Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 4 on Climate Crisis, Resources, Energy, and Transportation

Good morning. I want to thank all of you for being on time. People associated with FIRE are always on time. And so I wasn't surprised when I walked in a few minutes early and there are so many people here already. But we don't have a lot of Committee Members here.

But that's because today is about as crazy as it gets in terms of multiple assignments that people have. So they might be presenting a Bill in one Committee, serving on another Committee, eventually presenting a Bill on another Committee.

So I know some of them will be in and out as we do this, but it's not a reflection of the Committee Members view of the importance of this topic. I can assure you they've talked to me a lot about this.

I suspect that this video will be one of the videos that's more heavily watched than other videos of Committee hearings because of the interest in this topic in spite of the number of people here this morning. So welcome to budget sub 4. We have two panels as a part of today's hearing.

After some brief opening remarks, I'll ask the participants on our first panel to join us at the table for their presentation. Because this is an informational hearing, we will not be voting today. After both panels we'll take public comments.

For Members of the public who wish to provide public comment, please limit your testimony to the subject of today's oversight. Each Member of the public will have one minute to speak. But you know, wildfire prevention is about securing immediate and long term viability for California's residents.

I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say we are at a moment of crisis in California. And that crisis is one of home insurance and business insurance cost literally soaring out of control. We cannot have $30 billion losses every few years and have a sustainable home insurance market. And we have to get really serious about this.

And one of the challenges that we have is in a democracy, a democracy does not respond to slow moving crisis very well. So something that we need, the urgency of an event and all of that already, the urgency of the Los Angeles fires and the losses that we have have started to dissipate.

I see it in the Assembly, I see it all the way around. And our job for all of us, and I view you as joint stakeholders in trying to get this to happen. Our job is to not let that sense of urgency drop to the point where we don't take the actions that we need.

But we have to change. We can't just stay with the status quo and think that this, this is going to be good. Enough. Right. And there will be a number of sobering facts that will come out today.

That's why I hope that lots of people will be able to watch this testimony, and we hope to do much better in terms of the losses that we have in the future.

There is, I think, clear agreement that we have a problem, but there is disagreement and ambiguity and tension when we try to focus on how we're going to solve the problem. And so that requires us to have honest and hard conversations with each other. And it requires us.

I just came back from a week in Norway, and in Norway, I'm so envious of how they solve problems there. They literally get together.

And the parties, the stakeholders that we normally have at each other's throat here in the United States still strongly make their positions, but they trust each other to listen to each other and to actually try to come up with what's the best solution for the citizens overall. And that's really what we have to do today.

And so this is the beginning of what I hope will be robust and continuing conversation between all the stakeholders, and that's those of us that are interested in decreasing losses in wildfire prevention, in home hardening and protecting the environment. Everybody comes at this, the insurance companies, everybody comes at this with a little different angle.

And we have to find a way to come at it together if we're really going to do some good things for California. So with that, I will ask the first panel to come up.

And I look forward to I genuinely look forward to this hearing more than any other that we have planned this year because we have real experts in the room and great background.

Final thing I'd like to say is we always have good presentations from Lao and Committee staff, but this was particularly enlightening and helpful in terms of the presentation. So I appreciate the Laos background information. I appreciate staff and your summary of the information that we have. So with that, we'll turn it over and I think we'll start with the LAO's office. Right.

Good morning. Thank you. Rachel Ehlers with the lao. I will be speaking from a handout called Overview of State Wildfire Resilience Funding Actions and Considerations. Hopefully you have. It's also available on our Lao website, on the Committee website. That's it.

For the benefit of the public looking. This is the report she's looking for.

That's right. And there are some in the room, too, by the TV screen in the back for those who are there. I will also mention that I'm going to speak to most of this handout and then save the last three pages for my colleague who's speaking on the second panel. So don't lose it. Hold it handy.

So I think my role here today is to talk really about what has the state done so far in the areas of resilience, and then tee up some key legislative considerations for you to think about, not only today, but as you're facing decisions coming forward.

So turning to page one of the handout, you've got a nice color map here that shows a lot of red. So California's climate is naturally susceptible to wildfires in part because of the way our precipitation patterns work.

As we all know living here, we get rain in a certain period of time in the winter, and then it doesn't really rain for most of the late spring, summer, and early fall, which means things get really dry and therefore more susceptible to wildfire.

The risks do vary across the state, and your agenda has great background on this based on a variety of factors, including climate, weather, vegetation, topography, and proximity to ignition sources.

The areas, some of the areas with highest risk, not exclusively, but a lot of them, are what is known as the wue, the wildland urban interface, where there has been increased development that abuts right up to wildlands. There are a lot of factors that contribute to this risk. Development in the WUE is certainly one of them.

Climate change is increasing that, as we do have longer, hotter, drier summers because of changing climate and weather patterns.

Utility infrastructure management has certainly been a big contributor to some of our fires and also the State of our forests and our landscapes right now, in part because of our historical practices over the last few decades of suppressing fire, there's a lot of material in those forests ready to burn.

So this map on the page here is from the Federal Government. It shows the estimated probability of wildfire burning in a given year based on a number of modeling scenarios. We do have the greatest likelihood on average in the nation of wildfires burning, according to this modeling.

So, turning to page two, starting to get into what have we done? This is a positive figure. And sometimes when we see charts when the peaks are going up, it means bad things. But in this case, it's a good thing in terms of how much increased effort the state has made in resilience spending.

This is just CAL FIRE, so certainly we have spent in other departments besides CAL FIRE, but you can see in recent years a pretty significant increase in these types of activities. This is partly due to the wildfire spending package that was part of the climate packages during the budget surplus in the past few years.

But also increased commitments from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund of of 200 million annually over some of these periods. You can see historically we were spending kind of less than 100 million a year. So really notable increases in the CAL FIRE side.

Turning to page three, this gives a sense of the types of activities within CAL FIRE but also other departments. I'm not going to walk through each line here.

The point of this figure is really to just give you a sense of the breadth of the types of activities and also the dollar amount 3.6 billion between 2021 and planned through 28-29. Most of those out year funds are that 200 million commitment from GGRF for forest health and fire prevention activities.

You can see a wide range of different types of activities. I think one thing that's pretty important to highlight here though is most of this is one time money. Apart from that 200 million in GGRF committed through 28-29 to there hasn't been major increases in ongoing sustained funding for fire resilience activities.

There certainly has been quite a bit on the response side which we've talked about. But on the resilience side, not really much in the ongoing commitment. So that's a key issue we'll come back to in terms of considerations to think about.

Turning to page four, highlighting that GGRF and General Fund are not the only sources of funding supporting these types of resilience activities in the state. One of the major ones is utility spending supported by ratepayers required by regulators. That's in the kind of several $1.0 billion a year and kind of dwarfing what the state budget is providing.

I know there was a big hearing on that that you attended Mr. Chair in the Energy Committee a few weeks ago. So that kind of flies under the radar sometimes because it doesn't flow through the state budget. But that is a very significant source of funding contributing to these types of activities.

There has also historically been some federal funding, particularly on federal lands through the U.S. forest Service and then a pretty significant program operated by FEMA for mitigation. When a state experiences a disaster, it gets funding to do mitigation historically has a highlight. That program appears to be going away under the New Federal Administration.

So that will be a pretty significant change in the types of effort from the Federal Government for some of these mitigation activities. Local governments also contribute primarily around defensible space and fuel reduction activities. We don't have dollar amounts for that, but want to make sure we recognize that that is happening on the ground at the local level.

And then finally we know, particularly in this Committee, that Proposition 4 passed by voters in November provided additional funding towards totaling 1.5 billion for fire resilience activities as well. So page 5 of the handout just summarizes what that Prop 4 is as a resource. That 1.5 billion the figure is from January reflecting the governor's proposal.

So it doesn't show that the early action passed by the Legislature a week and a half ago included escalating and front loading some of this money putting it out the door already. And that's primarily the funding in the middle there for state conservancies, 140 million doll total as well as 10 million for fire training center.

So that funding has already been appropriated and is already getting ready to go, but presumably there will be likely more in the upcoming June budget as well as a total of 1.5 billion available for the next few years.

So turning to page six, it's not just money that the state has been focusing on, but also some really important policy developments and practices and changes. This page just is a sampling of some of the actions the Legislature has taken.

Certainly by no means comprehensive, but highlights increased defensible space requirements which I know you'll talk about quite a bit on the second panel, encouraged use of prescribed and cultural fire streamlining and facilitating some environmental compliance requirements to ensure they're still in place, but also don't create undue burdens to get projects going, requirements around disclosures and also quite a bit of work in the utility wildfire space.

Besides these legislative efforts, there's also been efforts at the Executive and regulatory level, for example establishing the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force which is doing a lot of strategic planning for the state and the Vegetative Treatment Program or vtp, which is helps address efficiencies in CEQA processes to try and get programs projects moving more quickly.

So the final page I will talk about on page seven just raising some of the key considerations to think about again not just today but as you move forward. And one of the big ones is this balancing of wildfire resilience versus response in a context of limited resources.

Clearly when there is a fire we want to have the resources available to respond to it. But thinking about could there be more effort kind of on the front end to help keep the fires from being quite so severe and requiring quite so much response.

Even within the wildfire resilience there are a lot of trade offs to think about different priorities. Protecting lives and properties is clearly one, but protecting Natural habitats and watershed functions is, is clearly another supporting regional economies, recreation, workforce development. These types of goals are not always in conflict.

Sometimes there are projects and efforts that can kind of address all of these. But sometimes there are choices that need to be made. And that's a key decision for you as policy makers. Clearly thinking about different areas of the state. I know that's a theme today that you'll talk about and what types of actions and.

And priorities and strategies are appropriate for different areas of the state. We're lucky to live in such a diverse state that it does raise challenges of one size does not fit all.

So being sensitive about that, I think the fourth bullet is one we would highlight very put a lot of emphasis on which is the problem is so big and the resources are always going to be limited. So how do we be strategic and how do we prioritize? And that is a tough.

And it's a tough one for you as the entity with the constitutional requirement to control the pursuings of the state. How do we prioritize our dollars and how do we.

And how do we act strategically so that the former Director of the Sierra Nevada Conservancy used to talk about avoiding random acts of restoration, which is a quote I love because it is.

It is even more important here where if you're doing little field breaks over here or little forest clearing over here and then a big fire comes through, if they're not thought about and plan planned in a strategic way, they are much less effective than if they have an overall strategy. How do we measure our success?

How do we know that what we're doing is working and how do we learn to inform future efforts given limited resources? What is the appropriate state role? There are going to be a lot of folks coming to you requesting help and one lens you can use to think about how to prioritize.

What is the best role for the state as compared to private landowners, as compared to the Federal Government, as compared to local governments? Where can the state help synergize and synthesize other efforts, but also stay in its lane and focus on its core responsibilities? Land ownership is one of the lenses to use for this.

The state owns a very small amount of land and so thinking about what its responsibilities are and how it can help is an important lens as well. Thinking about what reasonable goals and expectations are. We're not going to keep all fire off the land. Preventing all fire is not a reasonable expectation.

And in fact one of the lessons we've learned is trying to prevent fire has contributed to some of the conditions that are creating bigger problems right now. So thinking about when fire does happen, are we prepared? How do we keep it from resulting in kind of catastrophic events? That's one of the key lenses to think about.

And then finally, sustainability, not just of of funding over a long term to facilitate multi year large landscape level projects, but also how do we keep the effectiveness of those projects that we do undertake. It's not the same as just building a building and then it's built and then you can walk away.

The forest material will grow back. And so what is our ongoing maintenance and sustainability plan? And with that, looking forward to the discussion and happy to answer questions when we get there.

Well, I appreciate you highlighting how simple this problem is for for us. And we'll turn to CAL FIRE now.

Good morning. I'm Ken Pimlott. I'm the retired Chief of CAL FIRE and Director. My colleagues from CAL FIRE, esteemed folks are here. My apologies. Thank you Chair Bennett and Members of the Committee for inviting me to share some thoughts today.

I retired in 2018 after a 30 plus year career at CAL FIRE with the last eight being the chief, the Director and California State Forester at and what we did learn in the fire service is if you're on time, you're late and if you're early, you're on time. So that's why we have so many folks here.

I've served throughout my career across California in a variety of positions both in our resource management, forestry and fire protection programs, worked with landowner assistants, worked as a chief officer and worked as a firefighter over those 30 years, like so many of us, watched the conditions change throughout California and to the kinds of fires that were experienced today with catastrophic results.

As we've talked about and you've seen it in the excellent write up from Committee staff. California is a large and diverse landscape. It's 800 miles from the Oregon border to Mexico. The state ranges in elevation from sea level to the top of Mount Whitney at 14,500ft.

We have some of the driest arid deserts in the country in the Southeast, and then we have some of the wettest areas in the country in the Northwest in Humboldt County.

So we've got a very diverse landscape that supports a very diverse set of vegetative cover chaparral communities in Southern California, the mixed conifer in the Sierra Nevadas and northern mountains, and oak woodlands in our foothills and coastal mountains.

And so all of that is influenced by topography, different weather patterns, all of them unique to the areas in the state.

