getting these permits through. There are several projects in California have been trying for some years to get a permit through.

They haven't yet achieved that. And the big picture is we need tens of these projects working to get that 2045 target. And these projects take years to deliver. So there is a degree of urgency getting these done.

We've conducted separate research to the report that you have in front of you specifically looking at the permitting for these projects, and some of the suggestions that could be looked at in there include giving greater clarity on the lead role of agency involved in the permit application process, including CEQA.

So there's greater clarity on the roles and responsibilities and that focal point for that agency that is in charge. Great challenge is that carbon capture and storage projects are cross cutting and they involve multiple different agencies, and you've got above ground and below ground responsibilities.

A second thing you can consider is the clarifying the ownership of the underground storage with above ground land. That isn't always clear and that could be clarified to give greater certainty to projects. There are several other measures we look at in our research.

Another thing would be the Legislature could issue a statement just giving the sense of urgency for these permits to be issued more quickly and to be reviewed more quickly. So those are a couple of things to consider there. With novel technologies, which these are, it's important to also consider the communities where they'll be implemented.

They'll be very new to communities. Many people do not have much knowledge about carbon capture and storage, carbon dioxide removal. And there's a challenge there with bringing communities with you, getting acceptance, getting understanding, getting input from the communities where these projects are being built.

There's a real potential that they could alleviate environmentally burdened communities, improving air quality, reducing wildfire risk. But there has to be a sensitivity to how the policy develops to consider how there could also be some negative impacts, and that will obviously set back the rollout of the industry. A couple of comments on the financing.

The particular second and third pillars that I mentioned are particularly capital intensive to initiate, and that's obviously a big challenge for the developers who are looking to develop these projects. Also, the markets aren't clearly defined. We have a clear cap and trade system in California for emissions reductions. We don't have a clear market for carbon dioxide removal.

There's a voluntary carbon market, but there isn't a compliant one. And that's a challenge because developers need to know where the demand is going to come from, and they have to have sufficient certainty of price for them to be able to make those investments into the projects which I mentioned are capital intensive.

So that's a quick overview on the finance. And finally, just to emphasize this timeline point, these projects take years. These are technologies which we still have some amount to learn from the implementation of these early stage projects. Really two decades until 2045.

We really have a race on our hands to deliver this industry to this scale of 100 million tons. Alongside, as I said, the aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. And to wrap up. The prize is not just meeting the 2045 target.

It's also the opportunity to increase investment and jobs in California communities and also to have a cleaner air and healthier ecosystems to live in. Leaving remarks there, thank you very much.

Thank you and good afternoon. Julia Levin with the Bioenergy Association of. California. We have about 100 Members in California, including many local governments, tribal Members, nonprofits, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, University of California, and many private companies that are converting organic waste to energy to meet the state's climate goals.

Reduce wildfire, to reduce pollution from dairies, and to create a circular economy in California where nothing gets landfilled or piled and burned as a disposal mechanism and instead is reused.

I want to thank Casper for going first, because he covered one of the most important reasons to do bioenergy, which is it's the only form of energy that can be carbon negative, which is going to be critical to reach carbon neutrality.

But I would say an even more urgent reason for bioenergy is it is also the most effective tool we have to reduce short lived climate pollutants. And as important as it is to get to carbon neutrality, by mid century we will have lost the war against climate change. By then we have to do much more.

And climate scientists around the globe agree that the most urgent thing we can do, the only thing left at this point that will stop totally catastrophic climate change, is the reduction of short lived climate pollutants, because they don't stay in the atmosphere very long.

But while they're there, they're tens to thousands of times more damaging than carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuels. So on top of writing carbon negative emissions, bioenergy from organic waste can also reduce short lived climate pollutants.

86% of California's methane emissions, according to the airborne, come from organic waste, and more than 90% of our black carbon is from burning either wildfires or pile and burn of agricultural and forest waste. So it is hard to overstate how critical this is from a climate standpoint.

It's also really important from an air quality standpoint because we reduce the pollution from burning or landfilling, and we can provide firm, renewable power that we need for energy reliability, sustainable aviation fuel, hydrogen for hard to electrify sectors like cement, glass, other manufacturing, et cetera. So given all these benefits, you'd think we were going really, really fast.

And I think most of you know we're not. Permitting is a huge barrier. And I do have specific recommendations I'll come back to, but I would not be doing my job if I didn't say there are a couple of other huge barriers.

