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

This one's down. Good morning. I'd like to call this hearing to order. It's the assembly budget sub four on climate crisis, resources, energy, and transportation. It's my pleasure to welcome the experts from around the state that have joined us today for the home hardening oversight hearing.

Look forward to hearing your testimony and all of us sort of engaging in a collaborative conversation about this urgent issue that we have in California. As I've said many times, California has really reached a tipping point. Property losses soaring, home insurance costs rising, electricity companies, therefore, spending more and more on wildfire mitigation issues, and therefore, electric rates going up.

So as we're sitting here with a affordability crisis overall, this is one of the key drivers of this affordability crisis, which is higher electricity rates and therefore higher rents, etcetera, for people to pay for their insurance. Home hardening is an essential part of this.

And today, I hope we can all learn from each other about how and what we need to do at this inflection point moment to really move the needle, forward for California. So I wanna thank all of our panelists, for taking the time to come up, for your overall work in terms of doing this, and, trying to ensure that we have the most efficient spending of these limited resources, that we have.

After each panel, there'll be an opportunity for the members, the vast members of the subcommittee that are here to ask questions. And at the end of the hearing, we'll take public comment for members of the public who wish to provide public comment. Please limit your testimony to the subject of our hearing.

Each member of the public will have one minute to speak. And would any members like to make any other comments? Oh, I don't see any of them here. We'll go ahead and move on. So we're gonna move to our first panel, which is what is home hardening and defensible space.

Will ask this panelist to introduce themselves as they begin to talk. And we have mister Hawkes and mister Metzger, if you'll come on up. And for both of you, my one request is the audio in this room is not great. Unless you're close to the microphone, people can't hear you. And I even I even stay too far away.

So what people traditionally do is think they've pulled the microphone close enough because they have it. They have their paper in front of them. They have the microphone. My suggestion, move the microphone to the side of your paper. And that way, you can get the microphone closer to your mouse, which is what I have to do.

I can't move my microphone, so I have to lean forward to do that. You don't have to lean forward. You just have to have that microphone off to the side or however you decide to do that to get it close.

Because we do, I think a lot of people are tuning in to this hearing and there will be a lot of people, I think, over time that will, from the archives, pull this up because this issue is going to get more and more marketing, more and more public interest as we go forward. So we wanna make sure we have a good recording.

And so with that, I'd like to ask mister Hawkes to start us off.

Yeah. Good morning, and and chair Bennett and honorable committee members. I'm Steve Hawkes, senior director for wildfire at the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety. IBHS is a nonprofit organization funded by the insurance industry, and the investments that they make into our facility, which is, a one of a kind facility in the world where we can test full scale structures against the perils of wind, rain, hail, and wildfire.

And their continued investment enable us to do the research that we do in looking at how embers, flames, and radiant heat, exploit vulnerabilities in the area that surrounds the house and the house itself leading to large structure loss.

And for, our work, we're really primarily focused on that large loss fire, that conflagration scenario where the the fire starts, enters into a community, because of a set of conditions that exist at that time. Typically, that's drought stricken fuels where the fire can burn through those fuels very easily and very rapidly. And then wind, a very strong wind on that particular day that is the most, biggest factor that leads to extreme fire behavior and then the ignition of a fire.

And once the ignition happens, the wind can push the flames and the embers very far in advance of the the fire and and cause it to enter into the community very quickly. And, so let's look at how a, start becomes a conflagration.

So once the wildfire starts, that fire is producing, flames, a radiant heat, and embers. And those embers travel very long distances out far in front of the main front and inundate into the community. And when they land on a structure or pass in through of, like, a void space or vent inside the structure, they can directly lead to the ignition of the home. They can also land around the structure igniting that item, which can transfer the fire to the home.

As you see on, this fire in Fort McMurray in Canada, that large intense fire did not directly enter enter into the community.

It's the embers that landed in front of those homes leading to some ignitions. That is the how the fire entered into the community in that particular location. So as the fire begins to burn, those embers travel out, but also the flaming front will eventually abut the outer edge of the community and the flames and the radiant heat from the flaming front can lead to the ignition of homes as well.

And whether it's embers or the flames, once homes begin to ignite and ignite simultaneously or in short order, they can start to outpace the suppression efforts of the fire suppression resources that are on scene and can lead to the uncontrolled spread of the fire within the community. And at that point, the fire fundamentally changes from a wildland fire where it starts in the wildland fuels, to an urban fire.

And in that context, an urban fire is, one that burns urban fuel. So the fuels are anything that's combustible that can ignite and lead to the spread of the fire between structures and within the community. So once homes begin to ignite in the community, there's a set of an another set of factors that really determine how severe the destruction can become. And the first one is the most critical. It's it's the structure density or the separation between homes and other structures.

At tight spacing, it's very easy for one home that it has has ignited to ignite the next home in line, particularly when that home is downwind. And then, the next item is connected fuels or it's a set of combustible items, that the fire can ignite one and then travel to the next and to the next and eventually reach the home and ignite the home. And and that's that urban fuels. That's anything that's combustible from fences to the homes, shed wood mulch, ornamental vegetation and so forth.

And the last one is the materials that the home is made out of itself.

The more vulnerable the components, the easier it is for the home to be ignited by the fire that surrounds, that home. And so we really put a lot of emphasis on preventing the ignition of the home. I found that during my time at CAL FIRE, managing the damage inspection program that once a home ignites, it's greater than 90% chance, almost really 94% chance that it will be a complete loss. And and so we need to prevent the ignition, from in the first place.

And this really is the core crux of this problem is we have homes that are easily ignitable under the high intensity wildfires.

And we were able to do a deployment, to the Eaton And Palisades fires, within a few days of the start of the fires. And, we, worked alongside the Underwriters Laboratory Research Institute and, very closely with CAL FIRE's damage inspections teams. And we were able to do a full scale, analysis of both fires. And our key findings, we had many findings, but the key findings from our, deployment and subsequent analysis were that structure separation is really one of the biggest factors.

The as I mentioned earlier, when structures are really close to each other, it's very easy for one to ignite the next one in line.

And that is not only a finding that we had from this, post fire analysis, but also when we deployed to the Lahaina fire. It's a finding that UC Berkeley recently had as well in their report and, NIST and others. And then, next, we have that area that surrounds the house, that that five foot space immediately around the house and in other attachments. And when there is greater than 25% fuel coverage, and that could be anything. Again, those combustible items, fences, Mulch, plants, other combustible things.

When there's greater than 25% fuel coverage in that space, that there is at least a 90% chance that the structure will have some sort of damage or be lost. And we also found that when you have greater fuel coverage in there, that the work that's done out further from the house in the next defensible space zone, that five to 30 foot space, that that work is less meaningful because of the amount of fuel coverage that's in zone zero.

So that first space of all the space that surrounds the home is absolutely the most critical I've seen on all the wildfire deployments that I've been on as well as my time as a firefighter in the field that combustible items can and do ignite and lead to the ignition of homes. And lastly, when you start stacking mitigation actions the siding windows and eaves, we found that you you you start increasing the likelihood of of no damage compared to just doing one action.

So that's really what, our wildfire prepared home program is based on is a set of actions that meaningfully reduce the risk.

So that leads to our, our program that we call wildfire prepared, and there's two lanes to it. The first lane is wildfire prepared home, which is parcel centric, and it looks at reducing the ignition to a individual structure from the flames, the radiant heat, and the embers produced by things that are burning around that structure.

And then the next lane is what we call the wildfire prepared neighborhood, and it scales the home program and across an entire neighborhood to significantly reduce ignitions and giving this fire suppression resources a a much greater chance at being successful at defending the community even under the extreme conditions. And so let's take a a little, dive into the wildfire prepared home, standard. And we look at two distinct areas, on the property.

The first is the area that's immediately out from the the home out to a 100 feet, but really paying particular attention to that first five feet, as I mentioned, is just so critical in, defending homes. And we look at structure density and where we can create better structure separation. When that's possible, we we look to do that.