Each of these communities react differently to fire, but every one of these in the state, these vegetative landscapes are critical to sustaining people, not only our communities, but the resources that continue to make California thrive, even in the areas where no one lives. These landscapes are critical to what we do here in California.

Mike O’Connell will chat later after me about the insights in the Southern California chaparral landscapes. I really want to focus on the 33 million acres of forest land in California. California by size has 100 million acres. Over a third of that is in forest land.

That's a significant amount of forest land and plays a significant role in California. 40% of that forest land is in private land ownership. A little over half is in public land, primarily national forest, but it's a significant number to realize 40% of the landscape, with almost three quarters of that being non industrial private landowners.

So it's not necessarily the large industrial commercial land ownerships. We have millions of acres that are small 10 acre forest land owners up to 100 or 200. These are the people that make up much of the landscape in our forested communities. Why are these important?

Forests north of the Tehachapi Mountains provide up to 60% of the water supply for California, Southern California, our agriculture, all of that relies on the watersheds, the upper watersheds throughout Northern California that are captured in reservoirs and move south to support the state.

Our forests provide that high quality, sustainable timber supply, a critical resource for California, particularly when we are working to rebuild our communities that we have been so devastated by fire.

Our local economies, our tourism, recreation, and our plant and animal diversity, all that plays a very complex interrelated system that supports all of what we do here in the state. How are those forests impacted by high intensity wildfire that we're experiencing? A critical piece is water quality and supply.

When you have a high intensity wildfire like those we've been experiencing, denudes the landscape makes the soil impervious to water. We get erosion, it fills in our reservoirs, so our storage capacity for water significantly reduces. Our water becomes turbid, it becomes sediment filled. The temperatures rise. Because it doesn't have that vegetative cover.

All of that impacts not only the environment and the natural communities where it is, but also significantly impacts our ability to provide clear, clean, adequate supplies of water across the state, primarily to our agricultural communities and to the faucets in Southern California and the Bay Area, air quality and human health.

When our forests burn at the intensities they're burning, we're putting smoke into the eastern coast. We're putting smoke into Southern California and into Canada. That smoke has health effects that are impacting all of the residents of the United States. We lose that timber value.

We literally lose the supply of timber because we're destroying it or severely damaging it through high intensity fire engaging and managing in those forests.

Those forests are a pathway, as we learned in the Dixie and Caldor fires, literally burned from the west slope of the Sierra Nevada, across the crest of the Sierra, into Nevada, threatening the communities of South Lake Tahoe, Grizzly Flats, Greenville.

All of these communities that were tens of miles away from where these fires started, burned through a forest and then impacted communities. So how we engage and work in those landscapes outside of the built environment has a significant impact on the built environment. The state has a responsibility for 31 million acres of wildlands throughout California.

Again, that's almost entirely private watershed, forest, range land made up of these multiple sized private landowners. These are the areas, these are the watersheds. These are all of the things that the state through statute has been supporting the management of for the betterment of the entire state. Again, the water quality, economic base, all of that.

You'll hear more today about defensible space home hardening, which we are learning play a critical role in the survivability of communities. But if we don't invest in the entire system, we're not going to solve the problem completely.

Our watersheds are a component and a piece of that overall set of systems that we have to continue engage in and manage along with the built environment if we're going to reduce the impact of catastrophic fire and protect our communities.

As we've heard from the Lao's report, California is leading the way in its investments in this sector unlike any other state, unlike our federal partners. We have been bringing money to the table to really make a difference in this space.

But we've got to continue to make this commitment and make those permanent investments using all the tools in our toolbox. This includes, and you've heard it, you'll hear it a lot today, it's the partnerships getting the work done collaboratively together. Community county resilience programs, fire safe councils, resource conservation districts.

We need to put those strategic fuel breaks in place. Need to engage in forest thinning, prescribe fire. The state made some significant inroads in putting fire back on the landscape.

If we don't continue to engage and support the use of fire on the ground where appropriate, we will never again be able to get back to the levels where we need to be in healthy forest environment. This means we've got to increase the pace and scale of the amount of fire that we're utilizing on the ground.

Need to invest in partnerships like our prescribed burn associations, our land trusts and many others, along with CAL FIRE and our other partners to really double down on the efforts to get more good fire on the landscape. And of course we need to bring that social license into play so that the public truly understands.

Bring what into play? The social license. We need to have the public truly trust us and understand the value of fire so that we can again recognize when there's smoke in the air, it's happening for a good reason. There are many challenges to get there.

We need workforce, we need the economic incentives to help pay the way out of the woods for much of this material. Government funds can't do it all we need to of course, increase our capacity for infrastructure sawmills. We need to provide avenues to treat forest residue that isn't necessarily a commercial product.

We need to break down those silos where we're working independently and to the points we've already heard. Do it together as a system, in a team, so we get the biggest bang for the buck.

We need to continue to work on metrics because just saying we've treated 10 acres doesn't always tell the full story, particularly when we have to go back and maintain that 1010 acres a few years later. So how do we really tell the story and evaluate our accomplishments and successes?

And then again, heard it already, but it's building maintenance into our projects. It's literally just like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. When we're done, we've got to start over because we can't lose the investments that we've made to date or we lose that resiliency that we're building into our projects.

So in conclusion, reducing the impacts of catastrophic fire will only be effective if we tackle the challenge at the landscape, community and individual parcel level. We really need to double down on our investments in funding and the resources that we're applying to tackle the problem.

So again, thank you for the opportunity to share this with you today and look forward to answering any questions later.

Thank you very much. I'm very much looking forward to Mr. O’Connell comments.

Thank you. I appreciate that very much. My name is Michael O'Connell. I'm the President and CEO of Irvine Ranch Conservancy. We are a nonprofit organization in Orange County and we manage 33,000 acres of the urban fire prone habitats that the chief referred to.

We don't own any land, but we work in partnership with the County of Orange, the City of Irvine, City of Newport Beach, public landowners, local public landowners that have these fire prone wildlands, they also happen to be some of those biologically diverse lands in the world. Mediterranean ecosystems, as we all know, are incredibly diverse.

And so we have an imperative to protect the land itself as well as the communities are there. We are a conservation organization, but my entire team cares very deeply about our communities as well because we live there. I personally had a house in Laguna Beach for a while and I worried about fire every day.

And that had nothing to do with what I did for a living. So this is a very important issue to us. One of the things Irvine Ranch Conservancy does is we facilitate a working group. The chief talked about everybody needing to work together.

And in 2015, the Orange County Fire Authority convened a group that we call the Coast Fire Prevention Working Group. And it's more than 36 entities that are all have a share of this problem. And it's everything from Southern Caledison to Caltrans to landowners to land managers, nonprofits.

And we're all working together to try to figure out how to do this. And our motto is, we don't agree on everything. We agree that wildfire is bad. And so we've been able to accomplish a lot working together and I think created a model for how collaboration can work in communities.

If you remember one thing from my testimony, it's that fire in Southern California is different. The chief did a great job of describing the diversity of the state. And I also want to compliment the agenda. The brief that was part of the agenda is just outstanding. And I've been saying this for a long, long, long time.

But now people are talking about it and that's really important. Why is it different in Southern California? It's different because shrublands are not forests. They don't act like forests. They don't beh. Fire doesn't work the same way as they do as it does in forests. We have had too much fire in Southern California.

Our fire cycle is 90% too often, whereas it's 90% not enough in the Sierra. I wish we could switch fire regimes. It would be a good thing. Our fires are driven by winds, by extreme winds.

The catastrophic fires that do all the damage in Southern California, which, by the way, where 35% of the population lives is we have 90% of our damage done in 10% of the incidents. So preventing those 10% of the incidents during high wind events is really the crux of the problem for us. They're not fuel driven.

In fact, landscape scale, fuel clearing, it makes the problem worse. And there's a big deficit of understanding in the public about that. After the Palisades and Altadena fires, we got calls, as did our landowner partners from the public, hundreds of calls saying, clear it all, just get it all out.

And they didn't understand that it actually might make the problem worse. In fact, most of our damage is done by windblown embers. We have a problem there as well, because a recent poll.

I'm going to interrupt you because I think it's really important. You said it makes it worse. Land clearing in Southern California. That's right. Let's just take this point to explain why it makes it worse.

It makes it worse because the natural communities that exist in Southern California are adapted to a Fire cycle of about every to 70 to 150 years. They just don't burn as frequently.

Our problem is that over time these natural communities have been replaced by non native plants, mostly grasses, black mustard, things like that, which have changed the fire cycle. They're much more ignitable, they occur along roadways. And when you take out the heavier vegetation at the landscape scale, what does it get replaced with?

It gets replaced with easier to burn fuels. And we're starting a death spiral. And so I'll talk about it in a minute. But this issue of acres treated is really problematic for us because if you treat the right 20 acres, you may actually be protecting 20,000 acres.

And so it is entirely appropriate in some systems, as the chief has mentioned. But in our area, it's just not an important strategy.

When we did a recent poll actually funded by the Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program in Orange County and found that only 12% of the public in Orange County understood that embers were the single greatest threat to their homes. That's a huge problem. And that's not a problem of money, that's a problem of education.

And so using that information, we've started a big campaign for people to understand that. I'm happy to see that the conversation is starting to change. The fact that we're all in this hearing talking about fire being different in different regions, I cannot tell you how happy that makes me because I've been saying this for a long time.

The recent tragedies have forth a moment and I think, Mr. Chairman, you're right in that there's a moment that we have, but the memory fades quickly. We've known this for a long time. Does Anyone remember the 1993 Laguna Beach fire? 441 homes, 90 mile an hour winds, embers blowing 4 miles downwind.

Several of the people in this room, I think, were on that fire as firefighters. We've known this for 30 years. But the conversation is now finally starting to change and that makes me optimistic. So what do we do about that? Right. First, I think it's important to talk about what not to do.

We've already talked about large scale vegetation. Clearing makes it worse and it's counterintuitive, it's unconventional for the public. It makes complete sense. Well, this is the landscape that's burning. Let's just remove the vegetation. But we know as ecologists and fire managers that that is not the right strategy. Prescribed burning is also not needed where we are.

We've had too much fire. So putting more fire on the landscape as a Fire management technique is also not appropriate. So the main point is it's really unconventional, so we have to think unconventionally about it. In this group, coasst, we've spent 10 years putting together a set of strategies that we think cohesively make a difference.

And to the chief's point, you can't just do one of them or two of them. You have to do all of them. We even have some case studies that I'd be happy to explain where two out of the three strategies were done extremely well and one was not, and there was a disaster.

So these three strategies are number one and absolutely number one is ignition prevention, particularly along roadways and power lines. 92%, 93% of our ignitions occur on roadways and power lines. 82% on primary roadways, 11% along power lines. So that. And it's not every ignition. We have an ignition almost every day in Orange County on a roadway.

But it only matters when there's a 90 mile an hour wind blowing. Right. We have tons of resources in the fire service to handle routine ignitions that don't occur during high winds.

In fact, I saw one time there was a car had pulled over and it was on fire, and it was at the end of May, and so it was nice and moist, and four helicopters dropped water on that car. There was plenty of resources.

But when we had a fire breakout in 2020 in Orange County called the Santiago Fire, those four helicopters were grounded. They couldn't even get in the air because the wind was so high. So that's a big challenge. Ignition prevention. We have to prevent as many of these catastrophic fires as we can.

The second thing you'll hear more about it, so I won't go into detail, is structure hardening. That's a huge, huge thing. And then the third is strategic fuels.

Go back to the second one again that you're not gonna go into. I'm sorry, structure hardening, did you say?

Yes, structure hardening, home hardening, but not just home things like fences that can direct fire into a house and decks and things like that. So the third is strategic fuels management. Yes, fuels management, but really thinking strategically about where we do that. One of them is fuel modification zones around communities. That's a really, really important thing.

But fuels management writ large is not an appropriate strategy, which leads me to say Acres treated, like I said, is not a really good measure of success for us. And we have to figure out how to measure that in a way that's meaningful. Because ignition prevention, it's really hard to prove A negative.

So if we haven't had a fire in 30 years, what is causing us not to have that fire? It's hard to measure that connection, but it's essential because that is the problem. So what's the state doing right? I think the state is doing a number of things right.

The first thing is just recognizing that fire is different in different places. And that's a really a key thing. The regional forest and Fire capacity program is fantastic. It is. Calling it a game changer is not a strong enough statement. We literally would not have a fire program in Orange County if it weren't for rffc.

And so that is really important because it allowed us to create the capacity to then have the collaboration, develop the projects and bring forward these strategies that we didn't have the resources to do. So that is a highly leveraged investment that the state is making in a broad set of benefits.

The county coordinator program is also really, really good because it allows, again, capacity to staff these collaborations that have ripple effects and compounding effects. The block grant program that's being explored, we think is a really good way to do it. The Wildfire Task Force has led that. I know CAL FIRE has been a big proponent of that.

It's a good way to bypass some of the administrative hurdles to getting money onto the ground, especially when you're as collaborative and working together as well as we are in Orange County and broader in Southern California. And the Wildfire mitigation grants program that's run by Jay Lopez is just a fantastic idea. Needs to be scaled, scaled up.