And Tera Petri Norris, I think you've heard this before, but we have to crack the interconnection. It is a huge barrier for all clean energy. It is really impeding our efforts to reduce our climate emissions, to reduce fossil fuel use, et cetera. Either the utilities have to be put on much tighter timelines with real consequences.

And I think this is sort of similar to the permitting challenge. We need hard timelines and there need to be consequences for failing to meet them, or we need an interconnection agency and just take it away from the utilities because it is not working for any of the renewables at this.

Another problem is that the Public Utilities Commission doesn't place any value on all the other things that bioenergy can do, even wildfire mitigation. The former President of the PUC said wildfire is not a ratepayer issue. Don't come to us with these expensive forest biomass. I am not kidding. Michael Picker said that publicly.

So we need state agencies also to step up and recognize climate change is a different beast and we're going to have to move faster. We're going to have to accept some level of risk.

You hopefully have a law journal article by Michael Gerard, who is one of the gods of environmental law, about we are in triage mode now, and that means accepting some risk. It means we're not going to be able to save everything, but we have to do the big things.

There was a recommendation on the first panel about prioritizing climate adaptation or climate resilience. I would add to that climate mitigation. We can't adapt our way out of climate change. We also have to stop it or slow it down. And very quickly we need to reverse it.

And I do think getting to the permitting part, I have a couple of specific recommendations, and one does follow that recommendation from the first panel. We need some sort of permitting hierarchy. And again, I know chair Petrie North, probably others of, you know, in the energy world, there's a loading order.

You do efficiency first, then renewables and only fossil fuels to the extent that you have to. We're going to need a prioritization of permitting as well.

Not all permits are equally urgent, and I think anything that is essential for public health and safety and anything that is essential for climate mitigation, meaning reducing climate emissions or climate adaptation, those just have to be a higher priority. We have to figure out how to move more quickly.

There's a lot of talk about permit streamlining and thank you. I think all of you voted for Senator Caballero's Bill. SB 1420 did allow CEQA streamlining for hydrogen and non combustion bioenergy. That's helpful, but what's even more helpful is permit consolidation.

I think a number of the previous panelists have talked about the need to have permits done concurrently rather than consecutively, and one of you asked for a horror story. I will give you one.

Across the bay, there's a project actually in the terrorist district to convert organic waste that by law has to be diverted from the landfill into renewable carbon negative hydrogen.

It'll be used in zero emission trucks in place of diesel, and the process energy will be landfill gas that's currently being flared with no energy capture and no pollution control. It's a fantastic project, the county's health risk assessment said.

It's a win win win for the climate and public health, but the regional air district would not start its air permit until the CEQA permit was done, which cost a year. It's now been a year and a half since the CeQIP permit was unanimously approved by the City of Richmond.

There is no opposition, and it could easily be another year. There are frequently multiple month delays without any communication from the air district. I mean, this is happening across a lot of different projects, and air districts are a funny creature of both state and federal law, but I think they do need more resources.

It's not entirely their fault, but they also need a sense of urgency and prioritization, which we are not seeing.

These projects have to happen a lot more quickly, and to think that a project that would be this beneficial in a disadvantaged community where labor supports it, the local community desperately wants it, and it will take three years or more for the permitting. It's just inexcusable in this day and age.

So solutions state law already authorizes a consolidated permit. It is in public resources code. We want to get the number right, 71020. So the authority is already there, but almost no one knows about it and almost no one uses it. The beauty of consolidated permit it addresses a number of the challenges raised today.

It means permits happen simultaneously instead of one after the other. It also avoids what happens frequently, is not just conflicting permitting requirements, but what will happen in the Richmond project is when the air district is done, the project will have changed so much that they will likely have to go back and redo the CEQA permit.

This is ridiculous. And the way to solve it is to have a consolidated permit with one lead agency, and everyone has to work on the same timeline and they have to coordinate amongst themselves. It is sort of a mandated version of what in the sea level panel, Brit, I think was the acronym they were using.

This sort of forces that to happen every time, and maybe we start with climate adaptation and mitigation projects all have to use a consolidated permit. That would be enormously helpful. A couple of the other suggestions that came out earlier panels I just wanted to underscore.

We do need to get permitting agencies more resources, and they do also need to be held to stricter timelines, and there need to be consequences of not meeting those timelines.