We also look at those connected fuels and create good separation between all those items, not just looking at the plants, but between all those combustible items on the property to break that pathway for the fire to travel out away from the home directly to the home itself. And then we look at the home to make it more resilient through the use of better building materials, whether it's a rep retrofit or building a brand new home.

And and so underneath, our wildfire prepared home program, we have two levels, wildfire prepared, which is the essential items that a homeowner needs to take in order to reduce their risk from wildfire, and it focuses on the exposure from embers.

And it looks at those components of the structure and immediate surroundings that are most vulnerable from the ember exposure, like the roof, gutters, vents, the bottom six inches of the wall where it meets up with the ground where debris and embers can accumulate, and then that particularly that first five feet out from the walls again.

And then the second level is what we call the plus or enhanced level, and it provides enhanced protection to the home from the other, vulnerabilities to the flames and the radiant heat and looks at those other components like siding and windows and doors and eaves and and so forth and provides the maximum level of protection.

The What's that second one called? The one that's prepared?

Prepared home, which is the essential

Right.

Is the base level, and then the plus level is enhanced. It's enhanced protection. Enhanced? Enhanced. Oh, enhanced.

Yeah. Sorry.

That's it. Enhanced. We're roasting ants?

So, yeah, it it provides that maximum level of protection is really what you want to do when building a brand new structure is building to that enhanced level. For retrofit, start with the the essentials of looking at the ember protection first. And so you can see, the features of both on the bottom are the the requirements for the, essential, the the the base level, and then the plus level, on the right hand side of the screen.

And so recently, we just expanded the wildfire prepared program across 10 additional states and now in 14 states. And what that has done is given me an opportunity to work with a lot of different folks across those 14 different states in seeing how they're doing wildfire mitigation.

And I can unequivocally say say that California, with its funding and programs is far and away ahead of the other states. And, so getting to the the last couple slides, it the wildfire is a different threat. We can reduce the risk at an individual parcel level, which reduces the ignition potential of that parcel, but we need to do it at scale across entire communities to significantly reduce the risk community wide.

And when we can do that, we can reduce the likelihood of a fire transitioning into a conflagration. And as we look at the community KB Home Dixon Trail in Escondido, it received the wildfire prepared neighborhood designation, the first in the nation.

And all these 64 homes, you can see, are in a very high fire hazard severity area. But all of them have been built to that plus or enhanced level. And all of them have insurance in the admitted market at about $1,400. And then CDI and the National Association of Insurance Commissioners created a a landmark study that looked at the the Eaton and Palisades fires, and the study compared traditional building to the IBHS wildfire prepared home and home plus levels.

And it was a good test to see whether stronger building standards can reduce risk and support long term insurability.

The study found that rebuilding to the IBHS wildfire prepared, home standard can reduce average annual loss roughly 30 to 35%, and these results align with real world research that us and other renowned research organizations conduct. And a key finding in that is that wildfire risk spreads across neighborhoods, not just individual properties. And this reinforces that community wide mitigation delivers greater risk reduction benefits than isolated action. And as I turn to my last slide, we must scale wildfire risk reduction at the home and neighborhood level.

As I mentioned earlier that California is far ahead of other states in its wildfire preparedness efforts, and yet more is needed.

Risk reduction must be standardized and verified to ensure it delivers real, measurable results like the wildfire prepared home program does. Grant funding provides important support, but predictable and sustainable funding is needed to ensure continuity and effectiveness to meet the state's long term resilience

goals.

Without affordable financing like outlined in Senate bill 894, many property owners will be unable to make the investments needed to reduce their wildfire risk. And lastly, effective wildfire mitigation requires building and defensible space codes that are rooted in sound science and validated by real world field performance. By scaling these efforts, California can have safer and more wildfire resilient communities. Thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate that. We've got always have the challenge of we want great presentations by the panelists, and we want plenty of time for questions and back and forth dialogue. And so we basically have only this item, which is different than normal for us, but we still, are going to have to be efficient, I think, to get through, everything. So appreciate the PowerPoint slide.

Appreciate the presentations. We're gonna go to mister Metzger, and then we'll we'll, open it up for some questions. And then, I hope you'll be able to stay around because I think we'll have more questions as we go forward.

Absolutely.

Mister Metzger from, LAO's office.

Thank you, chair, and, thank you assembly member Connolly. Our office was asked to provide key issues for legislative consideration ahead of the three subsequent panels that will dive deeper into home hardening and some defensible space as well. We prepared a brief handout, so we will use that to guide our remarks today.

And I think it's a good time for me to interrupt you because they just need me to go vote in elections, and I'll be back in about ninety seconds. Alright. Okay.

Great. Thank you. So on page one of the handout, we mentioned that defensible space oh, I'm sorry. Apologies.

Alright. Thank you, Chair, and apologies for starting without you. I'll resume with page one of our handout. We mentioned that defensible space and home hardening are important wildfire mitigation strategies, not only to protect the individual home, but also to reduce the risk of wildfire spreading throughout a community. We also provide a list of some ways that state and local governments are promoting the implementation of these efforts, all of which you will hear about in subsequent panels.

These include adopting regulations and requirements, like the zone zero regulations that are currently under consideration, providing defensible space inspections, educating homeowners on best practices and potential options to achieve compliance, and undertaking some enforcement actions, and also providing homeowners with assistance and incentives to both achieve and maintain defensible space and harden homes. On page two of the handout, we provide a brief summary of some of the state funded home hardening and defensible space efforts.

These efforts include the California Wildfire Mitigation Program, a program primarily focused on home hardening, but with some funding for defensible space as well, which received 25,000,000 general funds in 2020-2021 and 13,000,000 in Prop4 in 2025-2026. And the Governor's budget Proposes an additional 26,000,000 from Prop4 for this program.

Also, Cal Fire's dispensable space inspection program has received about 20,000,000 general funds since 2020-20221 for inspectors to reach 750,000 parcels in the state responsibility area once every three years.

The budget proposes 6,000,000 in general fund ongoing to make this program permanent as well as more Prop 4 funding for a program that will provide direct financial assistance to homeowners for defensible space mitigation. Cal Fire and UC Agriculture and Natural Resources also received about $16,000,000 to help with local wildfire mitigation planning and provide tools and workshops that educate local communities on best practices. And we'll have additional comments about some of the governor's budget proposals later in the hearing.

On the last page, we have some key issues for legislative consideration and this is where I'll spend most of my time. Again, these are not all of the issues for legislative considerations, but ones that we felt were important to highlight.

First, what is the appropriate role of the state indefensible space and home hardening efforts? As we described on the second page of the handout, the state has invested tens of millions of dollars in these efforts and significant additional funding will be available soon. However, state funding is limited. So what can the state do on an ongoing basis, and how might that change over time? One example might be defensible space inspections.

We think it makes sense, of course, for the state to perform these routine inspections. The CalFire seems to be performing this role well and is proposing some resources to make this program permanent. But how will this role evolve, and what are the appropriate roles and responsibilities of others such as homeowners in this space? Second, how is intergovernmental coordination helping the state achieve a greater impact in home hardening and defensible space?

There are a number of opportunities for different levels of government to coordinate their efforts and achieve efficiencies, while also limiting potential conflicts or redundancies in their efforts. How are governments taking advantage of those, opportunities? And if not, why not?

Third, which of the current home hardening efforts have been shown to be most cost effective, and how can they be scaled up statewide? There are a wide range of home hardening efforts that a homeowner can undertake, some some that are lower cost and others that are quite expensive.

Recent data from the California wildfire mitigation program shows that the average cost of ignition resistant construction for the homes in that program, is around $50,000 for the participating counties.

Current state funding in that program and elsewhere cannot fully cover the cost of this construction for many homes that are in high fire hazard severity zones. So what can the state do to identify those efforts that are most cost effective, use state funding in some cases to incentivize or prioritize particular investments, and in the end, achieve home hardening at scale. Fourth, how are the state's home hardening and defensible space programs designed? Who do they serve? And how is the state measuring the program's success?