What does the state need to do better? The grants reimbursement process does not work very well. I know some organizations that have spent their own money. These are nonprofits, spent their own money and are waiting two years to get reimbursed for it. And that just. It's not functional, unfortunately.

And so I think a better grants reimbursement process would help. We also need to continue to just push and push and push. These institutions that have been built on kind of an outdated view of the way that FHIR works and get them to change. And also the public.

I think the state can lead with a loud voice and help the public understand what the real risks are. So I'll just close by saying what everyone else is going to say, which this is a really complicated problem. There's a lot of nuance. One size does not fit all. And unfortunately, there's no silver bullet.

Everybody's looking for one. And I'm here to tell you there is not one. It Takes a lot of that. And to quote my good friend Brian Fennesy, who is the Orange County Fire Association chief, fire authority chief, he says the problem with Wildfire is it's everyone's problem and it's no one's problem.

And that's really what we're dealing with. So we've all got to get at the table. And it's an honor to be here. And I'll answer any questions you have.

Great. Well, thank you very much. And I'm going to ask Director Tyler if you wouldn't mind coming up, because I suspect, in fact, as I know, I'm going to have some questions specifically for CAL FIRE.

And second thing I want to do is welcome my two colleagues here, one from Southern California and one from Northern California, so that I think that that highlights one of the major points being made here today, which is fires.

What we do about fire in Southern California is very different than what we should do about fire in Northern California. And trying to weave this all into a coherent policy for the State of California is the challenge. So welcome to both of you.

I'm going to dive in on the questioning right now and then turn it over to questions for you. But what's important to me is that this not just be another hearing. We had a Committee hearing on this. Yeah, we did this. And it gets kind of parked on the shelf. It just, it does not meet the moment.

If we do that right now, we, as pointed out in the report, you know, in the last eight years, something has changed in California. We've crossed a tipping point and we are losing whole community. We've lost three whole communities in the last eight years. We should not be losing whole communities. So we have to do better.

And we're losing three whole communities because there's been just enough change with climate change out there. The droughts have gotten just enough more intense. The heavy rains have become just enough. And the cycle has as a result of climate change. We can't change that cycle in the short run. We're going to continue to have that.

And so it's really important. Of all the hearings we're going to have, we want to make sure this one is not just another hearing. So for me, the questions are what's doable? And I think we all recognize what's doable is very challenging, as you've all pointed out. It's a massive.

It takes a massive effort here to try to do everything. We won't be able to do everything. I'm trying to ask this question with the limited resources that we will have for the next few years because the Federal Government will probably give us less.

What do we prioritize to try to move the needle on this as we go forward? Right. We will have fewer state resources two years from now than I think we have now. And that will be an additional challenge. So how do we prioritize?

And so, because I want this hearing to be different, I'm going to throw out sort of a thought or my thoughts about this, and I welcome my colleagues to do the same. But I'm looking for pushback and I'm looking for insights from stakeholders. And that's why I've asked you to come up here for this first panel.

And that is we need to be educated. We all need to finally get close enough to be on the same page that we can take effective action going forward. For me, prioritizing is always the hardest thing to do in politics because something has to go in front of something else.

And people who aren't prioritized or people who think that what should happen is not prioritized. I welcome the pushback. I welcome to hear it so that we can make sure that we don't make a decision without at least hearing and understanding a different point of view.

If Mr. O'Connell wasn't here today, we wouldn't have as strong a representation of: quit burning in Southern California while we had the presentation. We do need more burning in Northern California. And so I want you to push back in terms of this.

So in my mind, if we have to prioritize anything, it is we have to decrease home losses, we have to decrease property losses, because that's causing an economic challenge. So if that's the priority, if that's the first priority, then when it burns, we want to make sure that properties don't burn.

Takes my mind to hardening and all the things around hardening, because as I said in a previous hearing here, the proximity to the home strikes me as the priority in terms of the funding, and there was some pushback on that, and I understand that. And I want to make sure I understand that better. So feel free.

But if we're going to burn, I want to make sure that when that fire reaches that community, that we don't have the whole community burned down also. So that strikes me as home hardening defensible space. And the question is, how far out do you march the defensible space?

But if we have limited money and state's going to invest in defensible space, should it be that zone zero that we Invest in. Or should it be the hundred feet away? You know, what do we invest in? Should it be the ring around a community? And Mr. O'Connell, you talked about that.

Is that a better investment than Zone Zero? That's, you know, it depends on what you're going to do, of course, out there. But does that solve the ember coming from five miles away and two miles away? And it doesn't. So my sense is the closer to the home, the more valuable it is.

And if people want to push back on that, I welcome hearing that. The next thing is, what do we do? So when the burn comes in Southern California, somehow we generate either fewer embers or something. And I don't have any sort of genius in terms of that in Northern California.

My question is, when it burns, if we've done the right clearing of the underbrush and we can keep it from getting into the. Into the canopy and the treetops, I want to hear more about how valuable is that. Is that the reason for the, you know, the controlled burns? The fire is good sort of regimen.

I want to understand that better so we know how to, again, prioritize funding as we go forward. So that's overall thought that I have. And so I'm going to say my questions completely and not ask for an answer so that you guys can be thinking about those.

And my colleagues know what questions I'm asking, and then I'm going to turn to my colleagues and do that also. But you brought up the issue of data collection, you know, and it's one we've brought up before. And I know, Director Tyler, I said, how do we know what is the. What are the right investments in prevention?

You know, is it. Is it, you know, controlled burns or is it brings around, you know, an area? And I know it's. The answer is probably going to be some combination of those things. But how do we. How do we.

We need to create in California, if we're going to manage limited resources, we need to create some kind of metric measurement that we go, well, we're making some progress here, but we're losing ground here, and maybe we have to shift some investments or we finally have knocked this out and we now can do this.

But how do we create that overall measurement metric system is a fundamental question that I have. And you talked about the landscape here. And so I've asked that question about Southern California versus Northern California. That's my big question. The third thing that I want to put out there, and it'll be my last sort of overall question.

And that is, I assume you've already tried to tell us what you think we need to know. Right. Okay. But I want you to think about legislators making decisions in terms of hard decisions, of prioritizing very limited funds. Right. What is it, from your perspective you would be doing?

And that's why we have this diverse group here, Mr. O'Connell, all three of you, or even in Lao, what is it that maybe we're not thinking about or that you would be thinking about if you were trying to do this? And so I'm not going to ask for the answers to those questions because I want to see.

I just think this is such a big topic that if we get the questions out, it will help the panelists be able to answer this and stuff. And then for everybody's benefit, this is just panel one. Panel two is going to be much more about defensible and defensible space and hardening.

While these questions in panel one also go into those things. These are the bigger questions about how do we manage all of the resources we have. The second panel will be much more how do we actually deal with defensible space and hardening specifically? All right, so colleagues, anybody? Go ahead, Assembly Member.

Right. Well, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair. And this is certainly, I think, one of the most profound challenges facing the State of California over the next 20 years. I think sort of building on what with the chair was asking, I think we've recognized that this is a tremendous problem for the State of California.

We've invested billions and billions of dollars. When you look at the money that's also been invested not just by California taxpayers, but by California ratepayers, that's like there are tens of billions of dollars. And I am having a very hard time understanding what's working and what's not.

I'm also, I'm even having a hard time understanding what the experts think is working and what's not. So I would love to get. Chief, your perspective. Maybe it's Director, I get, Chief Director, your perspective on how are you and other leaders across the state evaluating the efficacy of these investments. How are you evaluating what's cost effective?

And then I guess to kind of simplify it, I'd love for everyone to provide a perspective on kind of one thing, one program that we should stop doing, one program we should start doing, and one program we should do more of. I think the chair wants to sort of get all of our questions out there and then allow you to respond.

Yeah, and then I think that's a great question. I think that the chair's questions are good ones. One of the ones that's been on my mind a little bit in our area, you've had massive wildfires that then when another wildfire starts, there's reburn.

And so it is a bit of a conflicting message for folks in our area about we need to do more prescribed burns because that'll help prepare the landscape versus then when you have another fire start, the area that's already burned is more susceptible for furthering that fire along.

So how do we win the messaging part portion of that? But how do we also take areas like Lake County, which I think 85% of it has burnt since 2015?

How do we make sure that areas that have experienced wildfires also continue to get the investment, even if they're not the shiny object that is the highest fire risk, so that then they don't reburn through that area and re traumatize those communities and then.

Yeah. Appreciate the opportunity. Thank you. Yeah. And hard to say whether this is panel two or one, but I'll throw them out right now. In addition to kind of the issues that have been raised around all the different funding sources at this point, metrics on how we're looking at projects, success, failure.

We have Prop 4 now, which is a great opportunity. A number of us worked on $1.5 billion toward wildfire prevention, including a provision I advocated for, $135 million toward home hardening, the Wildfire Mitigation Grant Program. A question I'll be asking, particularly towards CAL FIRE, is how do we plan on using this new funding? Exactly?

How will the funds get into the hands of individuals and communities to ensure that it can actually be accessed by people who want to harden their homes? Is CAL FIRE planning on expanding the Wildfire Mitigation Grant Program to new counties? How many homes can be hardened through this funding, Again, of metrics question.

So I'm going to be looking. A lot of the work we've been doing week after week in this Subcommitee has been systematically going through Proposition 4. And no more important part of that really has been the wildfire prevention, home hardening component of that.

So I think that's a little bit specific, and I frankly had it more teed up for Panel two. But it ties into the overall questions you're hearing about effectiveness, allocation of resources, metrics, gauging of success and the like.

And of course, to my colleague's point, you know, we, a number of us represent areas that have either been deeply affected by wildfires or are one event away. So that is top of mind for everyone. So thank you.

So you've heard these questions, and my staff did a great job of summarizing your question. So I'm aware to want one of each. You know, what should we do more of? What should we do less of? And these questions. So the home hardening is going to come up again in the afternoon, I mean, in the second session.

But from the standpoint of ranking and prioritization, I'm going to ask you to weigh in on that. And while you're at it, try to address Assemblymember Petrei Norris questions about what we should do more or less of, because that fits under the question of prioritization.

The Then we're gonna come to the home hardening or home hardening is gonna be one of those issues. Where do you rank home hardening relative to these other things? And so I'll Anybody wanna start? Great. All right. The retired guy has the least to lose.

Like I said, nobody can take my birthday away. Exactly. No. Thank you. And again, Ken Pimlott, retired chief of CAL FIRE and I have been spending a lot of time in the the last six years, I have failed retirement, and I've been spending a lot of time engaging on all of these issues.

And these are all the hard questions, right? And really, to go to Member Petrie Norris first, what would we do less of and what would we do more of? And I think I want to answer it in a way of not one of the specific things, home hardening versus prescribed fire versus fuels treatment, but it's.

And I chair our Fire Safe Council in El Dorado county. And they may, you know, cringe when they hear me say this, but I think the state really needs to prioritize its efforts on communities and areas and initiatives that are high in partnerships, that are high in collaboration, that are showing success.

Because to Jim Branham's point, former Executive officer of the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, we are spending a lot of money on random acts of fire prevention and conservation. And I mean, there's truth in that and it's all good work, but we're not getting. We're not making the difference at scale that we need to.

And so we really need to be looking at projects where, like Michael talked about, obviously I've got some in El Dorado county, but they're happening all over California and where we're bringing all the partners to the table, we're breaking down the silos. So CAL FIRE isn't off working on one piece. The local fire district is over here.

The resource conservation district is just working in their space. No, they're all at the table. And it does come back to, you know, fitting all the tools in the toolbox. But the projects need to truly demonstrate that.

And I think we need to be really looking at projects where either they're showing a history of that or where they're really able to demonstrate what they're going to do with that and then follow up.

So the State can't solve this problem. State can't what? The state cannot solve this problem by itself. I'm going to say the same thing you did in a different way and try to elaborate on it. The state cannot solve this problem. Doesn't mean the problem can't be solved.

It means the state can't solve it for everyone. This is something that massively is done at the local level, that you see it all over the state. And so it actually, for me is a relatively simple Analysis in the sense of you've got to look for leverage. Where is the leverage that the state has in its investments?

And I think the RFFC program is a good example of that. The capacity. What program? Regional Forest and fire capacity program is a great example of that because it's created leverage for the state by enabling capacity that has had exponentially important effects at the local level.

And so I also want to echo what the chief said, and thank you for saying that, which is we can't prioritize ignition prevention over home hardening over strategic fuels management. As I said, we've got to do all of those. Give me a Sec. I'll tell you a quick story.

We had a fire in Orange County called the Coastal Fire. It wasn't a gigantic one, but the fire itself was not abnormal. And the fuel modification zone had been inspected that week and passed with flying colors. Two out of the three and 20 of 22 homes on the ridge burned.

And it was because none of them were hardened. And that is to me, a perfect example where you can do two of those three things. Exactly right. And you didn't do the third one and we had a tragedy. And so I don't want to see the state choosing between those three things.

If you can't choose, what do you do? You look for leverage. What are the programs that the state can invest in that will make a difference? So I'm not looking for a one to one investment. I'm looking for a one to 20 investment. Well, what are those? Right. That's what you're going to ask.