I am, however, really worried about the you only get two bites at the apple, because at least in our area, some of these technologies are relatively new, or at least the application of organic waste to hydrogen. Say, in fairness to the Bay Area Air District, it's the first project of that kind that it's seeing.

So sometimes there does have to be more back and forth.

What I would say is rather than having a hard and fast number of how many times the air district can ask for information, and then it has to be up or down, that might not work out so well, I would say limit to 12 months, the total amount of time that it can be on an agency's desk.

If the applicant causes more delays than that, that's their problem. But there's no excuse for the agency to have information set on the agency's dress for a total of more than 12 months. So if after three months they have questions, fine, applicants should answer them as quickly as possible. Then they get another however many months.

But at the end of the day, there has to be a time limit that is really, really critical. And then just two other quick things I want to say in response to the previous panel. Combustion technology is mature and it is the least expensive. But there are lots of other mature technologies.

The Lawrence Livermore National Lab really highlights converting organic waste to hydrogen. We already have hundreds of wastewater treatment facilities and dairies used in anaerobic digestion, and it is better to use non conversion technologies even though they are more expensive.

They're also a lot more efficient, less polluting, and they produce a gas that then can be used in a linear generator. Thank you, assemblymember Paffen for AB 1921, so that you can have non combustion the whole way. But we also need that gas for dispatchable power and energy storage.

So there are a lot of reasons why we should be moving to non combustion conversion technologies, although they are still cheaper. Anyway, thank you. I've probably gone over. I'll leave it there.

We're going down. We're going down the. Yeah. Yes. Got it. Okay. You guys are so organized. I love it.

Musical chairs here. Guys, I know it's 4:15pm after a long day and a longer legislative session. I really appreciate you taking the time for this serious exploration of the permitting reform process.

And thank you, Chair Wicks, for your commitment on this issue in terms of building things in California and doing it in so in a way that preserves the environment and the well being of states residents. We share that ethos completely in scaling up a solution that, as Casper outlined, we know we're going to need.

My name is Christian Theuer. I'm with Heirloom Carbon. We're a carbon removal company, California founded. Our headquarters is 20 minutes south of here in Brisbane. We have a facility an hour east of here in Tracy, and we're excited to continue building in California. What we do is permanently and durably remove the existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Why are we doing that? The UN's chief climate science body, as Caspar has already laid out. I won't go too detailed here. The IPCC has found that we need to do two things in order to meet our global climate goals. One is immediately reduce our dependence on carbon emissions and oil and gas.

And two, in addition to that, we need to start removing billions of tons of existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and one cannot wait for the other. Here in California, your votes help set a 2045 net zero target. The Governor signed it to add one more data point to what Caspar was outlining.

ARB has scoped out at least 75 million tons of carbon removal needed annually to meet that goal. That is what we do. We're not point source carbon capture where we're stopping emissions from a polluting point source, from entering the atmosphere. We're removing CO2 that's already present in the atmosphere.

That would stay there for up to 1000 years, continuing to warm the planet, unless we start cleaning it up. How do we do that? Heirloom uses a natural input of limestone. It's 4% of the planet's crust. It can naturally bind to CO2 in nature.

That process in nature takes years, our technology speeds it up to happen in just three days. We do that by using renewable energy to break down limestone, basically turn it into a sponge for atmospheric CO2.

It reforms, it draws down CO2 from the atmosphere, and we loop limestone continuously through this process at scale to pull down CO2 that would otherwise continue trapping heat and exacerbating the climate crisis. We know there's already too much CO2 in the atmosphere. You've seen the soil erosion today.

You've heard about the impacts that are happening in this region and globally. We have the technology that can clean this up, and it's a matter of scaling that up. In Tracy, it's the first commercial direct air capture facility in the country. We opened that last year. Some of you have had the chance to see it in person.

You're all welcome to come out there in Tracy and see this technology. You can see it's not science fiction, that it's really happening. Right now, the CO2 that we're capturing is being mineralized and concrete that's going into Bay Area infrastructure.

That CO2 has gone from a gas in the atmosphere to a solid product it's not going to re-emit. Even if you demolish that infrastructure, that CO2 stays embedded in the rubble. So you're creating a true permanent carbon removal as a result of that.