We just talked about the wildfire mitigation program, which starts as a pilot program for a few counties and could be expanded soon to include additional counties or even statewide. Is that program currently designed to serve those additional counties or the entire state? Or might the administration and the legislature consider modifying the program in some way? Are the populations currently served by the program, the ones that should be served, or might there be a different way to target funding?

And how is the state determining whether these efforts are ultimately successful? What are the measurable outcomes we should use to evaluate the program in the short and long term?

Fifth, how can these efforts be sustained by homeowners and others in the long term? Funding is one key component of this question, but other incentives and assistance might be necessary. What benefit do homeowners receive, of course, aside from wildfire resilience from doing these activities? How do own homeowners access to and cost of insurance change, for example?

As the subcommittee hears from subsequent panels about the need for funding and other resources to implement these efforts, it's important to consider how to make these efforts sustainable. Sixth, are there impediments to the successful implementation of home hardening and defensible space efforts, and how might they be addressed? Are there ways in which varied local efforts could be better supported by state government? Do we have the information we need about the cost effectiveness of different home hardening efforts, or is there analysis and data that are missing?

What regulatory and or statutory changes might be contemplated to help facilitate implementation of these efforts?

And finally, how often should the administration and the legislature be looking at these programs to evaluate, for example, their effectiveness and their efficiency? While it is possible to do some real time evaluation according to a set of, you know, certain criteria, the legislature might consider if and when it would like to broadly consider these efforts to ensure that the state's overall strategy is working. And this also raises the question of what criteria should be used for these evaluations.

The choice of criteria is not only meant to answer specific questions, but to inform subsequent actions that makes that can make state efforts efforts work better. So what are those criteria?

How difficult are they to measure and to what end might they be used? And happy to answer any questions.

Thank you very much. Appreciate that concise but very focused presentation. This is when in looking at this hearing today, this is when I wanted to make these overall comments because we've now had an identification from the Insurance Association about the institute, about what home hardening is and why it's so important that we do it and then the appropriate overall sort of questions about the state's role and how we use our resources.

So, I want to offer this vision that I have because I'd like to have everybody comment on it, pros and cons and any other modifications you can think of. But this is how I'm seeing this at this point in time, and that is we have crossed a tipping point, a tipping point that we have to do something about if we want to keep California's economy sustainable.

Literally, we cannot have $35,000,000,000 losses every couple of years as whole communities burn down. If because we've passed this tipping point, we are it's incumbent upon us to come up with something better than the status quo so far. The status quo did not protect Palisades. It did not protect Eden. It did not protect, the paradise either, in terms of that.

And those have all happened in the last nine years. We did not used to have fire personnel tell me we never used to lose whole communities. Right? Except back in the old days when the whole city would burn down because of no building codes. But we're not used to losing whole communities.

We're now losing whole communities. So I think it's very clear that we need wholesale reevaluation of what we're doing and greater emphasis on moving the needle in terms of stopping losses. So, with that being the case, we have limited resources in the State of California. You've identified an average number of $50,000 for home hardening. That's what we're learning at least in in the pilots, etcetera.

But we have to approach the public and our own thinking about this, with recognizing that we're there's an error of limits. The we're not gonna be able to convince all everybody in the public that owns a home in a high fire risk area or to spend $50,000 just won't happen. And the state will not have anywhere near the resources to be able to do that. So what can we do to incentivize people and start to take the steps that are there?

So with the insurance association, I want to ask these questions.

And that is if you had to identify the various programs, I appreciate that you broke it it down between two programs and one of them is prepared and the other one is enhanced. The prepared program can be implemented, and it seems like those are pretty cost-effective programs. Is that what do you, do you guys have any numbers in terms of the cost effectiveness of these programs and the cost of the programs for the first level?

Because that's it seems to me where we ought to focus. We're gonna try to get everybody to do all of the initial things and how much gain do we get?

What is the value? You talked about 25% to 35%, I think. Could you can you just talk about that for just a brief moment? And, again, we have to keep everything brief.

Absolutely. And so we're really looking at retrofitting of structures, and that is our wildfire prepared, home or essential, as we call it, level that really focuses on those embers. And the embers are could travel very long distances and ignite homes. So, we have had the opportunity to work with a nonprofit organization called GER 3, in the Palisades or I'm sorry, the Altadena area post Eden fire.

And they are targeting retrofitting of structures that survived the Eden fire to our wildfire prepared home standard. And they were able to do that in, with $15,000 as the average cost, for the retrofit. So a very, a much affordable, but, you know, the homeowners are gonna need some financial assistance with that. They cannot still, as wholesale as we need across entire communities, do this on their own.

Great. Good. And and and taking people so number one, you've come up with a number for us. 15,000 for the prepared level. Right?

And I assume some of this prepared work could be done by individual homeowners who are resourceful, putting in the one eighth inch screening, removing the vegetation that is right there, making sure that the earth to the bottom of the wall, that six inches that you referred to. And I it's funny. You're saying it's six inches. I'd heard 18 inches. But it's six inches that you need to be most focused on?

That's what our research has told us is that bottom six inches is the most vulnerable space.

And do you see people are people able to put sheet metal or something up there onto wood siding and have that be sufficient?

There's various ways that that can be retrofitted like cement fiber board, sheet metal as you mentioned. And GER3 is, was able to accomplish that.

And so that's also something people could do fairly inexpensively on their own if they were if they were so inclined.

Yes. Many of these items are DIY type projects.

Great. Good. And if I could jump over to the LAO's office, in terms of cost effective approaches, intergovernmental coordination, we have the pilot program out there. And in the big picture, the pilot program is was created to try to teach us what we need to learn going statewide. But right now, we have a proposal in front of us to expand the pilot program in terms of the funding for the pilot program.

But I question whether to what end? Where do how does that enhance everybody in the state? I mean, we've hardened a 167 homes. We spent a lot of money, you know, to do that. If we put expand this program and we harden 500 homes, we have 2,000,000 homes that that are out there, more than 2,000,000 homes probably that need it.

I just I don't see that. So in your references to intergovernmental coordination and cost-effective scalable approaches, do does the LAO's office think we should think broader than the pilot program at this point in time?

Brian Metzger, LAO. I don't think we've thought about particular expansions beyond that program, but we have looked at the specific data that is associated with that program.

And I think what we would note is that, as we mentioned in our comments, there is a need to think about how the funding is being targeted and whether the program in its current form is scalable given that there are some components of this program that are specific to the availability of things like federal funding through the hazard mitigation grant program. There's also some data about who in the certain income levels are receiving this funding.

And you can kinda see that there is a significant amount of funding that's going towards folks that are, of lower income.

But as you expand the program and as you have limited resources, how much of it should be going to that population? I think there are different ways the program could be structured in order to make it more scalable, and it's gonna be really about legislative priorities as to how we frame it or craft it.

Thank you very much. And any other members before we go to panel two? Alrighty. Thank you.

If you'll stick around, we're gonna be I know I have some more questions for insurance as we move forward. And I go to panel two, and that's community wildfire risk reduction, increasing coordination between homeowners, local partners, and the state.

Thank you. And the same reminder, we'd like to have you closer than I usually am to the microphone.

Thank you, Chair, and good to see you, members. Good morning. My name is Eric Horne. I'm California Director of Megafire Action, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing policy solutions to end the megafire crisis. At the center of our work in California and what I'm excited to talk about today is our theory of change about how California should approach mass adoption of home hardening.

As the Chair mentioned, more than 2 million homes sit in California's highest fire hazard areas, most built before modern wildfire construction standards existed. We know that defensible space and home hardening work, yet adoption remains far too low. If the state's goal is to mitigate risk to even half of those homes in the highest hazard areas, that would be about a million homes, and we have to be honest about what the scale and cost of that would be.

At at the cost per home that the CWMP is currently averaging, $49,000, that would cost $49 billion to reach every one of those million homes. Now nobody is suggesting that we scale up this grant program to reach a million homes, but I say that to just get a real sobering picture of the math here that we have a huge upfront capital problem that we need to be creative about addressing. Now, that starts with recognizing that structure-level mitigation is different from landscape-level resilience.