Both of you are saying you can't choose between those things, but we're going to have to choose. We don't have a choice. So I want to go back. I want to push back a little bit here. You talked about those 20 homes that burned on the ridgeline. You told me yesterday how they burned. Tell me how they burned.

They burned from the attic down. They all burned from ember intrusion.

And so my question is, if they all would have had vents on their attic, would we have lost those 20 homes?

More than likely not. I think chief would agree with me on that.

So how can we not say that's not the priority?

I'm not saying it's not a priority. What I'm saying is.. the priority.

No, no, no. I didn't say the word a priority. How can we say that's not the priority?

Because if you spend all of your money on home hardening, then the land's going to burn over and over and over and over again. And we're going to lose all of those investments, including the ecosystem services that you've talked about.

Well, when we prioritize, we're not saying we're going to spend all of our money. We're saying we're going to spend the first of our money on the home hardening, but we're going to spend some of our money on these other things. If I could, like you said, even when that fire came, they probably wouldn't have burned. Right.

If they had had the very possibly, very possibly. Right. And I know I'm guessing I'm making Director Tyler very nervous with this line of questioning. Right. I mean, it's truly a partnership. We need to have the pre. I'll give you an example.

In terms of what is the priority, should we have those four helicopters ready to be able to drop that, you know, drop water when the first fire breaks out?

I absolutely think that's a priority over a whole bunch of other things because as you and I talked about yesterday, most of the time when we get those ignitions, if we don't have high winds, we're able to get them out right away.

Now if we, if we get ignitions and we can't get them out right away, even when there's low wind, we've got a real problem. So I'm saying that's a priority over literally, we're getting told just yesterday, our colleagues, we're getting told we're going to have to make huge cuts in Budget 4. Right.

We're going to have to make a decision about how many more helicopters to get versus I'm not trying to lecture you guys. I'm trying to say to you, we don't have the luxury of saying, oh, we need to do all these things. You're right. We will do all of these things.

But when we have to make decisions about the last $100.0 million or the last $10.0 million or the last $1.0 million. Right. We've got to know. From what I've heard, I'm going to get those vents covered in those attics before I'm going to spend the next dollar on the other. I see. Assemblymember Conley.

I want this to be more interactive. That's why doing this this way.. So go ahead.

A quick point which is I don't think we're disagreeing. I think what what I'm saying is that you have to leverage every one of those investments. So if the investment in hardening is vents, do it right. And there were aircraft like mosquitoes on this fire, and they still all burned down. I mean, there were.

There was aircraft everywhere. And so I think what we really seriously have to focus on is what are the things in each of those three strategies that we need to invest the state's money in? So what I just don't want to see is all the money going into home hardening and all the money going.

Into education and that. And I would say priority one is don't put all the money into anyone. Yes, that's correct. Alrighty. So if we can take that off the table, unless my colleagues disagree. So we don't put all the money into any one thing. We get that we have to have balance, Right. So we're there.

But we're going to have a healthier conversation if we don't spend all of our time saying, hey, don't put all your money into one thing. Nobody's going to do that. Right. What's the. Right.

What's at the margin when we have 60% here and 40% here, and we've got to decide, do we change that to 7030 or do we change that to 50? 50? That's what the prioritization comes from. And still I'm going to get this out there.

From what I just heard you say, even though we had all those helicopters, Right. If those vents would. If those. If those that burned from the attic down. Right. And maybe from the roof down, if they would have had roofs and attics hardened even with all those helicopters, we may have been able to save them.

Sure would have helped. So there I have. I have been. And my colleague Assemblymember Connolly's been pushing this for a year and a half. We're elevating, hardness, hardening in our minds. All right, not everybody, but at least some of us. And I think in Southern California, because embers are so much more of an issue. I think hardening is so much more on our minds in Southern California. Go ahead.

We've all been to the aftermath scenes and literally have seen what you're talking about, where three homes are burned down, one is standing, two more burned down, and so on. What's the missing piece? It's the home hardening and the vegetation management around that.

Mr. Rogers? Yeah. Assemblymember Rogers.

I'm not going to disagree with my colleagues, but I think that they hit it on the head when they said that this isn't just a state problem. And part of what I look at is as we're prioritizing dollars, where can those dollars also come from?

And when you think about things like vegetation management, that is not going to be borne by an individual, it's going to be borne by the state. But when we talk about individual home hardening, there's a public benefit and we have to figure out how to pay for that.

But I actually think about it sort of in terms of when my community was going through sewer lateral replacements and really trying to figure out like, yes, it's in the best interest of the entire community for each of those homes to have better sewer laterals that we're able to.

To deliver the water without flooding and causing street issues. But how do you bear that cost? And how do you give people incentives to be able to do that on an individual scale as well? So I know we're not saying we've got to do both.

What I'm saying is part of the conversation needs to be the art of the possible, which is if there are other ways to Fund certain aspects of this, that it makes more sense for the state to focus on one part and build tools for others and individuals to focus on another.

And that's the value of the conversation we're having right now is you just highlighted an important part. I would not make the case that the state should pay for hardening of 5 million homes. That doesn't make any sense. But should the state pay for incentive programs that create the right incentives for people to harden their homes?

And that's what you're talking about. In other words, where we should maximize our investments? I agree. And just by articulating this, it's going to help us make budget decisions.

And we have Prop 4 money that's been, you know. Dedicated.

Well, that's Prop 4. But there's also going to be, you know, homeowners are going to have to be involved in home hardening. Right. And the question is, how do we create that? I'll say it here. I'm thinking about Bill. In fact, I've talked about it with some of my colleagues.

I'm thinking about a Bill that says if you make home hardening investments to get your home certified, because certification of a home being hardened is a lot more valuable than just, zero, I did this or I did this. You know, you talk about do every. You got to do everything if you get a certified home that's hardened.

Right. So let's incentivize people by saying you don't have to pay increased property taxes for the money that you've spent to Harden your home. Hugely controversial by, you know, some people.

And you get a discount on your insurance.

Well, absolutely. Absolutely. That may be one. Those are. But. Yeah, exactly. But you incentivize. But that's exactly what you're talking about. And that is we probably can't get as much leverage funds to help us with controlled burns and forest management. We can get more leverage funds. And you're saying that also.

So already this is starting to come into clearer focus here. Right. In terms of that. Go ahead.

Because we've talked about your Bill idea as well, and I think it's a good one. But I think the key part to not lose is that in the certification process, it's not one home element, one home hardening element.

It's how do you create that structure in a way that is actually hardened, that it's done the zero landscaping, that it's done the specialized vents, that it's got the types of material for the siding or for the roof that actually makes it home hardened, not give an incentive for them to do one component of it that leaves the home still vulnerable, but actually a real program that says this is what will make your home more hardened but also protect your community, that has more value than some of our programs that I've seen where it's just, it's dollars to change out the vents on your home.

But then to your point, there's still other vulnerabilities that exist on that property where at the end of the day, even if the vent doesn't allow anything through, the home still burns down.

Right. Couldn't agree with you more. And our certification Bill that's moving forward actually says it has to be the whole home has to be hardened, which is the requirement. The insurance companies have to say, if you want to want us to give a discount, you got to harden the whole home.

So again, we're trying to have a collaborative stakeholders. And one of you said, you know, the problem with Wildfire is it's everybody's problem and it's nobody's problem. Right. Well, I'm just, I'm here to say the people in this room, we're the ones. This is where the buck stops, right? It's you guys are the kids, CAL FIRE.

It's the insurance companies that we're going to hear from. Right? It's, it's and it's, it's us, the buck stops. We are the ones that have to figure this out because we are at that tip point. Right. In terms of that. Did you have something you wanted to say there? Okay, great. Mr. Okay.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Just want to underscore Assemblymember Rogers point about the Multiple payers. Where can you find multiple payers? I think one of the points you'll hear on the next panel is how expensive it is to really harden a home. And if the state did decide that was its big priority, it wouldn't get very far.

And so one of the key issues for you to think about is how can you take the limited dollars we have and stretch them as far as we can and make them as effective as that's finding other funding partners.

I think another consideration we would underscore and Chief Pimlott really talked about this, and I think it's important to bring it back, is it's not just about structures and communities and damage when we're talking about wildfire in our forested landscapes, where there are watersheds that we are so dependent on for not only our economy, but our lives and our agriculture and our Southern California communities that don't have their own Sierra watershed right next door and they need the water from far away.

Not only are there not the natural funding partners there the way they are, there aren't always the advocates that you hear from as homeowners and communities coming forth and saying, protect our homes, protect our homes, spend our money here. The watersheds don't have that.

And so just want to reiterate, that is a core state responsibility that we have to ensure that our, not only our biodiversity, but also just that that watershed function and that those big catastrophic wildfires that we have in our forested watersheds, which may not have as much damage to property, can have really serious implications for the state. So just want to make sure that that voice is on your shoulder as well.

Absolutely. And that's the value of this hearing. And Director Tyler and I had some, some good conversations in terms of prioritizing about that very issue of reforesting land and the importance of reforesting land. I'll tell you the question that takes me to the second issue of random acts of, you know, and it was resiliency.

All of, you know, you can, you can plug in sort of anything. Random, random acts of hardening don't work. Random acts of, you know, all this stuff. But what that goes back to the first question.

What metric is there that says this is the amount of, of reforesting that we have to do, you know, and that might be relative to the amount of burning that we have. This is the amount of each one of these categories. What is it that there's a. There is, you know, the marginal rate of return.

You know, the early dollars are going to get you big return you know, the last dollars get you a smaller percentage return. Where, where's that break point in terms of, hey, now it's time to start moving some dollars to another place.

Love to hear any thoughts that you have on that because we're doing big picture and we're going to go into hardening much more detail. And with the next panel, we'll go here and then we'll go to direct. I'm going to go to Director Tyler because he moved his microphone and that means he's ready. Okay, go for it.

That's all right. Chair Bennett, thank you for inviting me up. I appreciate that. Members of the Committee, my name is Joe Tyler. I'm the Director, current Director and fire chief at CAL FIRE. And I just want to level set the colleagues.

My colleagues made great statements, but I think when we're talking about priorities, we need to take a step back again. Think about level setting of the diversity of California at the time that our northwest California could have a marine layer in our coastal redwoods.

Just a few miles, hundred miles over the hill, we'll find Shasta county in Redding, where our watersheds are coming from and the Cascades in the northern Sierras and even the central Sierras. We find ourselves in conditions at that exact same time that we could have 100 degree temperatures and drying conditions in Shasta County.

At the same time on the east side of the Sierra in Inyo Mono, we could find ourselves in high wind conditions coming down to Sacramento. At that exact same time, we could find ourselves having a delta breeze and a coastal influence where the hundred degree temperatures in Redding are 75 to 80 degrees in Sacramento.

And then it starts heating up down the Central Valley. We find ourselves getting into Southern California in the deserts where it is well over 100 degrees and find ourselves getting into San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles, Ventura, where we are back in the 80 degree temperatures with dry fuel conditions there.

So the first step is what is the right answer? Well, the recognition of the diversity of California. And this isn't going to be what you want to hear, but one size doesn't fit all.

Based on that diversity, we find ourselves as a step back in time and we think about the problem that we are thinking about from the January 2025 wildfires. Well, let's take a walk back in time for just a moment. In 1961, we had the Bell air fires. Exact same thing happened that we just saw in 2025.

As we fast forward, I'm going to skip over a large amount of time, but we recognize in 1991, we had the tunnel fire in Oakland. In 1992, we had the Fountain Fire that burned eastern Shasta county, hundred homes through Round Mountain and Montgomery Creek.

By 1993, as said earlier, I personally as well as Chief Pimlot were on the Laguna and the Malibu fires that burned in that time. We fast forward again to 20151617 where we saw the North Bay devastated by wildfire.

At the same time we saw coming off the Plumas National Forest, the North complex that impacted many of those residents in the Butte County Plumas County area.

Then as said earlier, by 2020 and 21, we saw the impacts of the largest fire in single fire in California history, which was the Dixie Fire and the Caldor fire, both of them unique in that they burned from the west slope of the Sierra Nevada to the east slope.

Nobody thought that it was going to crest the Sierra Nevada at that time. Largest fires occurred in that time of the August complex in Northern California. I skipped some of that, which was 2003, which was the Cedar Fire across San Diego. And we saw it again in 2007 with the Witch fire and several other fires.

All wind driven fires back to Dixie and Caldor fuel and topography driven fires. And then just to cut this short, in this history is we see what happens in 2025 and history continues to repeat itself.

And so it's our obligation, as you say, for all of us to figure out how do we come together as partners, both state, federal, private and tribal partners, to resolve this problem and make it easier. You asked one thing that perhaps we shouldn't do so much of.

We shouldn't do so much of chasing acres, chasing a number that is not the metric we should be chasing. It is a multiple, all in approach because of the diversity of California.

It is recognizing that there is a need for fuels reduction, mechanical thinning, prescribed fire and cultural burning in the Administration, with the support of the Legislature, has set some of that up in a recent State of emergency, things like SB310, which allows coordination of cultural burning and prescribed fire with our tribal partners, and then the recognition of the funding that you have provided to be able to grant out money to RCDs and RFFPs and other private sources to be able to get that work together and get that work done.