In Tracy, you'll see that we're a poster child for how California is poised to scale up this new industry. Powered by the prowess of US manufacturing, this is something the country used to be very good at, and we're going to need to be very good at again.

We've been enabled by the federal funding from the IRA, from the infrastructure law, and by the leadership in this room, especially those who supported the $56 billion package founded by Governor Newsom. Our technology has scaled from a petri dish, 27 months later, to a full commercial facility, removing very quickly. And we feel we've built that facility exactly the way it should be done. Built it with local union labor. We're powering it with 100% renewable energy.

We stood up a model of community governance to provide oversight, including from environmental justice groups, into the facility's operations and multi-year community benefits fund and decoupled from any use case for oil and gas. To review, pro-labor, pro-renewable, pro-climate, pro-community. That's how we're defining the high road of carbon removal from Heirloom's standpoint.

All that said, we have faced challenges in building. Challenges I know this Committee understands very well, That first facility is operating successfully here, but as you know, a lot of federal funding from the IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law is flowing to red states.

And we're following the pull of a federal funding facility opportunity to northwest Louisiana to build a million ton removal facility. That's all to say, a lot of leadership has gone into getting us to this point.

But our progress also, there's a cautionary tale here, because all this still is not enough to get us between now and net zero, where we need 9 billion tons, as you pointed out, Chair Wicks of CO2 removed annually in order to meet our temperature goals.

And companies, including heirloom and the others before you today, we're only moving a tiny, tiny fraction of that today. One way we get there is through demand. We've actively supported legislation here in California where the state's uniquely positioned to lead, including SB 308 with state Senator Josh Becker Fairbrooks, we thank you for your support there.

The other is permitting reform. So let's talk about that. One is the cost of clean energy as we look at the landscape and get excited about building more of this kind of technology in California. Our facility in Tracy is powered by wind and solar.

We need clean energy to power carbon removal because we remove all of the emissions associated with our process, including the energy. So we're highly incentivized to use no carbon energy wherever possible. It's not ideal for us that states like Texas that don't exactly share airlands values have more abundant, cheaper clean energy than California.

To build large scale projects doing carbon removal in the state, you're going to need large scale utility renewables on the grid. If you permit clean energy, if you build clean energy, if you connect projects to clean energy, you are going to help build carbon removal. To sum that up next is on permitting more generally.

We were able to build our facility in Tracy in just eight months. One of the reasons why is we were building on a site that had already done an environmental impact report. We were able to avoid any additional SQL review. Even then, we still faced additional permitting challenges, as Assemblymember Grayson pointed out. Add ons again, not again.

These delays could have killed the project and the company. We're a startup, a climate startup, but we're building infrastructure, and these sort of delays can be absolutely devastating. And these fits and starts from the permitting side shouldn't be determined, shouldn't determine whether or not we get to net zero. And two, that set of happy circumstances in Tracy.

We also had some support, very much appreciated from Gobiz, to overcome those permitting challenges at the local level. That doesn't create the kind of certainty that moves hundreds of millions of dollars behind larger carbon dioxide removal projects.

Just like several Members of this Committee, to be more specific, supported an infrastructure package in 2023 that solar and offshore energy projects urged this Committee to also consider direct air capture and carbon removal as a climate critical technology that streamline the Ceco process accordingly, so that these bureaucratic blockers prevent projects and the companies that are trying to stand them up, not moving forward.

More specifically tied to permitting. Is permitting tied to funding? The California Energy Commission has funding allocated to support carbon dioxide removal. We're fortunate and lucky to be a recipient of some of that. We've been tentatively selected for some of that funding, which some of that is also gated by additional CEQA recommendations.

If we were to expand our footprint in the state, our ask is that if and when the state doles out capital for a public good like carbon removal, for a climate investment like carbon removal, we streamline grants to be awarded and pre development, at the pre development stage, that we can move ahead with land, pre development costs and additional permits, then use the public capital appropriately for projects that don't face these artificial bottlenecks to getting these public dollars out the door for projects that remove carbon emissions again could just leave you with one thing, delays deadly for projects and climate startups.

What I've told you here today is that even though we've built here, we face challenges in permitting, that permitting reform can solve. To sum it up, we need clean energy, efficient, predictable permitting, and ensuring that public dollars are able to move on a financeable timeline to get these projects actually stood up.