Unlike prescribed fire or fuel breaks where government is the one planning and executing these projects with large public investments, home hardening depends on millions of homeowners, at least hundreds of thousands, making individual purchasing decisions on their own properties, purchasing decisions about landscaping, vents, windows, decks, gutters, and more. And in this way, home hardening is really more of a product. It's something that people need to buy, and so it's a market adoption challenge that the state faces.

And if it's a market adoption challenge, then what we can look to is the customer journey, which is what product designers call, you know, the process through which somebody makes a purchasing decision. And that means that there's a couple of steps in that customer journey. First, homeowners need to be aware that the product exists, and they need to trust that it works. Second, they need to be able to afford the product.

There needs to be options to help them, and there needs to be incentives to take-- to make an investment decision. Third, the process needs to be easy to navigate. We cannot expect hundreds of thousands of homeowners to do home hardening given how currently complicated it is. You have to call a gutters guy, a windows guy, a landscaper. We need to make it easier, and we need to have trusted scopes of work that are based on predictable certifications that are respected by the government and industry.

Finally, we all know that individual homes taking action is great, but what we really need is community hardening, and so we need to think about network effects. Network effects with this product is clear. The product becomes more valuable the more people do it. So incentives that help homeowners work with their neighbors to do community hardening is gonna be key.

Right now, we're seeing breakdown at every single step of this customer journey, and what I would posit is that the role of the state is not to pay for every single homeowner to do this work, but to help target interventions at every phase of that customer journey to make this easier and more affordable for homeowners at scale.

I'm gonna stop you and say that's music to my ears, and so I'm gonna ask you to repeat it so that people know this is probably one of the most important things you're gonna say. That the role of the state is to intervene-- yeah.

The role of the state is not to pay for 1 million homeowners to do home hardening. That would be financially unthinkable. The role of the state is to target high-leverage interventions at every single point in the customer journey to make home hardening adoption easy, appealing, and affordable for as many Californians as possible. And in our research, in order to better understand where the customer journey is breaking down, we did some really targeted polling in the highest fire-risk areas in California across different landscapes and we found that even among homeowners living in these high-risk areas, only 39% right now said they're likely to do this work in the next couple of years.

What that tells me is that at the top of the customer journey, we have an education and consumer confidence problem, and because homeowners need to believe that something is effective before they buy it, we need to do more education here. The good news is that amongst homeowners that believe home hardening will be effective, that number rises to 61% that wanna do this work in the future. So education is-- it's possible to change attitudes here.

For those that are interested in home hardening, and we would refer to that as customers that are further along the customer journey, the biggest barrier to doing this work right now is decisively cost. Fifty percent of homeowners chose expense as being the biggest issue standing between them and doing this work, even amongst those that are really motivated, and that's regardless of income level.

What we also found diving deeper on the affordability issue is that the median willingness to pay out of pocket for home hardening amongst those that are motivated to do the work is only $5,000. That'll get you defensible space. Maybe it'll get you mesh fencing for the vents, but it's not gonna get you much else.

However, median willingness to borrow through a hypothetical state-backed low-interest loan program is more like 8 to $10,000, and that's a lot closer to the IBHS Wildfire Prepared Home Base standard, and it starts to lead us to a key takeaway. The state cannot realistically expect the majority of Californians to shell out 40 or $50,000 to achieve the highest resilient standard.

But with financing and a lower resilient standard that's still effective, like Wildfire Prepared Home, combined with lower cost incentives, like the insurance premium discounts that are already in the market as well as perhaps some smaller level grants or tax incentives, I believe there is a fiscally responsible and sustainable path to the state helping hundreds of thousands of homeowners achieve home hardening. We have examples of how this model can work in other sectors, like residential solar and energy efficiency.

The state has programs where they use loan loss reserves to leverage private capital to help homeowners finance solar and energy efficiency upgrades that uses a 12 to 1 leverage ratio right now. $12 of private investment can be leveraged with $1 in investment in a loan loss reserve.

And the beauty about loan financing is that when the loan cycle is over, if we have a five-year loan cycle and a $15,000 loan, that capital is available again to be lent out again at the end of five years, and so it creates an opportunity for more sustainable approaches to helping homeowners. We want to understand whether homeowners would actually be interested in such a program, and so we asked in a scenario where you have a $15,000 retrofit cost, would homeowners like to do financing, pay out of pocket, or could they still not afford to do the work regardless?

And we found that 40% of homeowners would use a low-interest loan, 22% of homeowners would pay out of pocket, 38% of homeowners still feel that they could not do this work even with low interest financial assistance. And that points us towards what I think might be the way forward here, which is a blended capital model.

Loans and financing can dramatically expand the scale of upfront capital assistance for middle-income homeowners, while programs like the CWMP might still be able to cover the entire cost for the lowest income homeowners but also perhaps partial costs for middle-income homeowners. If homeowners are interested in doing the work but are still facing that affordability issue, turning resilience into an affordable monthly payment will help, but perhaps a couple extra grand in grant funding might be what pushes them over the edge and helps them do this work.

Ultimately, we need to recognize that the Legislature's priority here is to bend down the risk curve across the state and to maximize the number of homes, the amount of homeowners that can do this work, and to help Californians. We're asking a lot of Californians and asking them to do this work.

We need to give them every opportunity and every resource that we can, whether they're low-income or middle-income, and we need to evaluate our programs based on their capacity to scale to meet that need. Again, we might need to do this with a million homes, and we need to be rigorous in assessing the return on investment of these programs for the taxpayer.

If we want to materially reduce wildfire losses over the next decade, we need an approach that's designed not for hundreds of homes at a time, but for millions of homes. And I think that we can get there, I think that we have the tools in place with different industries, and I think the ambition and the desire on behalf of the Legislature and the government and private stakeholders is there. I believe that we can take a knockout swing at this problem. So thank you for your time.

Thank you very much. That's a great introduction to sort of this prop challenge that we have, which is how do we scale up with limited resources the whole home hardening program? And the fact that you've identified Megafire Action's goal is to find a way to incentivize mass adoptions of home hardening. That's the fundamental challenge that we have in front of us. What are the changes that we have to make so that we can get to mass adoption?

Because if we don't have mass adoption, we don't move the needle in terms of home insurance costs, we don't move in the needle in terms of the number of losses that we're going to have, et cetera. So really appreciate that. I'd like to go on to Mr. Watson.

Good morning. Can you hear me?

Okay. My name is Stephen Watson. I'm the Executive Director of Ventura Regional Fire Safe Council. We are a 501[c][3] nonprofit based in Ventura County that prepares residents and communities for wildfire. I'll give a quick example. I have my timer set because I know we have a packed agenda and we wanna get to questions, but I'll give a very quick example of some of the work that we do.

Yeah.

Home hardening assessments is one of our main ones where we go out and provide free, no-cost assessments to community members. Home retrofits we do with limited funding. None of that is currently coming from state funding, and I will touch a little bit upon the work that we've done there as well as the education and outreach.

One example that we just had last week was we went to a neighborhood in Piru--a little over 2,000 residents, low-income, mostly Spanish speaking--and gave them a bunch of free services, defensible space. We worked on 35 properties.

You'll note that none of this was state funded, so don't worry about the boxes of large pizza. It's not coming from state funding or tax dollars. This is just a note to say of some of the work that we are doing on the local level on a week-to-week basis. So, moving on very quickly, because I wanna make sure we have time for discussion, our Home Assessment Program, we go out to individual properties.

We do a report around their home. We walk with them and provide them recommendations of what they can do to make their home and structure safer from wildfire. And then with that, we have a Resident Grant Program, which this is the home retrofits where we target those community members who need it most and provide limited funding to do those home retrofit work.

And over the years--you may not be able to read this right now--but over the years, we've done just about 50 homes so far, and it ranges anywhere from 2,500 to 5,000 per home. This year, we are planning to do 50 total, and the difference is that this approach this year is neighborhood approach.