So from recognition earlier, we have to recognize that we still have to protect our watersheds. We still need the water, we don't need the sediment flowing into our reservoirs. And at the same time we need to protect our communities. We have allowed our communities to expand into the wildland urban interface.

And with that as an all in approach, we have to protect our community. So without giving you a specific item, what would I do more of while we continue to do the prescribed fire and cultural burning and making those streamlined is community risk reduction.

And I agree with Chief Pimlott in the discussion of really focusing on those areas that are showing results. Now to Assemblymember Petrie Norris's question. I have had dialogue previously about how do we find this information, how do we know what is working and what isn't?

And it is still a work in progress, but we are making improvements and ways that we're making improvements are through the Wildfire Enforcement's task force. That is one way you can go to their website and you can find two predominant things that I would be interested in people looking at. And that is number one is the interagency treatment tracker that is available there.

That turn of events was allowing our local, state and federal partners to input the data of the fuels reduction they're doing and show where there needs to be cross collaboration, cross jurisdictional efforts of placing your dollars to make sure that projects are contiguous, that we find areas where those projects can come together.

The second item on that website right now is the Governor's State of emergency and streamlining of the CEQA process while maintaining environmental protections to allow users across the state to conduct more fuels reduction, more prescribed fire, more cultural burning. Those are the two predominant things there now. Efficacy in fuels reduction.

One of the items after talking to Assemblymember Petrie Norris was making sure that we can show where results are being driven. So one of the things that I went back and did on our public facing website was I added a new tab. That new tab is called Prepare, I'm sorry, prevent and it's got a drop down.

You can also find it on our homepage because we want easy access and it's in Fuels reduction is the header of that. From there you can go and you can also find the Interagency Treatment Tracker.

You can find dashboards in that specific area related to the defensible space inspections that we and our partners and our qualified entities are doing all the way down to how many are being done in each county in a geographic area using ArcGIS to be able to show where those inspections are being done.

There are on that same website ability to see year by year who all the grantees were related to, various types and kinds of grants that you have authorized the dollars for us to be able to put out to the public. You'll also find one of our More recent additions is our fuels Treatment Effectiveness Program. So what happens here? A wildland fire starts, a pin drops on a map.

If the fire is within 1/4 mile of that wildfire, if there is a fuels reduction project within 1/4 mile, it will ping a representative of the local unit that has a responsibility to go to that incident to evaluate that fuels treatment against the wildfire, to write a narrative and a report on the effectiveness of that fuels treatment, to then have it published on our website as to the effectiveness with pictures and narrative.

So that is one way that we are working on the effectiveness. Now back to grants and soon to be finished. Is I just approved, it's not posted yet.

A grants dashboard to make it easy to see all the grants that CAL FIRE administers, and we're not the only state agency that administers those, to be able to show the work, where the dollars are, where they're going. Finally, to Assemblymember Connolly's point, your questions are all great questions.

What I'm gonna ask your Grace is if panel number two can work on those questions for you. Back to you, Chair.

Well, two years ago, we asked you to do exactly what you've just reported, which is start to create much more data so we could evaluate did this wildfire resilience project, whatever it was, fuels treatment, et cetera, did it have any impact? And so trying to.

I really think that's a great idea, drop the pin and immediately have the local person in that area, you know, evaluate that. That's the kind of stuff that helps us, you know, as we move forward. The. We have the next panel coming up. I'm going to. I'm going to try to summarize some things here in my mind.

Welcome, you guys, to any summary comments you want to make before we go to panel two. But I would offer these things that you made. The comment you said, you may not want to hear it, but one size doesn't fit all. We do want to hear that because nobody's advocating one size fits all.

But I think what you are hearing is that the Legislature looking at the total amount of spending that we have out there, you know, the 3,3,600,000,000 that we've spent identified in the LAO report, that the effort, the percentage of that that goes to hardening and getting communities hardened is much smaller than we think the effectiveness of that could be.

When you sit there and say there's a good chance those homes wouldn't have burned if they had been hardened, it's hard to imagine that. So by no means are we saying, let's not take care of our watersheds or let's not do any of that stuff.

But there is an interest in increasing, but not increasing something that is just going to be a small drop in the bucket on the issue of hardening, because whatever money we allocated, 100 million, 500 million, we touched so few homes, it would have no impact. So we're not advocating that. What I'm trying to advocate for is an increase in the effort to get more homes hardened.

Not for us to pay to Harden more homes, but for us to spend the money to really work with the insurance companies to empower the fire marshal, work with the insurance companies to come up with a home Hardening program that actually makes them comfortable, giving substantial discounts if you get a certified home, and then using that delta between, this is what you're going to pay without certification, this is what you're going to pay with certification.

That. But we need to spend some money to create that. We need to spend money to incentivize communities to say, we're going to harden our whole community. And this fits with exactly what you were saying, Mr.

Pimlot, which is, you know, invest in communities that are also investing and then get a whole community and go, okay, this community is in pretty good shape now. Let's go to the next one. You have communities down in Orange County that from the very beginning were designed and those communities have not burned. Right?

And so you can get a community to the point where it's pretty darn, you know, resistant. And that's what we have to do to meet the moment of being at a tipping point. Right.

And so we just, I want to push back a little, that if we keep saying one size doesn't fit all, I don't think that that means we leverage any significant change in how we're doing things. And if we don't leverage any significant change in how we're doing things, we're going to have unsustainable home insurance rates in California.

We have to make a change. We don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We want to try to make it intelligently. And so this panel's been really helpful for us to try to prioritize some of those things.

So as we get ready to move over, it's a request to make home hardening more important, but not necessarily a lot more expensive in terms of what we're doing, but a whole lot more important in terms of what we're emphasizing.

And then spending that money to tease up all of These other sources, but it's going to be primarily individuals. But creating incentives for individuals to Harden that they go, we get a property tax cut. I'm just thinking we get a property tax cut, I get lower insurance.

I get the security of knowing that my home's and I also get when I go to sell my home, I can sit there and say this is a certified hardened home. Those, those are the things we have to do to get and then with all the education.

So maybe we spend on education, maybe we spend on some kind of incentive programs for communities. I'll tell you what can go a long ways.

We're a fire safe, firewise community and we publicize that or we put a thing out there so that when people go to buy homes, they go, I want to buy a home in a fire safe. Just like people check for school districts. I want to buy homes in school districts that have good test scores.

How about I want to buy homes in areas that have high fire wise ratings. So that's my, that's, that's how I want to in my mind, want to bring this panel one to an end. But I invite my colleagues to join in any way you would like before we move on to panel two.

Assemblymember, I think you summarized it well, really kind of tying together all the pieces. So if I can provide a local example, and I want to commend Chief Tyler for participating in this. We had a statewide forum in Marin county recently on wildfire prevention, and one of the highlights was at the local level.

The county has actually formed the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority. So residents stepped up. They're taxing themselves. It's a strategy to look at things all the way down to the individual home level, but also community regional level. And it goes to the point you're making chair is that it's local planning with a state involvement on top of that.

It's incentivizing. I think the frustration right now is you have communities stepping up and forming firewise groups doing the work. They're still losing their insurance right now, are still being priced out of the market. To me, that's unacceptable. But we have to keep chipping away at it. So the state itself is not going to solve this problem.

It is going to require in different ways. Not every community is necessarily, necessarily going to tax themselves or the like. But we've got to kind of ramp up these efforts. It's got to be local, regional, state partnerships leveraging. The insurance industry has to step up. I like your idea of different types of incentives.

That's something I'm working on with AB1 right now as well. But it does go back to guidance from our state partners as well.

About and I like your point, it's not just about number of acres but what are the relevant metrics to assure folks, hey, we are four billions of dollars now and more to come that this money is getting out in the right ways that will tap into local and regional dollars, provide true incentives and true results on this issue. Assembly Member

Well, thank you Mr. Chair and I think you did an excellent job summarizing the discussion. I have just one very brief question because I realized in the course of this conversation one thing that we did not discuss was investments in wildfire technology.

And that's something that's gotten a lot of attention and you know, some modest investment from the state for everything from ignition detection, surveillance kind of prediction.

Is the fact that we didn't talk about that an indicator that no one thinks that is a high priority or particularly cost effective investment or I'm just curious on the 30 second answer on wildfire Tech and how we should be thinking of that as we're prioritizing investment.

Thank you Assemblymember. I appreciate that because as soon as I stop talking, technology is so important to every one of you and I talked about the dashboards 30 seconds. Technology has taken us a long ways and technology continues to expand.

Just recently Earth Fire Alliance and the firesat organization launched its first low earth orbiting satellite and they're going to launch more as the years go on with a rollout by 2028. This is just one example.

It is going to be able to provide more persistent coverage for wildfire detection working with another vendor who is looking at LIDAR availability that is more persistent as well. They are cutting edge moving forward.

We found in the January fires where we got reliance on our fixed wing aircraft for intelligence and found ourselves in places that they couldn't fly. And we relied on Department of Defense fire guard technology to continue to update us with the perimeters so long and short. Technology is still equally as important as an all in approach of everything else we're doing.

So we are asking for you guys to be real partners with us as we try to re rebalance and focus on new technology. But I would just, I thought I was done but I just would point out under resilient forest and landscape we have $2 billion that we spent in the last few years. 2.0 billion. Right.

That's on resilient forest and landscapes. On community hardening we've spent 74 million right now I'm not suggesting that we flip those by any means. Right. But would a little more spending there for how to encourage communities to become firewise and how to, you know, what are. That seems to be appropriate.

But we need your creativity to help us get these communities to Harden. And I think we have such a healthy environment here and that in other situations, agencies become defensive and they're only worried about trying to hold onto their funding. And I don't sense that at all here. I sense much more.

We're open to looking at all of this and so we're not trying to, you know, make that major change.

But what's a major change is all the stakeholders coming together to say how do we get this hardening part of it to be stronger while we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater with all of this other stuff, while we are dealing with decreasing revenue, because we're going to have trouble doing all of this.

The more creative we can be, the more we can leverage communities to help themselves, the better off we're all going to be. Thank you very much. Really appreciate this. And let's go to panel two. And I appreciate my colleagues. I know this is a little unconventional how we're doing this, but hopefully lost again.

We'll hold it together somehow until your return. Right. While they're switching,...

Panel 2 on home hardening and defensible space. I think that we certainly surrounded this topic a lot, so we can get much more specific into the details, hopefully with these presentations. And so appreciate all of you being here. We're going to go in the order that's listed on the agenda. And so LAOs office. Ms. Kerstein.

No, it's not. Maybe because I did that. Now try it. No, no, no. I think. I think they both work. I think they were working. I just had this button pushed.

Okay, thank you. There you go. Sorry about that. Good morning, chair and Members. Thank you so much for including us in the hearing today. I'm going to pick up where my colleague left off on page eight of the handout.

If you don't have the handout, I think the sergeants have a few more copies, so they should be able to give them to you. But I'm going to try to go relatively quickly.

You had such a robust, helpful conversation as part of the first panel, but I do want to provide a little bit of context and overview specifically related to home hardening and defensible space for you. If you start on page eight of that handout.

The first point is one that I think has been made very well so far, which is really the importance of home hardening and defensible space. I think there's probably no one in this room who would disagree that those are incredibly important pieces of the puzzle in terms of helping our state be resilient to wildfires.

And it's important not just to protecting the individual home, but, as you well know, to protecting neighboring homes and communities. So really a critical piece of the puzzle. There are a variety of different types of approaches that state and local governments and other entities can use to try to encourage defensible space and home hardening.

I outline a few of them here on the handout. The first is adopting requirements so we can require, folks, hey, you need to have this amount of defensible space. And this is what that means. This is what that looks like. You need to have these specific home hardening measures.

We can require that, as the state thus far has had primarily for existing homes. The requirements are for defensible space. The home hardening stuff. We've had best practices, but haven't really required much in the way of home hardening on existing homes, only on some new homes. The second approach is providing inspections, education and enforcement.

So that's sending folks out, like our CAL FIRE employees and CAL FIRE staff, as well as local governments and others to go and inspect properties and See, are folks actually adhering to the requirements and the best practices that are out there.

And it can be a really important opportunity to not only flag where there's a lack of adherence to those best practices, but. But also to provide education to folks on the ground, let them know, hey, you know what? This is a fire hazard. Cause a lot of those things are not necessarily totally intuitive to folks.

Sometimes they are, sometimes they are. And then also in some cases, providing enforcement. And so some local agencies provide more enforcement and some of them do less enforcement. But that's a tool in the tool belt as well. The third is offering financial support. We heard a little bit about that. It can be providing grants.

The state has done some of that, certainly providing grants that help pay for these types of activities. But there are other approaches. We can provide loans, for example. We can provide in kind support. That's actually a really common approach too, is.

For example, chipper days are very common in a lot of communities where it helps to subsidize people getting rid of the vegetation after they do defensible space action. So that's another important approach. And then providing other incentives. And I think there was a robust discussion on that.