Offer these remarks, not to sidestep the community process. To be abundantly clear, heirloom strongly supports these models of community governance that we're putting into practice tied to our first facility. We can move at the speed of trust. We can do right by the climate, we can do right by communities is doing both. California can do both. If there's a state that can do this, it's definitely us. Thank you.

Hello and thanks for hosting us here today and for spending your time to be here. So my name is Josiah Hunt. I am the CEO of Pacific Biochar Benefit Corporation. Benefit corporation, California Benefit Corporation.

It's a legal tax thing that was founded in Sonoma, which oddly enough, Jared Huffman is largely responsible for making that designation that you don't get any benefits, any tax benefits, but we actually just burden ourselves extra work so we can call ourselves a benefit corporation. Anyways, that was non sequitur. Just like talking in a microphone.

Julia put so many great words and concepts out there. I would just like to bottle that up and just carry that around with me. And what I'm going to explain about my process is also very applicable to the next person here. We have a lot of parallels in what we do, and I'll let him explain differences.

So our company, Pacific Biochar, we produce. We've been doing this California since 2016. Biochar is an interesting product. It is horrible name. The name describes a process and also a material, and that's a problem that's hard. We haven't gotten over it, but that's just. I just want to put that out there.

So if there's confusion, you're okay with that. You're not alone in that. The material is a charcoal. Essentially, the process is to take waste, organic matter and transform it into charcoal and bury the charcoal. In farmlands, that achieves a few key things. It achieves long term soil fertility improvement.

Charcoal is a stable form of organic matter that improves water use efficiency. It improves nutrient use efficiency and crop yield. With the same amount of input, you get more output. It's really good, and it lasts for hundreds to thousands of years. So the impact of improving our farmland is a gift that we give to generations to come.

When doing that, you're taking carbon that was transformed with a little bit of sunlight. Plants take carbon from the atmosphere, build their bodies with it. We take those plant bodies and transform it into charcoal in an energy positive process. Basically, we're combusting it, but only part way. So you still get energy out of the process.

Just not as much as if you burnt it all the way to ash. But then you get this charcoal product, they'll bury it in the soil. And that whole thing, in a nutshell, is not only a waste management, energy generation, and a farmland improvement, but in a nutshell, it's a climate change mitigation tool. That's the whole thing.

That's why we had to come up with a new word. And the word is biocart. It's a horrible word, but that's it. That's why we had to come up with this new word on the spot. And so that's what my company does. It wasn't until 2020 that we could get a carbon removal credit for what we were doing. And that has profoundly changed our trajectory. We are a very small company still, but we are pathetically small then, and we have grown significantly since.

To put some perspective on that, in 2023, Pacific Biochar delivered the largest supply of carbon removal credits for any company on the planet. I'm sorry for a very specific type, durable carbon removal, not the nature based carbon removal of forestry, which is very valuable in the specific durable carbon removal, that which lasts significantly greater than 100 years with no risk of reversal.

In a world of durable carbon removal, we delivered the largest supply on planet earth of any single company, of any single technology type. And that was right here in California. And we were following these guys who did that in 2021, I believe, who held that title in 2021. So California is a hard place to permit.

That's on the map. And why my company is here is because of this wonderful phenomenon where you have. Well, it's not really wonderful, but as an opportunity, it's wonderful. There's this tragic, catastrophic level forest health right now, which generates massive amounts of excess biomass. Well, that's a problem.

But it's also an opportunity, because we can help take that biomass, transform it into charcoal, and then, like the Yuba watershed, it's a perfect example.

You can take the biomass from the head lens, turn it into charcoal, and spread it in the farmlands and the alluvial plains below, helping with water conservation and with forest help up in the headlands, and with water conservation in the farmlands, and sequester carbon while doing that in an energy positive way. Pretty cool.

I'm really fascinated with it. Anyways, what makes business hard for us is what you guys hear about. So what permit reforms? What can we do? Julia touched on some really great stuff. I would highlight everything she said. The interconnection delays. Yes, really, really, really big problem.

In addition to what she was saying, there is conditional use permits, and particularly this. Sorry, I forgot to mention this part. Our method of production is that we modify existing facilities, we don't build brand new ones. We found that we can actually work with existing biomass power plants and modify them for biochar production.