And we heard from Eric, we heard from Steve that a neighborhood approach is the most important and crucial component to this problem. We need the community to be involved and engaged, and I'll touch a little bit more on how I believe that we can do that and how we have effectively leveraged our communities. So this is one of the things that I'll mention. Also, currently not funded by the state. We get a lot of our funding from Edison foundation dollars.

This one is our Firewise USA Community funding request. For those of you who don't know, Firewise USA Community is a nationally recognized program through NFPA. CAL FIRE also approves their three-year action plans. And what happens is we gather neighborhoods and communities together, anywhere from eight to 2,500 dwelling units that form a group. They do a risk assessment.

We walk them through the process. They do an action plan of the items they're gonna do in year one. For example, it might be 25% of the homes in year one will have one eighth or one sixteenth mesh screening on the properties. Year two, 50%. Year three, 75%.

And with this funding request, which we have limited funding for, we allow these communities once recognized to send in a request of up to 1,000 to 2,000 for them to do some of this work that's approved. Some of the examples that I think are most relevant and pertinent which is scalability is what we've talked about. One example, we got mesh for 40 homes. That was one of their requests. It was a 1,000 bucks, and they found their own installation.

They worked together as a community to lower the contract rates by having one contractor come in and do the installation on a number of properties. We saw the same thing happen; 28 homes for $986. We had a contractor come in and do the retrofits for all of those vents and screens on those homes.

So I believe that leveraging these Firewise communities is extremely important to reducing the cost and scalability, and it also points toward cultural change, social pressure, and getting communities involved on a larger scale. Neighbors are talking to each other.

It's also reducing the work that we at the local level have to do because they're doing it themselves. They're forming groups. They're working together. Then we have another community asking, how do we do this? We connect them to that first community that did it.

So this is saving time, money, and energy on all levels through this initiative. So next, I'll talk a little bit about the lessons that we've learned through our home retrofit program, and it's a bit different than the other one you'll hear about, the California Wildfire Mitigation Program, because it's smaller dollars and we had to prioritize much differently.

One of the things we noticed is what's talked about individual homes scattered throughout is not effective. We have to look at neighborhood approach. Structure separation distance, which you heard earlier, is a key factor, and if we only have 2,500 per property, we have to look at structures that have more structure separation distance because the real costly retrofits are ones where there is limited structure separation distance.

The other challenge with that is how do we prioritize what communities to make these retrofits in? How do we determine? How do we target? And it's a combination of income, it's a combination of structure separation distance relative to the amount of funding per home that we have, and it's a combination of wildfire risk. And we have mapping models to kind of piece out and target which communities to work in.

One of the biggest challenges, quite frankly, is capacity. We have maybe the-- all the homes that you saw retrofit, we've had one person working about part time as a project manager for that. And so I think funding at a local level-- I know the County Coordinator initiative is a really great step in the right direction to fund local-level initiatives and projects and capacity to do that work.

So next up, I will talk a little bit about what we think the state can do to help out. I was not prideful enough to think that I have all the answers, so I tapped our local wildfire collaborative. I tapped our partners in Santa Barbara, LA County, as well as California Fire Safe Council to answer some of these questions, but what we ultimately believe is that it needs to be a multifaceted approach. Education is a component of it.

We've heard a lot about that. However, I will say that awareness is not enough. It needs to be cultural change. And what I mean by that is-- an example: friends don't let friends drive drunk. You know, these marketing campaigns that really touch an emotional human connection, I think, is one of the keys to cultural change.

And maybe the state--and I don't know how feasible it is--can fund a marketing campaign, a cultural digital campaign that is changing people's view of wildfire. One of the things we noticed at a local level is that it's starting to become a little bit with this Zone Zero of people being frustrated with the state, like the people versus the state, and what we're getting away from is we need a common enemy, and the common enemy is wildfire destruction on neighborhood levels.

And instead of saying, oh, blame the state for Zone Zero, you know, it has to shift that narrative at a local level, and we are-- we do our best to do that, but I think that there needs to be common messaging and understanding both at the state level, the local level, and down to the communities about the, quote, unquote common enemy.

Enforcement, I think, is a component to it that is necessary. Like we've said that no matter what we do, no matter how much is done, there are still gonna be folks that won't make the changes. So there's some level of enforcement that's needed. Incentives-- I believe that we have seen a lot of low-income communities and households that just genuinely cannot do the work.

So I think for certain income levels, there may be-- there may need to be some help, whether that's a form of rebates, whether that's the loans. I'd like to see a tighter connection between insurance, insurability. We have a lot of boots-on-the-ground feedback that people are disappointed with the insurance discounts they're getting with the work that they're doing.

We see anywhere from half a percent. In very rare instances, we see 10%, but it's not enough of an incentive at the moment, and I think part of that is the clarity around what the insurance discounts will be for the homeowners as well. Funding capacity, I mentioned that already. Neighborhood community-focused, I think that's probably the most important thing that we are seeing at a local level.

Say that one again?

Neighborhood community-focused approach and leveraging those communities. We have about 12,000 dwelling units in Ventura County that are Firewise recognized and we can use that. We can run with that and make a lot of change happen. And then Zone Zero, in combination with home hardening, I think we've seen this Zone Zero blow up a little bit, at least in Southern California, and I think, unfortunately, it started to have people neglect or forget or not think about home hardening, and I think it's important to marry those two because home hardening is extremely important.

And a lot of the focus, at least at the local level, has been questions about Zone Zero, confusion about Zone Zero. And so, I know that there are initiatives for a home hardening certification program. I think that's a really great step in the right direction. And I believe that the last thing I'll say is a sense of urgency, I think a greater sense of urgency for this problem, and it's only gonna get worse, so thank you for having me.

Thank you. Appreciate the presentation. Appreciate the efforts, particularly the analysis in terms of what actually works emotionally with people and emotionally with communities. And we have Mr. Brown.

Good morning, Chair Bennett, Assembly members, committee members. I'm not gonna try to repeat the excellent testimony from Eric and Stephen--

Let us know more about who you are.

I absolutely will. My name is Mark Brown. I'm the Executive Officer for Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority. Prior to that, I spent 30 years of my life committed to the Marin County Fire Department where I retired as a Deputy Fire Chief. Fifteen years of that was as an Operation Section Chief on a CAL FIRE incident management team where I was in a command role on some of the state's most devastating fires ranging from the Nuns Fire, Thomas Fire in Ventura, Paradise, the Camp Fire, the August Complex, the North Complex. I've seen all the fires.

I've seen them at an intimate level. My home has been evacuated twice, once from the Nuns, once from the Glass. Glass Fire burned within 200 feet of my home. The closest home destroyed to my house was five doors down, and I've been on-- assigned to a serious incident in every one of the committee members' jurisdictions.

So seeing all that happen really forced me to change my career direction from being in the suppression side of the shop and chasing fire to being on the wildfire mitigation side of the shop and putting energy before fires ever occur. And I also have had the experience of having my insurance not renewed by State Farm and work through the process of getting new insurance. So I've been through that aspect of it. Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority is a 17-member joint powers authority.

If I miss anything, I'm sure Assembly Member Connolly could help me fill in the gaps. We were formed shortly after the North Bay fires. We formed a lessons learned committee where we invited Sonoma County law, fire, and land management agencies down in Marin. We asked them what they were doing before the fires, during the fires, after the fires. We asked them what their challenges were. We asked them what their successes were.

This led to six and a half pages of action items, and not a single entity was charged to make sure that all of these action items occurred, whether it's because wildfire knows no jurisdictional boundaries, but it also spanned all the different disciplines of local government, and that's how Marin Wildfire came about. The idea was that we needed to create a joint powers authority to bring the wildfire mitigation efforts under one umbrella, but you know how government financing works.