The insurance market is one potential approach here that's been used to some extent, could be used potentially more in terms of trying to give people incentives through potentially lower rates or more assurance they'll actually get insurance. Other places in the country have also worked on this. Boulder county has an interesting model here too.

And then also disclosures of property sale. The state has again has recent legislation on that. But helping make sure that people understand the risks when they're buying a property can be important as well. If you turn to page nine, I think this gets.

I know there was a good discussion on cost effectiveness and just what do we know? And I think part of the challenge before you is that there's a lot we. There's. There's definitely things we know, but there's a lot we don't know.

And one of the things we don't have a really clear understanding of is exactly what that mix should be. Right. How much should be defensible space versus home hardening versus fuel breaks versus these other things. And it might depend on the area. Right.

We heard a lot about how much the state varies across its landscapes and also even within those. Right. So even if you're just interested in defensible space. Okay, how much should we be investing in inspections? How much should we be doing in terms of enforcement?

How much should we be doing in terms of Financial incentives and then even which activities. Right. How far around the home and exactly what needs to be cleared? Does it need to just be bare?

And I know there's probably going to be some discussion about some of these issues coming forward, but I think there are a lot of questions about exactly how to do it in the most effective, cost effective way.

So those are really important questions that makes it hard to make the decisions that are really hard and before you, when you don't have necessarily the information that would be ideal. So we do note that historically there hasn't been a lot of requirements for programs to evaluate their effectiveness and cost effectiveness at the state level.

There was a requirement on AB38, that was the pilot program that was funded starting in 202021 that created the California Wildfire Mitigation Program. I think you'll hear about that more later. And so there's supposed to be a report coming up in 2028, so hopefully that will provide some insights.

Also, you know, there is continuing gathering of information, but again, still still a lack of complete clarity on this. Also wanted to highlight that at this point it does appear that that program, the California Wildfire Mitigation Grant program that the state has been investing in, it's been relatively slow to get off the ground.

There have been some challenges in terms of a variety of things. I'm sure you'll hear about it more working with the Federal Government in terms of a partner and some of the other challenges just launching that program. So relatively few homes have been treated thus far, I think about 20.

And the cost has been pretty significant per home. Right. Because you're not just necessarily doing the vents, you're doing more comprehensive treatments. And so really think that's, you know, you know, really a quite substantial cost. I think around $50,000 per home is the data that I've seen.

So if you turn to page 10, we highlight some key considerations around the state's approach to defensible space and home hardening. Some of these will seem familiar because they repeat for a little bit from the broad ones we had, but that kind of makes sense.

These are really trying to focus specifically on this area, defensible space and home hardening. So very similar themes. The first is cost effective actions and strategies. Really trying to think about where we're going to get the most bang for the buck is going to be super important. The second is the state role.

This is, I think, particularly important because these types of activities have not only public benefit and they certainly do because wildfires spread from house to house, but they have a lot of private benefit. If you come and replace my roof, that's pretty awesome.

It's not just awesome for my community, but gosh, that roof is going to last me another 20 years and help a lot of aspects of my home's value and protecting my home in other ways too. There are certainly private benefits in that respect and certainly also I don't want my house to burn down.

There's an individual benefit to not having that risk. There's certainly a mix of those things. And so really thinking about what is the state's role versus, you know, private entities versus local governments as well and the feds. Couple things to think about. One is the ability of homeowners to afford costs.

So if we have a limited dollars, you know, one option is to focus that more on low income individuals, also on communities. Marin County is really a leader in terms of taxing itself and it's relatively wealthy area as well.

So it has some of the capacity to do that potentially in some ways that some other parts of the state might not. We don't want to though. You know, we want to make sure that we encourage that kind of kind of effort and activity as well. But also recognizing not everyone can do that.

So I think that's an important consideration too. Jurisdictional responsibility, also very important. So there's not only that the state doesn't own most of the land in question, but there are a lot of these areas that need this kind of treatment, especially home hardening, that aren't necessarily state responsibility area.

So some of the state is sort of divided up into federal responsibility areas, state responsibility and local responsibility area. And there are lots of areas that are local responsibility areas. So does the state have a different role and responsibility in those areas from the state responsibility area, I think is an important question.

And then also thinking about the type of activity, and this comes back to, I think some of the points that were brought up before, things like education. That can be an area where the state can really play an important role because it makes sense at scale. Technology, I think that was another issue that was brought up.

Sometimes some investments in technology, for example, if you want to have technology that looks at the state at scale and tries to identify defensible space gaps, if that were something that the state wanted to pursue, that might not make sense for every individual little city to do.

It might be hard for a city or county, but it might make sense at a statewide level. So really thinking about what areas, what interventions do we need and which are ones where the state is best positioned to intervene, then coordination is really critical in the areas of home hardening and defensible space.

There are hundreds of local agencies involved in this. It is a lot of different entities. And there is. The jurisdictions are complicated. You have some areas where, for example, there are state responsibility areas, but they're within a local jurisdiction. In some cases there could be locals as well as CAL FIRE conducting inspections. Sometimes there's overlap.

Sometimes there are some areas that might not necessarily always get caught. Really thinking about in that complex web of different responsibilities and different agencies, clearly coordination is going to be important. Scalability, again, very important. Especially given the cost of the pilot program that we've been running.

We can't spend $50,000 per home, as was stated, for a million homes. Likely that's just unlikely to be within the state's capacity because we'd be talking about if it was a million homes, 50,000, I think that's $50 billion. Right. It's just a huge amount of money and it wouldn't necessarily be appropriate to do so.

So really thinking about what are interventions that can scale and how do we sort of leverage that, as was said, I think is going to be super critical. And then sustainability, I think, particularly with respect to defensible space is so important because, you know, as we talked about, vegetation grows back.

So yes, you have the, you know, you put replace your siding, maybe that lasts you a good amount of time, but your, you know, your gutters are going to need to be cleared again or your grass is going to grow again.

And really thinking about how do we make sure that folks are not only building defensible space, but maintaining that defensible space over time is a really important issue too. So those were the comments. I have happy to take questions at the end.

Before we go on to Mr. Berlant, I invite all of you to become our partners in how do we address the challenges that were just laid out by LAO? How do we create the incentives? How do we determine inspectors? I mean, you've identified a number of things and you know, do.

Are the inspectors always going to be local? We're going to have state inspectors. Getting inspection done is going to be important in terms of the education. So to the extent that you can address all of these issues, that.

Because I think it is clear, at least the Assembly wants to make a significant effort in hardening and defensible space. After what we've experienced now with these three communities going down, we need help and we need your expertise in terms of filling in all the gaps to try to make that happen.

And before you begin, certainly you heard it brought up. But the certification Bill, to the extent that it's not clear, is intended to be certification that is whole. The whole home, you know, hardened so that we, because embers are going to find the the weakest entry point, at least for Southern California.

But I'm sure that's also true in Northern California. So I want to make sure that to the extent that the legislation does pass and you're in charge of that, that you recognize that our intention is to try to make that something that insurance companies feel good about because it is whole home.

And with that, we will ask our state fire marshal, Mr. Berlant, to give us your sage insights.

All right. Well, good morning, Chair Bennett, Members of the Committee again, Daniel Berlant, the California State Fire Marshal. As you heard from Chief Tyler already, there is a lot happening in this space. And it's my honor this morning to kind of narrow in on more of the community and homeowner portion of our of our strategy.

But I first have to start by thanking you already for your investment. With the leadership of Governor Newsom, we have made major investments, as you noted, in community and wildfire resiliency. And so please note that while I'm going to focus my time on defensible space and home hardening, our strategy is an all of the above approach.

We have to ensure we have proper response. We have to manage our forest, but we also need to focus in on our community and support our homeowners. You know, in the past decade, over 70,000 homes and buildings have been damaged or destroyed by wildfires. You've already touched on the major impact that we've had in California.

But a staggering fact is that homes that ignite during a wildfire have a 90% chance of being completely destroyed. 90% completely destroyed, which tells us that we have to ensure that they don't ignite in the first place.

And that is where defensible space and the proper vegetation clearance right around the home is so vital so that we can make those communities more resilient. I want to stress though, again, as Chief Tyler mentioned, the state has a very strong plan that is rooted in California's Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan.

And while it touches all of the efforts, technology, forest health, community level, resiliency, specifically, the plan has 32 key actions that focus on community protection, including home hardening efforts. So that really is our north star of how we at the state level have been focusing in on these efforts.

I know you all are very knowledgeable on home hardening in this topic. But for the public and the folks that are watching, home hardening is really is building or retrofitting homes or other buildings using construction materials that are ignition and ember resistant.

So the easiest way to try to explain it is it is essentially fire resistant armor for the home. Now you heard from the LAO already mentioned this, but I'll just key in further. Since 2008, California has arguably had and maintained some of the most stringent building code requirements for new homes built in wildfire prone areas.

That code works and we have the data and the research to show that. The challenge though is that 90% of homes in wildfire prone areas were built before this code. And so that is where this conversation and your robust continued conversation we had.

You know, I go back to a budget hearing just last month where we talked a lot about these topics. But what do we do with the 90% of homes that are existing is really where the retrofitting conversation comes into play. Specifically how do we support vulnerable Californians?

The Lao, she's done a great deep dive into this effort and that has really been where we have focused those individuals who can't afford to do this work or can't physically do the work. And so since 2018 we've collaborated with Cal OES and you'll hear from my colleague here in a moment.

But we've worked to develop a financial assistance home hardening retrofit program. Now that program was formally codified by legislation in 2019, but essentially we created a joint powers authority establishing the California Wildfire Mitigation Authority. Now that pilot has several purposes.

One is it is looking to not only figure out where do we invest this money, which has been a big question of yours. And so we did a very detailed analysis. I talked about this at a former hearing on the budget.

But we essentially took wildfire hazards, we took social vulnerabilities and we forced ranked all of the counties. Those top counties were the counties that we are currently piloting this program. San Diego, Shasta, Lake, El Dorado, Tuolumne and Siskiyou. In no way is that a reflection on the remaining 52 counties or the thousands of communities that are at risk for other social vulnerabilities.

But this pilot really looked at a small number of communities to try to address how do we at scale, not just I loved your conversation earlier about making sure that we're not just doing mitigations here and there, but making sure they matter.

We want to do this work at community scale because if we only harden this home there and this home there. We're not going to ensure that we have more of what often gets referred to as herd immunity. And so that's a big challenge. How do we get an entire neighborhood on board into hardening their homes?

Conversations back to is it our program's responsibility to harden all those? I think the answer is no. But how do we incentivize? How do we motivate? You know, the LAO properly has pointed out, you know, we are very proud of, though, that today we've been able to harden nearly two dozen homes.

There are, as we speak, another two dozen homes under construction. But this pilot is looking to scale up to over 2,000 homes. But there are millions of homes at risk.

But this pilot for the several years, while it has taken a long time to get to a place where we have only several dozen homes hardened, the pilot is really looking at breaking down barriers that arguably have taken years to take. My colleagues and talk a little bit about it in a moment.

But the pilot was specifically focused on leveraging FEMA hazard mitigation dollars. In some cases it's a 90:10 ratio, meaning we're leveraging up to 90% federal dollars. But there's a lot of hurdles and additional requirements that come with that. And so that has taken us time to solve.

But we're not just solving it for our existing mitigation authority program. We're trying to solve it for all communities. And so, as you already heard, there may be other options. Maybe other residents using a fire safe council come together. Maybe there are other fire safe organizations, Hoas, that lead this work. But we're hoping to create a framework.

What are the mitigations they should be doing? How do you prioritize that work, both financially, what is financially a priority, but also what are the most important home improvements to make that give you the biggest bang? Now, you're gonna hear from my research colleague here in a moment that you've gotta do it all.

We have to harden all of the homes. But if you have a finite amount of money, where do you start? And so this program has been building that effort. So again, we're working to scale up to, in this pilot to retrofit up to 2,000 homes.

But we're also really trying to strengthen a framework that can be used in other communities and with other funding sources, switching to defensible space based on our research that we have done, much of it in partnership with the Institute for Business and Home Safety, which you'll hear from in a moment.

But also from detailed analysis, I mentioned those 70,000 homes that were destroyed in the last decade. Well, we've learned a lot from them. We've pulled a lot of data from them and done significant analyzing with our own staff, but also with academia to try to learn from them.

But not just from those 70,000 that were destroyed, but the ones some are. Connolly, you mentioned the ones that are standing here and that are standing there. We want to know what was different about those homes.

But one of the things that we have found already from this research and analysis is that really to increase a home's chance of surviving, you have to have both home hardening and defensible space. And we were still finding homes being destroyed that had adequate state minimum standard defensible space.

And that's where we've really narrowed in on zone zero. And again, you're going to hear from several colleagues more on that importance. Five feet. But that has really been identified as a vulnerable area that we need to continue to work to strengthen.

And I would argue that over the decades our law has required homeowners in wildfire prone areas to maintain 100ft of defensible space. It's not a guidance, it is a requirement. But we do find that through our educational efforts, sending out inspectors that we get compliance. 90%. 90% compliance for homeowners indefensible space.