It was a key part, I should have said earlier, we modify existing infrastructure to produce this biochar. And that's really important. For the next part, I'm going to explain the testing process change. If any one of these biomass power plants wants to change a process to improve their emissions, to improve the efficiency of their facility, they have to go through a testing process change, which can take 18 months. They have to go to their local air district, and then it's just this huge pain in the butt process.

And Julia with the CBA can really help you guys address that more. I'm only saying this with not as much eloquence as she can, but that's a really big problem. Yeah, no, that's a really big problem.

And we have a lot of projects where we can take this biomass infrastructure and slightly modify their, their operating parameters in a way that does not reduce their energy output, and it does not increase their emissions any way.

What it does is it increases their ability to handle the excess fuel load that we have and generate this carbon negative product, which can improve our farmland. And it takes almost no capex. It's really, really easy. And we can do this. We've got large companies willing to pay for the carbon credit rules that we can get. And one of the big stops is being able to permit with these facilities.

And the facilities are really scared to do anything different than what we're doing right now because they have to go through this testing process change, even if they're trying to do something good, and even if it's only as small as less than 24 hours, if they want to do a six hour process change, where they just intentionally try to do something to improve their emissions, they have to go through a very lengthy, cumbersome process that's hard to make it out the other side of.

So that's a specific one, testing process change. And the requirement for the air district. Another one is with the extension of the biomat program. The biomat program is a fantastic program, but it's heavily undersubscribed. Why is it so undersubscribed? I don't know all the details, but I think it could be extended. It's supposed to come to an end next year and it's heavily unsubscribed.

And I think we should open that up and say, hey, if this was so hard to get in within this timeline and within the thresholds that we've asked you to fit in, maybe we need to review whether the program was actually pragmatic and easy to achieve.

One example of how it could be changed is that it costs roughly 35 million, and this is estimates, but it costs roughly 35 million to develop a five megawatt power plant. And that's the cap for the biomat is five megawatt. It costs roughly 35 million, it costs about 45 million to build a 15 megawatt hour plant.

So that's kind of one of the problems, is it forces you into this highly inefficient cost to energy ratio. That would be one suggestion, but I would just say, hey, reach out to Julia and others in the industry to figure out how could the biomat program work better.

Send it so that you can give it some time to improve it. That would be a really, really useful one. With a biomass or with a biochar utilization. It sounds great, right? We can put this biocar in our soils, improve our soil organic matter for generations to come. Fantastic.

There are actually support programs within California and within federal to help this, but they don't work. They don't work fast enough and they don't work efficiently and they don't work for most people. Specifically, those programs are the California Department of Food and Agriculture Healthy Soils program. Biochar has been adopted under demonstration.

It's acceptable for demonstration grants, but not yet acceptable for incentive program. So they can't release funding to help farmers pay for biochar applications. And the demonstration program is so restrictive, only one or two grants have ever been awarded for biochar with that. So if the USDA NRCs.

I'm sorry, if the Department of Food and Agriculture Healthy Schools program is to accept biotar as a new management practice, that would be a really big deal. And new management practice acceptable for the incentive program. I worked with UC Davis and submitted a proposal back in 2020, and there was additional proposals submitted just this last quarter.

So they have a lot of information. And as a parallel to why I think this is reasonable that it should be accepted, is that it's already been adopted at the federal level. So at the federal level, the National Resource Conservation Service has accepted a conservation practice standard for biotar applications to farm land.

It's under the Soil Carbon Amendment Code 336 that allows federal money through the EQIP, through the farm Bill, through the EQIP funding to be used for compost and biochar applications. This is a really big deal because California just passed 1383 for waste management and we have way more compost than we can manage.

Both yards are having a really, really hard time. And you have a program, two programs that can help with this, the healthy social program and the Public Work Department, Food and Agriculture. I'm sorry, the NRCS 36, those are parallel programs.

And Karen Ross, the Secretary of AG, actually signed last year, I believe the year before, maybe Member of an understanding. They're going to try and work in parallel and streamline. So those two parallel programs can be highly efficient.

She could probably use some help, more support and to the numbers on this, the healthy solos program is paid for out of the cap and stage program, which brings in about $4 billion per year. The amount of money that is spent on the Healthy Souls program is less than 100 million.

So one out of every $40,000 that goes to healthy soils program and being at how soils are, how we feed ourselves, a great place to put carbon and a great way to help with water infiltration and water preservation. It seems like that could be a legislative lift to really help achieve things with biochar and compost.