If you're gonna increase the budget of one area, if you don't find a new revenue, new source, you decrease the budget in another area. So we have the support of our community to put a little over 10 cents per square foot of property tax for building space. Our budget is now approximately $23 million a year. Sixty percent of our budget goes towards what we call our CORE Program--vegetation management, public education, grants for our residents. 20% goes to our Defensible Space Evaluation Program, very similar to Ventura's with the Firesafe Council. We perform approximately 30,000 inspections a year.

More than 50% of those inspections are with the residents walking with our inspector. And we find that if the resident walks with our inspector, they're 60% more likely to take action. And the last 20% goes back to our member agencies because they know their communities. They know what is needed. Being a lifelong local government employee, I tend to think that local government is where action happens and where the solutions can come about.

One-size-fit-all solutions rarely work. We, as the local government of Marin County-- we're-- we are the trusted information source for our communities, but we're also able to prioritize. As has been mentioned, we can't treat every single property. At the local level, we're able to use both our subject matter expertise but also modeling so that we can prioritize where our efforts-- where they are going to take the-- provide the most impact.

We haven't been selected for any of the home hardening or DSpace grants that were offered at the state level largely due to Marin's demographics, but fortunately, we had a resident base that was ruling the tax themselves, and we have a very aggressive grant program that we've been averaging a little over 2.55 million a year towards our grant program when we have treated hundreds of homes.

We have found that even people with financial resources that Stephen was talking about and Eric, some people need a little bit of a nudge to get that work done and we've experimented with different grant ranges to see where that sweet spot is. Right now, we're at 2,500 as our grant award, and that seems to be that sweet spot. But what we're finding is for every dollar Marin Wildfire puts towards a grant, on average, our residents are putting 6 to $7 towards that work.

So that grant program has turned into a massive incentivization tool. It's gotten so much more work done. We also feel public education is so vitally important. The days of the fire department showing up and saying, you need to do this because we told you so, doesn't work. I think we found that out through the Board of Forestry conversations when it comes to Zone Zero.

So that's why we put together over a million dollars a year towards our public education so that we can bring the community along with us. We've also created what we call our Ember Ready Program, and that is funded in partnership with the Marin Community Foundation. The Ember Ready Program is to help our residents navigate becoming home-hardened and Zone Zero because it is a complex space.

I've had personal friends who have been told they need to harden their homes and have Zone Zero in order to have their insurance. They had no clue what to do. They're like-- so Ember Ready is designed to walk the resident through the process. We're in partnership with our landscaping and construction industry, including fencing contractors to create pro-- services that are centered around those services. We feel it's gonna create an economic and profit center for those industries, and I use Fireside as an example.

Fireside started in Marin. We were their first customer. They-- we helped fund the development of their software for inspection. Now they are in 13 states and bringing tax revenue back into Marin, and we-- that's what we feel of what's gonna happen with the Ember Ready Program.

It's gonna create an economic center that's gonna create revenue that's gonna come right back into Marin. So Marin taxpayer dollars are actually creating more revenue within Marin. And then we're also gonna create some supply chains within that. So we're really excited about the Ember Ready Program, but we do believe--and sometimes I take a hit from our residents--we do believe that home harding and the defensible space is the resident's responsibility.

And we ask them quite often, stop looking at the wildlands. Turn around, look at your house, and we take responsibility for what you need to do. However, not everybody has the financial resources to do it. That's where grant programs come in, and I really am looking towards low-interest loans.

And I gotta wonder if that perhaps the insurance industry will want to protect their investment they've made with their customers by providing some of their customers low-interest loans. I think that's one possibility, support from the state for low-interest loans, and then we have some awesome local banks in Marin that we're gonna start partnering with and see if they're gonna be willing to put the low-interest loans. And what Stephen was talking about is that loan revenue, that investment can be reinvested.

We've had multiple residents that have been taken off the California FAIR Plan because of some of the grants they received, the work they've been-- that they've completed, and they've gone from a $10,000 plus a year residential insurance cost down to a $3,000 a year. So they're seeing a return on their investment within five to seven years, and they're going, you know what? That was worth it for me. And I wanna echo everything. I am not gonna repeat what these gentlemen said because I felt like we wrote our testimonies together. And with that, I'll end right now.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. This is really a valuable panel. Basically, we have three representatives here. One, Megafire thinking about this holistically for the whole state. What do we have to do to get mass adoptions? Then we have a representative from Ventura County that is talking about implementing the program without the super value of what Marin has, which is an actual local-funded source. That's-- at least that I'm aware of, it's the only one in the state where we actually have a local funding program going forward.

But we're learning so much from the three of you in terms of you're an organization that is trying to say, how do we move the needle in terms of mass adoption? How, without a lot of funds, can you maximize and what are you learning? And your comments about, you know, it takes cultural change, it takes an emotional change, a connection, when you make the references to if the homeowner walks with the inspector, how much it changes things, those are lessons the state really needs to hear because we operate at a-- you know, it's too often we operate too far away from actually ground level in terms of doing that.

Your identification of $2,500 as a sweet spot, I might offer probably $2,500 as a sweet spot in Marin County. It might be a different dollar amount in other counties as we go forward. So I'm gonna leave part of this. Well, you got something you wanna say?

Yeah, if I might--yeah--say an additional thing, I think another thing that wasn't talked about is workforce development is really important for this as well. So I'll just comment that, and we did a landscaper contractor training down in Ventura County because one of the biggest questions we get asked is who do we go to to do this work? And then the other thing at risk of biting the hand that feeds, and I think the shift is already happening, but shift away from acres treated in response to prevention, I think, is critical as well.

Great. I certainly would join that when you talked about to quit looking at the wildlands and start to turn around. I think the State of California would benefit from focusing a priority on, the closer it is to the home that's gonna be lost, the more important the investment is in terms of moving the needle where we need the needle to be moved.

And I can see why Assembly Member Connolly has been so insistent about trying to create some funding for everybody to make the investment, and I agree wholeheartedly. So I'm gonna end with this part of it, and then I have a couple of specific questions here, but you talked about urgency. The first thing urgency that we need is we need a giant marketing campaign, a giant marketing campaign, and that marketing campaign should be coordinated because, as you said, having common language would be really valuable.

A giant marketing campaign makes no sense if it's a little bit here, a little bit there, and there's no coordination between it, et cetera. So I hope Megafire and Fire Safe Councils and Marin can help us with how do we design that. And that's a charge for the state. That's a charge for CAL FIRE. It's a charge for the California Earthquake Association because they've been empowered or invested with the responsibility to try to come up with some of this.

But we need to have that coordination. So a giant marketing campaign. Second thing is, we have to find a way to do this all efficiently, and that means we have to leverage federal dollars. We have to leverage utility dollars, like you are. We have to try to leverage insurance company dollars, as has been mentioned.

We need to leverage local governments' incentives to try to say, hey, maybe more communities ought to come up with some kind of self-funding program because they know the dollars are gonna be spent right there to make their community safer and lower their specific insurance rates. The grants and loans is a significant part of that and the low-interest rate loans that can generate, you know, the money that comes back.

There are a lot of people that if they were convinced they were going to get a substantial insurance discount would make this investment. And so your comments about little tiny-- you know, less than a percent kind of value, well, that's partially because of the partial investment aspect.

You know, if you only partially harden your home, the insurance companies don't feel like that's gonna get the job done. But we need-- we need two levels. So one level is that initial investment. How much of a savings should that be and how much of a savings should the Insurance Commissioner translate that into in terms of rates? And then so, you know, what is it for prepared and what is it for enhanced?

So in terms of legislation, I think that the-- what is the right legislation that we should focus on? And I think it is to try to pull up a statewide marketing campaign. The coordination of a statewide marketing campaign is future legislation we ought to work on. We ought to then support that marketing campaign with all kinds of incentives, and the incentives would be, you know, all kinds of things.

Perhaps we fund-- or perhaps because we give some kind of funding to CAL FIRE or the Earthquake Authority or somebody, and there's a Zone Zero competition amongst landscapers to try to show you how beautiful Zone Zero could be and how it could be both cost-effective, et cetera. There's just many kinds of things in the incentive side of it, but one of them is that insurance discount, and we need to talk about that clearly.