But as we transition to incorporating the board's Zone 0 regulations and the latest science into this non combustible zone, we know that that's going to be a huge challenge on us to continue to educate homeowners on what to do to be compliant with these requirements.

But I would just reiterate, a lot of science and research has gone into our requirements. And so these are science backed and field tested measurable differences in protecting homes. But it's important to note that maintaining defensible space is the responsibility of the resident.

So a lot of conversation of what is the state's role and what are other entities. Defensible space is the homeowner's responsibility. And so we view it that we go out and provide information and steps for homeowners to comply with defensible space.

But we've also funded through your investment significant dollars through our Wildfire prevention grant program for things like chipper days for educational firewise communities. I'll quickly note, Chair, you brought up community level mitigation and certification. We've been very proud that we have worked hard to scale up the number of communities that have the designation of firewise.

You know, go back into 2020. We had 250 communities designated as firewise. We doubled that by 2022 to 500. And then just this month, we've hit 1,000 firewise communities. But now the conversation, and I turn it to you all to set the policy is firewise is an educational space. How do we validate that work?

Because that is what you'll hear that the insurance companies want. While we've worked hard to align our mitigations with our insurance industry partners, we worked hard with the Department of Insurance. We all want to see the same standards for defensible space and home hardening.

But how do we validate that work is a component that continues to need to be addressed. But I'll just wrap up here on defensible space. Our goal at CAL FIRE is centered around working to visit every home within the state responsibility area.

So it's about a third of the state that CAL FIRE is charged with preventing fires and protecting against wildfires. We work to inspect each home every three years, and we worked hard to get out more inspections.

How many homes is that?

In the last fiscal year, we were able to perform almost 300,000 inspections. And what that translates to is just over 200,000 inspections.

Now, one of the things, how many homes are in the state responsibility area that you're trying to get to within every...

Roughly about 800,000 homes or so. And so again, by if we can get to one visit every three years, you know, then we're hitting it to what our goal is. But we are spending significant amount of funding in education and other tools so that even if we're not out inspecting.

And I'll hit on one of these really quick, since you asked a question here. Through support by the Legislature, a Bill was passed that allowed us to create a qualified entity program.

Essentially, we've created curriculum, going out and teaching fire safe, councils, firewise, hoa, other nonprofit groups so they can go out and do defensible space and home marketing assessments. Now, it doesn't require a fire Department inspector necessarily. We can go out and provide that base level of education to even more homes. So it really is augmenting that effort.

And so back to your question. Almost 300,000 inspections last fiscal year, we're on track to continue to hit that. Our target is 250.

So while we are hitting our target of the number of inspections, what we're really narrowing in on is trying to hit more individual homes and again, scaling up so that we're visiting every home every three years. But I'll conclude on defensible space saying Our focus is really on homeowner engagement through education.

We get about a 90% compliance simply through our visits and our educational conversation and resources. So I'll end with this. You know, to protect communities against wildfire, it has to be a tiered approach. Of course, home harbor and defensible space are key components of our partial level mitigations.

But we have to ensure that the neighborhood and the community level mitigation is handled, that we've made them a community community that's more resilient. We have to address our forest health, but we also have to have a strong response because wildfires will happen. And so making sure we have proper technology and firefighters and equipment.

And with the peak of our fire year just ahead of us, we're almost into our wildfire preparedness week here in the first week of May. It's critical that all Californians are taking the steps now to prepare for wildfires.

So I thank you very much for your interest, for your investments, but this continued focus and once the panel's done, happy to answer any questions you might have.

Great. Thank you very much. And I appreciate the energy that you displayed both overall what you guys are doing and just your passion as you spoke here right now. Our Next speaker is Ms. Fenning from Cal OES.

Good morning. Thank you very much for having me. My name is Robin Fennig and I'm the state Hazard Mitigation Officer and Assistant Director for Hazard Mitigation at Cal OES. And I'm going to kind of do some maybe add on remarks to Chief Berlantz.

Really amazing introduction and focus mostly on home hardening because that's really where Cal OES is at the table in implementing and overseeing the partnership with CAL FIRE with the California Wildfire Mitigation Program.

And we are really grateful to have the opportunity to have all the support from both the Legislature and the Governor in funding a lot of our work and helping provide cost match for a lot of our home hardening work across the state.

And as Chief Berlin mentioned, we do have six pilot program pilot communities who are leveraging state provided matching funds in their matching FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant Program or HMGP grants. The Hazard Mitigation Grant program, unlike the BRIC program that you may have heard about, the BRIC program is being canceled.

And I think that was the program that my Lao colleague mentioned earlier this this morning. However, the Hazard Mitigation Grant program, which is a post disaster grant program provided through the Stafford act, seen as kind of a complement to the funding for individuals and communities to repair damaged infrastructure.

HMGP can be leveraged statewide and is provided after receiving a presidentially declared major disaster declaration, which we did for the Los Angeles fires and every other major disaster declaration preceding that. So typically in the HMGP, FEMA provides 75% of eligible costs and the locals are required to leverage 25% match.

And in this case the state is helping provide that through CWMP. This 7525% cost share applies to two of our pilot communities in San Diego and Shasta County and will apply to two additional pilot communities as we bring them online shortly in Riverside and Siskiyou counties.

During the COVID 19 pandemic, FEMA allowed for Stafford act fundings for a limited time to Fund up to 90% of federal of the costs associated with our work. As Chief Berlant mentioned, we have a few communities who are able to get HMGP funding during that time frame.

So we have El Dorado, sorry, we have Lake County and Tuolumne county with that 90-10 cost share. El Dorado county has that same 90% FEMA cost share. But they are splitting the non federal cost share between locally provided funding and funding provided by the cwmp.

As mentioned, the grants provide homeowners to enact both defensible space and home hardening activities because as I think everybody here is in agreement, they have to work together to provide that whole, you know, parcel solution for each property owner. So I'm going to share some data, some numbers because I think that's really what everyone wants to know.

What's going on with the pilot program? What are we seeing? And I think that the number 50,000 has been thrown out. So we're a little bit under 50,000 per home. So on average the communities that have completed homes were at about 44,500 for home hardening and about 14,000 for defensible space.

But that is also a lot of zone zero compliance work. And because that is a relatively new requirement, a lot of education, a lot more time, a lot of different measures and obviously the costs are going to vary by structure and by site. Specifically, what part of the state is it? What is the fire risk?

There's a lot of site specific characteristics that have to be assessed. And to Chief Berlant's point, the CWMP works to train locals so that they can do their own assessments. So building that local capacity so that they don't have to rely on the state to come and do those assessments and come up with that individual scope.

For every single house, Lake County is the farthest along and are you know, they are spending about a little over 40,000 per structure home hardening across its 18 completed structures, San Diego County has completed two homes to date with an average cost of $82,800. We've had more house more structures, have the defensible space work.

As we're still waiting for some EHP clearance, Environmental Historic Preservation Review clearance to begin the actual construction activities that are funded by FEMA. We also have breakdowns for various home features.

Because I think everybody's kind of asking the question, is it the vents, is it the roof, is it the siding, is it the accessory structures, decks, what is it? I will say it's very. We do look a lot to our research colleagues. I'm surrounded by them right now in the table.

It's hard to determine what level of mitigation protection does just the vents provide with nothing else. What level does the roof? Because that's honestly how you'd have to analyze it.

So as a result, we're looking in full right at the whole, the whole optimal solution that each site assessor is doing a deep dive with the property owner to come up with. We have numbers if you are interested on a line by line breakdown, we can do that.

And if you have questions about specific types of features, after my fellow panelists are done with their introductory remarks, we can definitely get into that. I've got all the information and we'll be happy to provide that.

I will also say that my colleague to my left from ibhs, their organization helped to author I think one of the most robust and maybe only study nationally that actually looks at the costs associated with home hardening. I manage FEMA grants, so I don't just do wildfire.

Chief Berlint really gets to do a deep dive into home hardening defensible space as well as the other suite of activities that CAL FIRE is charged with. But I'm engaged in flood mitigation, seismic mitigation, coastal hazards and managing, specifically managing FEMA grants nationally.

You know, FEMA has done a lot of work to understand the cost effectiveness of individual structural retrofits and a lot of work in the flood space.

If you want to talk about cost effectiveness associated with home hardening communities, I mean elevations, floodplain elevations are kind of one of the most tried and true FEMA funded mitigation project types nationally. And the national average right now for a structural elevation in the 100 year floodplain is $355,000 per structure. That is the cost effective.

The national average, residential safe rooms for tornadoes, the average Ranges by state for construction requirements and prices between $6,100 in Virginia and over $26,000 in Arkansas per individual safe room, which can house between two to eight people on average. Hurricane retrofits, which to me is where a lot of the interesting work has been done.

When you look at doing a whole home like same type of assessment and big upgrade hurricane retrofits, national average is almost $87,000. That's with the roof and that's most of our structural retrofits and home hardening are also looking at that, that whole home envelope. If you don't do the roof, it's $67,000.

So the cost of a hurricane retrofit roof is almost $20,000. And our data right now, when you look at the roofs, eaves, vents, we're almost about half that. So we're doing, I think when you look across the hazard portfolio that FEMA has done a lot of investment studying, we're doing pretty well.

But we are really creating the data for what does cost effectiveness look like for home hardening. Other states aren't doing this type of state led initiative. And I think that just it highlights how at the forefront of this work we are and how important it is.

And that's why I think we do look to the Legislature when it comes to limited amount of money. We look to the Legislature and to the Governor to help us find that right menu of options.

Because a lot of work has been done in a lot of the other hazard spaces and specifically a lot of the FEMA work is focused mostly on flood after fire.

And so this pilot is really important for us to continue to work with the communities, find that right size of a project, something that's not too big, that it overwhelms a low capacity, socially vulnerable, high risk community, but one that provides that economy of scale and that herd immunity that we continue to talk about.

So we are going to continue to work on that. Preliminarily that we do have to do cost effectiveness tests to submit our subapplications for FEMA.

And on average our pilot program total for expected benefit cost ratio is 4.88, which means that for every dollar that we're spending in home hardening defensible space in these six pilot communities, almost $5 in expected avoided damages.

And that's based on the expected the specific risk profile of those communities, CWMP has a higher average benefit cost ratio than when you compare to the national. In my field, the National Institute of Building Sciences or NIBS conducted this national mitigation saves study.

And it's kind of the landmark study that drives a lot of the work in my field. And that national average benefit cost ratio is only 2.0 for WUE retrofits. So we're, we're over twice as cost effective. Obviously we have to complete the work and then continue to test and assess the success of our, of our work. But we have a team that's ready to do that. With that.

I will, I'll wrap up my remarks, but I just want to thank everyone for the opportunity to share about our work and kind of, I think bring in some of that national comparison amongst other hazards, because I think that's maybe something that is missing right now in the conversation.

And looking forward to any questions that you all have about specific costs or program implementation or FEMA hazard mitigation grants. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Our Next speaker is Mr. Stapleton from the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Thank you very much, Members of the Committee. My name is Dan Stapleton. I'm the Assistant Executive officer for the Board of Forestry. I've been the acting Executive officer since March 1 when Edith Hannigan departed to the board to come work for the Senate. So I'll do the best I can.

I have not been involved with the Zone Zero up to this point. I'm mostly involved with forestry and forester's licensing. However, I have a presentation to you to kind of bring you up to speed with what's going on with Zone Zero. There's a little bit of a delay. Yeah, there's a delay there. So overview.

First of all, we're going to give you some background on Zone Zero and then we're going to look at some of the board's previous work and then what our next steps are. So what is Zone Zero? It's a new defensible space within first 5ft of a home or a building.

It's considered the most important area to keep clear of combustible items such as plants, things that reduce risk to the structure of igniting during an ember driven wildfire. Where is it, where is the an ember resistant zone 0 required?

All structures in the state responsibility area according to PRC4291 and then all structures in very high fire hazard severity zones in the LRA or the local responsibility area per government code 51182. When will these take effect? Well, Executive Order N 1825 stated that we should have these done by December 31st of 2025. zero, I'm sorry.

Keep forgetting, huh? There we go. Simultaneously working on guidance a guidance document as described in PRC 4291e. When the regulations are in effect and the guidance document is updated, the regulations will apply immediately for new construction and three years for existing buildings and structures.

Typical combustible items are fences, gates, landscaping materials, lawns, plants, trees, Outbuildings Board's prior work in September 2020, AB 3074 was a statute directing the Board to work on Zone 0 regulations that referred to the board's resource protection Committee.

The Board created an initial work group with Members including CAL FIRE and some of the LRA Fire entities, the University of California and the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety to get some science behind this.

In around September, October 2023, our government partners realized that AB3024 3074 only allowed for one year for landowners to come into compliance and there was no mechanism for the Board to address funding.

And so they started working on some of these issues and we expanded the group to include Fire SAFE councils and more LRA partners and you'll see that they're coming from a more diverse regional a location in the state. The Recent work We're gathering latest science in Zone 0 we're incorporating additional perspectives and input.

Our government partners are identifying financial assistance through a climate bond, we're getting updates from Safer from Wildfires recommendations and Department of Insurance framework for Sustainable Insurance and we're securing economic consultants to complete standardized regulatory impact assessment criteria, which is required under the APA. Most Recent Work In March we had a public workshop.