The last thing on the list, or I guess it's kind of a two part thing, that California Air Resource board would immediately begin their review process to adopt a methodology for biochar be a carbon removal process?

Climate Action Reserve, which is kind of collaborative agency, but separate climate action Reserve just this year published a brand new protocol for Biochar, a methodology for carbon accounting for biochar, the US and Canada Biochar Protocol.

And I think it would be great if California Resource Board could immediately begin review of that, because SB 308, I don't know why it didn't pass. I know it's probably not perfect. It's really interesting. I think I would like to learn, why didn't it pass? What could we do to make it better?

But if and when it does passes, what methodologies do we have for carbon removal? Biochar makes a lot of sense in California. What heirloom was working on makes a lot of sense. But what methodologies will California Air Resource board so that the carbon removal technologies can actually engage in that carbon removal market Development act? So sorry, that was a laundry list and I probably went over time.

Thank you very much.

All right. I guess I'm the last thing standing between us and getting done. Well, I'm Harris Cohn. I'm the head of sales at Charm Industrial. We're headquartered here in San Francisco, about a couple miles in the southeast corner of the city. We also have operations in Colorado and Kansas.

You all have a handout in front of you, but I took the liberty of bringing along also some pictures as well from a recent deployment. So if you don't mind passing those down to the legislators, that would be lovely. So if you have just three takeaways for what I'm about to say, here they are.

Charm can play a key role in supporting wildfire fuel load reduction, safely closing orphaned oil wells, and supporting California's scoping plan by removing carbon from the atmosphere. Put some finer numbers on it. And as Kaspar pointed out, we have this 100 million ton gap.

By 2045, there are about 29 million tons per year of excess forestry residues created every year in California. And via Charm's process, we can safely and permanently sequester about one metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalent per ton of biomass that is inedible and excess. That would be up to 30% of the problem, if you will, or 30% to the goal of the carbon removals in California. Now, on the permitting side, it's of course critical that California continue to create a permitting environment where innovative companies can scale responsibly.

And I really am honored to be on this at this hearing with some of the leading lights. In that vein, the two places that we have some permitting suggestions are in air quality as well as orphaned oil wealth. And I'll get to them in a moment.

So the way that we work is we perform carbon removal, and we're also trying to decarbonize heavy industries. So our carbon removal process involves harvesting waste biomass like ag and forestry residues, and converting them into a carbon rich bio oil. You see some pictures there.

Through a method called fast pyrolysis, bio oil can be permanently sequestered deep underground, or it can actually be gasified and used to reduce iron ore into metallic iron. Turns out iron is about 6% of global emissions, and it's a manufacturing process that we have largely abandoned here in the United States.

And so our biolog can be used as an alternative to fossil fuels. In this respect, farm currently sells carbon dioxide removals on the voluntary market. That's how we get the revenue to operate. And our customers include large corporations like Google, Meta, JPMorgan Chase and others. Now, there are a number of social and environmental co benefits alongside our carbon removals. We estimate that we can create about $430 million in gross state product and over 4000 jobs in California alone by 2040.

As our scale up increases, our approach delivers really critically needed air quality, wildfire resilience and economic benefits in parts of California that need them the most, especially the Sierras and the Central Valley.

I'll note that the Central Valley and the especially the San Joaquin Valley has burn restrictions going in place January 1 of 2025 related to agricultural residues that ratchet up over the coming years. Investing in CDR technologies can stimulate economic growth by catalyzing innovation, green jobs, and of course, attracting investment.

Now, some of the pictures that you have there are from a recent deployment and partnership that we did with the National Forest foundation and the US Forest service to process unmerchantable waste biomass into bio oil.

We only did about 60 tons of this material as a way to demonstrate the utility of a mobile pyrolysis deployment to this area. Why is mobile important? It's very expensive to move biomass more than a few dozen miles to where it needs to be utilized.

So we are pursuing a mobile first strategy where we can take these fast pyrolyzer machines to as close to the biomass as possible to reduce that economic burden of moving the biomass and turn it into a bio oil. This densifies the carbon in that from that starting biomass by about five x.

So it tremendously improves the economic potential of treating more and more forestry acreage with this solution. Additionally, one of the alternative uses if biomass can't make it to a bioenergy plant or can't be used in timber. The biomass is usually pile burned or left too rot.