We have, right now, legislation moving forward that says, we need to publicize that discount more prominently every year when the insurance bills go out so that the public sees, wow, this is the discount I would get if I voluntarily got this certification, and perhaps there's two certifications: voluntarily got to prepared, voluntarily got to enhanced in terms of doing that. So all of this needs to be coordinated. This is not gonna happen in one day.

It's not gonna happen in one year. We need to keep chipping away at this and and trying to pull this together. But this is the first time that we've brought all of the stakeholders together with this panel today. It shouldn't be the last time. We should have lessons learned next year and what should we do and so that we try to focus the best legislation and the-- all the people that are receiving the dollars, et cetera, that are funded start to really work together and use the lessons learned from each other as we go forward.

So like to just-- if you have anything else you want to say about how the state can support local governments, like to hear that, and I'd also like to hear what reforms you would like to see in terms of that from your position. So I'm just gonna sweep through the three of you for a quick 60 seconds and then I'll turn it over to Assembly Member-- well, I'll turn it over to Assembly Member Connolly right now.

Well, I was even gonna-- yeah, maybe just kind of add to your question because I think it's a great one. But in addition to local governments' coordination with homeowners themselves, organizations such as yours and Ventura and Marin, how can the state play a better role in--

Why don't we start we start with just to go in the same order, Mega Fire. Great. What do you see specifically and and fairly briefly? Two minutes or less.

Yeah. So specifically, I wanna note that local governments are the most trusted partner for this work. 50% of respondents said that their local fire department was the most trusted support, source of information on home hardening. So if we're gonna do a campaign, let's make sure that they are they are in the lead, that we are giving them materials.

I would say that the core function for the state when we think about helping local governments and we think about helping homeowners scalably is this this concept in business called customer acquisition cost.

What is what is the actual cost to the state that is the lowest possible to get the lowest amount of people? If it's a $15,000 loan with a loan loss reserve, that might mean that the state only needs $1,250 for that one home. Add to that a $2,000 grant, that's $3,000 to acquire that homeowner doing home hardening with the public benefit that's entailed. You said, insurance premium discounts. I think about this with solar.

Solar folks do low interest loans, and then they have energy savings that at least partially offset their their solar monthly payments and and usually give them an additional cash flow. The cash flow in this scenario is insurance premium discounts. Now some of them are quite low. Other insurers, that are really forward leaning are giving premium discounts upwards of 30%.

30% off of your insurance savings, as Mark said, that is a significant free cash flow every year that can if you have an upfront capital mechanism like a low interest loan, it can finance that.

So low tax credits, low dollar grants, low interest financing, ways that we can give the the state the lowest cost to taxpayer to reach the most amount of homes. That would be my recommendation.

Great. Thank you. Mr. Welch?

For me, I I've set most of my recommendations already. I'm not local government, but on that topic itself, I think assembly member, you mentioned it, that alignment in messaging is kind of crucial and critical and working at a local level in combination with the state for this marketing campaign and initiative. And also, I love our Ventura County Fire Department. We work very closely with them, but, they're not marketing geniuses. So I think we need to, leverage real marketing firms.

And I don't wanna speak ill of CAL FIRE either, but I think, bringing in marketing experts to do this type of work. The last thing I'll say is I I think that local flexibility is important, but I think local reinvention is wasteful. So that's another topic of alignment and having something as set standard that we then can take and flex a little bit to apply at a local level?

I certainly that that stimulates a thought and that is to literally create competitions out there amongst communities to get this done and people who compete really well qualify for more grant funding, etcetera. But, you know, that that that that came to my mind here. But to set standards and let the local governments get there, But but to say, hey. You need to get x percentage done in terms of these things and and try to have a local government there.

And to the extent possible, this this fine line between enforcement, you know, you talked about enforcement to to some extent, but this voluntary aspect of it, we need to keep people's eyes focused on actually getting it done and not the heavy hand of this is government coming in and making us because that you immediately get that reaction.

And then I find it I'm finding it so much more difficult to try to sell people on this. I'm going this This isn't about, you know, government heavy. This is about you doing something that's really cost effective for you. Because in the long run, if your house doesn't burn, you save a lot of money. Right?

And if you also get lower insurance, if you don't get kicked on the the fair plan, right? That's a tremendous savings as as as you just talked about. So we have people that are going to get no insurance or be kicked onto the fair plan if they don't get after this. Trying to sell people on that avoidance, you know, is is harder, but that's part of what we have to put in the program. And you, for the final two minutes, before we go to panel three.

Really quick points. I want to I want to pile on to the marketing. Firefighters are not good marketers. Our Amber Ready program, the first name we gave it was zone zero in a box. And people are going, what are you talking about?

That means nothing to us. So we hired a marketing firm and actually came up with our new name, member Reddy. So I'm on board with having a consistent marketing program. Number two, what can the state do, to I I think and and I'm biased because I'm I'm I'm from the fortunate position of having a well funded program. But so many of the other counties are just looking to the state for money, and that's what they're gonna take action with.

I think the state needs to incentivize local fundraising, sustainable fundraising because grants go away. You need to have programs that are gonna last after the grant stream goes away from the state. And then finally, when it comes to insurance and decreasing costs, I really think we need to focus on availability first. And once we tackle insurance availability problem, then the cost will go down. And I'll use my example again.

We actually increased availability because we got people off the California fare plan and on into an admitted carrier. That's what decreased their costs. Interesting insight. Availability first and then talk about discounts and stuff. Hope you three gentlemen will stay because I have a feeling you'll be called back up here towards the end from time to time.

This has been very helpful. Alright?

Thank you, sir.

Alright. We're gonna go to panel three. And defensible space evaluation of current programs and proposed investments. And I hope that none of the firefighters in the room are listening have taken offense at the marketing comments that were made, but zone zero in a box is probably will will probably not win the marketing award for the year. Right?

Alright. And we'll start with Mr. Morgan, and then we'll go to Ms. Rolfe.

Good morning, Chair Bennett and Members of the subcommittee. My name is John Morgan. I'm the Assistant Deputy Director of Community Wildfire Planning and Risk Reduction for CAL FIRE. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this morning. CAL FIRE California continues to face historically destructive wildfires with 15 of the 20 most destructive fires occurring in the past decade.

Data from our damage inspection teams shows that homes lacking compliant defensible space are six times more likely to be damaged or destroyed during a wildfire. Yet despite the state's goal to inspect approximately 250 homes annually, CAL FIRE's annual inspections could be reduced nearly in half if one time funding from the wildfire and forest resiliency, initiative expires.

In 2019, AB 38 created 21 permanent forestry technician positions to meet the increased workload of providing defensible space inspections and documentation of compliance during real estate transactions. This was a great initiative. We need to focus more.

In fiscal years 2020, '21, and twenty twenty one, twenty two, CAL FIRE received funding from the wildfire and forest resiliency multiyear funding package to provide three permanent and 28 temporary help forestry technicians to augment and enhance defensible space, inspection efforts in the state responsibility area. However, these were one time funding allocations and must be used before 06/30/2027.

Therefore, Cal Fire is requesting 6,100,000 and from general fund and 31 positions in fiscal year twenty twenty six twenty seven with 5,600,000 ongoing to stabilize the state's defensible space inspection program. This also supports the ongoing workload created by AB 38 in 2019. This proposal transitions temporary roles to permanent staffing to ensure California can meet its long term wildfire mitigation and defensible space compliance obligations and also documentation of home hardening mitigations on existing structures.

Strengthening the defensible space inspection program enhances our state's wildfire resilience. Permanent staffing ensures community continuous inspections, public education, and when necessary enforcement through public resource code 4291. It also supports anticipated future workload under the governor's executive order n dash 18 dash 25. That's a zone zero implementation. Permanent positions also also strengthen operational stability by improving retention and recruitment, including it's also helped keep institutional knowledge available to our inspectors and increase inspection data quality, which unfortunately is an inherent challenge to temporary employee staffing.