In March 21st we drafted a rule plea that was published. It reflected both work groups and feedback from Previous Resource Protection Committee meetings and public workshops. In April 7, we had another public workshop.

And in March, we have a rule plead and it describes where no landscaping or other materials that are likely to be ignited by embers, except for right now, potted plant exception is being considered. The pot can be no larger than 5 gallons and there's some consideration of the plant height.

Trees are allowed only if they're taller than the roof. You can't have any dead or dying branches. This is all within five feet. If they're lower than the height of the roof, they would need to be removed.

If they're taller than the height of the roof, then you would need to keep branches away from the roof line and the roof ridge top as well as like the chimney. Also, gates directly attached to buildings cannot be made of materials that are or that are combustible.

Perpendicular fences directly attached to the building or structure cannot be made of combustible materials. When the next replacement of a parallel fence is considered, the replacement cannot be combustible. Outbuildings must be built to Chapter 7a standards of the state fire marshal. So our next steps, we're going to revise the draft rule plead again.

We have a May 12 workshop to take on more comment. In June, we expect to revise draft regulations, complete an initial statement of reasons. We'll have more public meetings and a full board will initiate formal rulemaking process.

Then the formal comment period will occur in third or fourth quarter of this year with public hearing, response to comments, another revision possibly of the regulations, and then complete the formal rulemaking process by the end of the year. With that, any questions?

Thank you very much. I think we'll go on and have our questions with everybody afterwards. Our Next speaker is Ms. There we go. Thank you very much. And she represents the counties of Humboldt and Del Norte. She's their forest advisor.

Well, good morning. We're almost afternoon here. Chair Bennett, Members of the Committee staff, I appreciate the invitation. My name is Yana Valachovic and I work for the University of California in the Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources. And I'm just going to share. I have one of the best jobs in the world.

And I say that because I have the privilege to test and answer critical questions around fire adaptation, around many of the questions that we're talking about today. I get to help decision makers understand that information and make it accessible. And I get to work with communities to adopt that science into action.

And while I come from the North Coast, I have had a job for the last 25 years that's enabled me to travel all throughout California, work with communities across the state and every corner, but both urban and rural.

I'm giving you this background because I have a very interesting perspective on these issues because I'm also a registered professional forester. And more recently, I've had multiple roles with the Wildfire Forest Resilience Task Force. And I serve on the science advisory panel, helping to try and frame and shape some of these critical questions that we're tasked with.

Yesterday I was a part of the panel of the insurance Commissioner talking about the public model adoption for catastrophe modeling. So I dabble into that space as well. And then I'm affiliated with UC's Fire Network, where I lead on community resilience and built environment issues.

And then because I'm in an organization where we partner between the University and counties, I'm a Department head in two county government organizations. So the fundamental issue is that I'm really passionate about these issues because we were looking for old solutions to try and solve modern challenges.

And we've been really stuck in the woods for a long time. And I bring that forward because if you think about our Smokey the Bear campaign, it's been really effective and to some reasons, almost too effective. And I'll get to that in a minute. I've also been involved in many post fire investigations, including the coastal fire.

So I had to sit on my hands back there when we were talking about the coastal fire and some of the issues that were important there.

I've been involved in trips to Los Angeles, and I've also written some papers on the effectiveness of Chapter 7a in the town of paradise and how Chapter 7a and the exterior building performance affected survival in that situation.

I also am a Member of the Board of Forestry's technical Advisory Committee in the development of Zone 0 and other regulatory development. So those are a lot of words. But what I want to say is we've burned one out of every seven acres in the last decade.

Those fires have burned forests, they've burned grasslands, they've burned shovelands, they've burned woodlands. But more importantly, we all know they've governed communities and towns and cities across the state. And fixing that issue is not easy.

And there are no simple solutions that do not involve individual action and community efforts to support those who are financially and physically vulnerable. I want to bring this to the kind of sociological perspective because change is never easy and no one wants to be the one to change. Right.

And I often talk about my mom, and I think she's a key bellwether in this. So my mom, the way she looks at this was the Problem was always her neighbors, it was never hers, it was always someone else's. I'm pretty good at reaching people and being able to talk about these issues.

I never cracked into my mother, she did pass this year. So I think this really underscores the fundamental challenge before us. My mom decided the issue was someone else's, it wasn't hers. She did not see herself in the solution. And like many others, she saw this as a forest fire issue, not a whole state issue.

Which brings me back to the Smokey the Bear comment. We've been really effective in talking about wildfire as a forest fire issue. And when I meet communities throughout the state that people will say, you know, I don't live in a forest, it's not my problem, it's not going to happen here. And look at La.

I mean, the fires in Los Angeles are not in a forest. Finding blame with others is always easier until it touches us personally. And as humans, we're not easily motivated. And wildfire is one of those issues that are chronic.

That reminds me of preparing advance directives, estate planning and documents we hope will never be necessary until there's literally a fire under our feet and we can't push it off to tomorrow. So what's missing in all of this? And to me it's really urgency and shared responsibility.

As a society, we've always had difficult paying for fire services, but in justifying that funding, we've promoted a narrative that professionals will come and save us and they do a fantastic job when they have the capacity and when we're not stretched beyond belief.

But we as residents of this state need to prepare our homes for a situation where under critical fire weather conditions, especially on a red flag warning day where there's wind, we understand that fire services are focused on evacuation and helping those in most need.

And we can relax because our homes are in good condition and can weather the exposures. That doesn't mean that funding the fire service is unnecessary. That's not my point at all. But response might look different from what we've been expecting. Expecting.

I've been all over the fires in Los Angeles and looking at surviving homes and I saw very few where people had actually prepared and addressed this issue and thought about it. So what do we need to do in this moment? You know, much has changed in the last five years.

We're in a room here and I run with the circle regularly where our vocabulary is increasing. We can talk about home hardening and sort of understand and have a visual image of what that might be.

But most People don't see these actions infecting them until they receive an insurance cancellation, a wildfire comes close, or they want to sell or buy a home and they suddenly have this bad news that they're going to have to do some disclosures and they're going to have to think about it.

You know, AB38, which produced both the wildfire mitigation program as well as those disclosures, has really been, I think, a bellwether. And it's going to take some time for people to really get that. I still don't see a real estate agent marketing home hardening or, or marketing defensible space actions.

Instead, they still talk about the remodeled kitchen and the floors and the view and not really talking about the important actions that have taken place. We do market cars based on safety, but we don't market our homes in that way.

I think we really have to supercharge and deploy more trusted messengers to help people understand that there are actions within their control that can be taken in the home protection space. I think we have a lot to learn from public health programs. This really is not much different from a public health program when you think about it.

So in short and in summary here, I'm going to recommend a variety of things. First, the insurance space is super complicated and it's going to take a while for people to start to see both the discounts and the variety of incentive programs that are trying to be deployed to come into action.

And you know, I like all the efforts that we've put towards trying to help and demonstrate and pilot those that are most vulnerable. But I think we're not thinking at scale yet. And one of the ways I think we could think at scale is with tax incentives.

They've been super helpful in the energy retrofit space and they have moved us into the private sector where we've been able to have different trusted partners, not just those that show up in a badge and a suit to help out. And it also gets us out of CEQA and NEPA analysis and prevailing wage.

And I think it can help us start to get to scale. So that is, you know, an interesting conversation to have. It's complicated with our federal partners right now.

Excuse me, I'm going to ask you to repeat when you repeat what you just said, starting with tax measures.

So I think tax incentives and tax credits have been really helpful like they have been in the energy retrofit space. And we should start to think about that in this space so that you could, when you file your taxes, you can get Some level of credit for the work that has taken place.

Got it.

I know we want to think about it at all or nothing, but I think most families have to stage the work, they have to anticipate it, they have to budget for it. And we can't expect someone to come into compliance overnight. There are ways that you can start.

There are small actions that can get you in the door, that can dip your toe in the water, and then there are bigger actions. I mean, I don't know. I mean, when I went to replace my roof on my home, you know, it was a $50,000 tax Bill, right? That is not something that I could pay overnight.

I actually had to refinance my home to be able to pay for that. I mean, that's not a trivial task. So if we say that this home is not prepared because the roof is out of date, that doesn't mean that the homeowner should be walked away from.

The homeowner should be rewarded to do the things that they can within their budget, but to plan and stage for those bigger tasks. I work with lots of community partners that try and get at scale with all this stuff. So my second point is that we need stable and continuous funding for partners to do educational programs.

Living in a feast or famine environment doesn't create durability or a trusted partner. If you're having someone get out of the truck each time, that's different. And you don't have any sense of reliability. You can't expose your most vulnerable issues to someone if you don't trust them. And they can't help you if you don't trust them.

So, you know, we know in all of our large programs that we need coordination, we need monitoring, we need grant management, we need project development, we need capacity development, we need implementation funding. And what you're seeing is our partners are basically trying to pull all that together in this feast or famine environment.

And it's very hard to Fund. I think that the clearinghouse approach has been slightly more effective than the competitive funding model. And so I would encourage us to think about that, especially once we've established a trusted funding.

What do you mean by that?

So in other words, so right now you can apply for individual competitive funding projects. And you are what? You know, we look at shovel ready projects. Well, who has the capacity to be shovel ready all the time?

And who has the capacity to wind that program down and then have enough funding to be able to then move on to the next project? If they don't have any base funding, they're in this episodic effort.

And you see most nonprofits burn their Executive directors out, burn their staff out, because they don't have the base capacity funding to stay in business because they're chasing the money and don't have enough time to finish the project before they have to chase the next project.

So having block grants and clearinghouse funding, where you've established with community groups that they are good and that they have some reliability of base funding, what do.

You mean by Clearing House funding?

So you can see, like through the North Coast Resource Partnership and other organizations where we're doing funding out to groups would then turn around and deliver that to their local partners. So you're not always competing at the state level. You're working within your own geographic area.

And that's something that we talked about with the Wildfire Force Resilience Task Force and other organizations. I just want to underscore that I think it's effective. And then my third comment. So first was tax incentives. Second was stable and continuous funding. My third one is really around workforce development. It takes a really unique skill base to talk about fire.

To talk about what?

Fire and to talk about how it affects homes, how it behaves and what mitigations really matter. And how do we work in the wildland, how do we work at the local scale? And in all of my effort, I stand up before communities and I talk about this issue to thousands almost every month.

I'll say that fear never motivates action, really, but opportunity does. And most do not know how to recognize their vulnerabilities in their own homes or in their own landscapes. And it's often very simple things that they can take action over to make a difference. So fire adaptation actually takes adaptation.

We can't keep living the way we've lived and expect a different outcome. So this is not an action for others to take. It's an action for everyone.

Just like we've learned to use seat belts and have car seats and sneeze into our elbows and rather than our hands, we can change behaviors to protect the those that we most care about. And we can align programs to support those actions.

I'm going to close by saying often in the prescribed fire statement, there's this comment about how do we burn a million acres with prescribed fire? And the answer has been with a million landowners one acre at a time. How do we harden a million homes one home at a time?

We can do this if we can get people to understand that it's within their self interest and it's within their capacity to do, and that these are things that are achievable, that are going to reap rewards financially through time.

And so thank you very much for letting me share a few of my thoughts, and I appreciate the very robust and enjoyable conversation today, and I look forward to the remaining speakers.

Mr. Hawks from the Wildfire Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety.

Just waiting for the PowerPoint to come up, but good afternoon now, Chair Bennett and Committee Members.

I'm sorry, do you have copies of that PowerPoint for us?

I do not.

Yes, you do. I do.

This one's coming up. Okay. I'm Steve Hawks, senior Director for wildfire at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, or IBHS.

Across three decades at CAL FIRE, from responding to wildfires, a firefighter, to overseeing the department's defensible space, home hardening and damage inspection programs, to the last couple years of deep dive into the research around wildfire mitigation at ivhs, I've seen firsthand the devastating impacts of wildfires. IVHS is a nonprofit organization funded by the insurance and reinsurance industry.

Industry. Sorry, it's not advancing. Funded by the insurance and reinsurance industry. On how severe weather and wildfires impact homes and businesses. We identify their vulnerabilities and the mitigation actions that home and business owners can take to meaningfully reduce the risk to their homes, making them more survivable and insurable.

In the wildfire lane, our primary focus is on significantly narrowing the path that a fire can take to become an urban conflagration. Next slide, please. There we go. So once a wildfire starts under the conditions of drought and very strong wind, that fire will produce embers.

And the embers can travel very long distances and are generally the first order of the fire's entry into the community. Igniting fires around structures, igniting the structures themselves, or as referenced earlier, fires inside of the structure. And then those fires can develop and spread within the community.

Meanwhile, the flaming front of the main body of the fire will encroach upon the outer edge of the community, creating direct flame contact and radiant heat exposure to those structures on that outer band, potentially igniting those structures.

Once that begins to occur, that fire really transitions from being a vegetation fire, a wildland fire, to an urban fire and burning urban fuels. One more time, burning urban fuels, and that is homes, fences, landscaping, materials, anything that's ignitable and combustible can ignite and burn, leading to the spread of the fire within the community.