The proposal represents a critical investment in the state's core wildfire preparedness strategy. Stabilizing the defensible space workforce is essential for reducing property loss, supporting community resilience, and fulfilling our statutory requirements. Additionally, there are long term benefits such as avoided suppression costs, reduced disaster imp impacts, improved insurance availability and accessibility, and most importantly, enhanced public safety. Thank you for your time today. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you very much. We'll have some questions, specifically about this request, after we've after we move through the program. Our next presentation is state finance budget analyst.

Yeah. Julian Rolfe with the Department of Finance. We have nothing to add at this time, but happy to answer questions.

Great.

Brian Metzger, LAO. On the proposed ongoing funding for CAL FIRE's defensible space program, we find that it has merit as a way of continuing to perform these inspections once every three years. But it could be modified given given the budget condition. For example, at least some of the positions in the proposal are funded with greenhouse gas reduction fund monies out of the existing allocation for Cal Fire. And so the legislature could consider whether additional positions could be funded with GGRF in lieu of the general fund.

Alternatively, the legislature could consider other alternative funding sources such as a reinstated SRA fee or a fee with a similar structure, where the primary recipients of fire prevention services are paying for the cost of those. And also, the legislature could consider, again, whether to approve this on an ongoing basis or on a one term basis, particularly given that forthcoming regulations, likely will increase how much time is required, at least initially, for each of these inspections, and that may require revisiting the program structure and staffing.

Right. Great. Thank thank you very much. So a number of questions here. And first one, how does Cal Fire envision local assistance defensible space grant program operating?

Is it gonna be like the California wildfire mitigation and grant program?

Gotcha. Yes. So, CAL FIRE's envision, that this program would operate in, in a similar way. CAL FIRE will launch a defensible space financial assistance program this summer in 2026 using fire safe councils and similar agencies to deliver grant funds, using with a focus on ember resistance zone, that five for zone zero. Also, treatments in vulnerable wildfire prone communities.

The program is distinct from the wildfire mitigation grant program as it focuses on vegetation and amber resistant work, rather than a majority of home hardening. These two items, however, are closely knit and must happen, in conjunction over time. The, approximately $25,000,000 available and focused in, Southern California, Cal Fire expects to assist roughly 2,125 homes while providing technical support to ensure consistent community focused implementation.

2,125 homes?

3,125.

3,125 homes.

That's correct. When we look at that, average cost over.

So the program will only do will will do assistance for 3,125 homes. What's what's the average grant you're thinking of providing?

I can do some math real quick to find out, but I don't have the number off the top of my head.

Why don't you do that math while we check with some other people? Department of finance, will the defensible space inspector positions be funded out of the $200,000,000 in tier three GGRF, for the resilience or from the state operations pot?

Julianne Rolfe again from the Department of Finance. So it's not coming out of the 200,000,000. It's coming out of the SRA feedback fill, which is under the tier one category.

Okay. Thank you. And for the state fire marshal, I don't know if state fire marshal is here, can answer this question, but I'm very curious about the Zone 0 has quite a bit of flexibility built into it for local governments. Will the local governments have to get approval of the flexibility that they policies that they come up with from CAL FIRE, or will that just be unilateral decision making on their part?

Yeah. Well, first, good morning, Chair Bennett, members of the committee. Daniel Berlant, California State Fire Marshall. We've been working very closely with the California, Board of Forestry and Fire Protection as they draft, those regulations, providing feedback and assistance. But to answer your question, we are not in the position to approve local, jurisdiction ordinances.

However, through, your legislation over the past years, we have very much built up a assistance program providing, model defensible space ordinances as an example. Tools, resources, to help them not only manage a program, but also with the enforcement, techniques. And so all that to say, no.

We're not gonna be in the business of, determining what local ordinances look like for that first five feet ember resistant zone, but we will absolutely be supporting them, in their effort, as they work, through the the board's, flexibility, for local enforcement. Do you see it as possible that we create some kind of minimum standards that they can't go below if they want to qualify for some of our grant incentive programs?

Yeah. I think that's a great question. The Board of Forestry's regulation really is the minimum standard. A local jurisdiction, as is already in effect. There are a number of, jurisdictions that have a, defensible space, zone zero.

Back to marketing, zone zero means nothing. And in reality, this regulation, as drafted today does allow, certain, low flammability or low combustible, items. But, the Board of Forestry's regulation really is the minimum standard, and there will likely be best practices that go beyond it, in in additional support. And especially in the boards right now phased in approach, those two will be items that, can can help a local jurisdiction be, a bit more restrictive or, increase the pace.

Now your question and, let me get to it about the grants.

We will absolutely be looking specifically, based on legislation. Our wildfire Reg grants will receive prioritization for jurisdictions that, submit their defensible space inspections to us as part of our qualified entity program.

So if they decide to go below the minimum that's identified there, You you would just They're not allowed.

The way the state, structure works in in, public resources code, the regulations that the board sets is the minimum standard. So they cannot go below. But the board has really worked, and I don't wanna speak, though, Aye, a little bit in here, On behalf of them, the board has really worked to make flexibility interpretations at the local level.

But just to be clear, they cannot go below the regulation itself, but they can through their again, interpretation of of a little bit of gray area, ensure that it meets the local needs, the local flexibilities. And again, I'm a little bit stepping in the Board of Forestry's term.

Okay. Our job will be to enforce it, not to set the reg. Sure.

Alright. So there there is, essentially, a minimum standard that they can't come up with local regulations. Thinking a lot of pressure saying, we don't like this zone zero. We want it to be one foot instead of five feet or whatever. They they they can't go below these standards of

Oh That's correct. Legislation passed by by you all, a number of years ago sets an ember resistance zone, sets a minimum standard. A local jurisdiction, just like the building code, can be more restrictive based on local needs but cannot be less restricted. Thank you. Mister Morgan, were you able to do the math?

Yes.

Sorry for the delay. John Morgan with CAL FIRE. That's, estimate of $8,000 per home.

$8,000 spent on the defensible space of a particular home?

Correct.

And will that be do you anticipate that that's going to be restricted to low income people? Is it what's what's what what kind of qualifications do you have there?

Right. So using the financial assistance program parameters very similar to the wildfire mitigation grant program in those counties, however, that are specified.

So this would only be in the counties that are specified right now?

Right now.

The local defensible space program would also be just limited to those five counties.

I'm sorry. I could not hear you.

The low I'm sorry. Pimping the violating my own principle here. Right? They the the local defensible, local assistance defensible space grant program is going to be restricted to those five counties. It's correct?

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah. Let me jump in here really quick. When I heard you ask though initially, the defensible space proposal that's in front of you is part of the budget that, chief Morgan mentioned is for the entire state responsibility area. The grant program, the financial assistance program is specific based on, legislation to the eight Southern California counties.

The eight Southern California counties. Not the counties that are in the That is correct.

Not the area. Very separate from the

Got it.

The prioritization of the Right. Home Harning Joint Powers Authority.

And do you anticipate that that's going to be community focused like the grant program or will it be sort of any homes that apply?

What I'll say is we're taking the feedback from this hearing to help us as we Great. Fine tune the grant guidelines, and we'll work with your staff to make sure you have a copy of that. Great.

Thank you very much. Assemblymember, other questions? Alrighty. Great. Hey.

Thank you. Appreciate it. We're gonna go to panel four, and then we're gonna come back to sort of a a lot of questions that we have here at the end. So we have a much larger panel. The future of home hardening evaluation of California wildfire mitigation grant program and the proposed twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven investments.

And this is one of the more robust aspects of today's conversation that we're looking forward to. So with that, we'll start with state fire marshal.

Alright. Well, again, good morning, chair Bennett, members of the committee, Danny Burland, California state fire marshal. First, let me, thank you for hosting us today. This is wildfire preparedness week. We are in day four of of this, week where we acknowledge and recognize our preparedness as a fire service, but also the importance of homeowners, being prepared.

And so your timing for this hearing, is impeccable. But on behalf of, chief, Joe Tyler, thank you for the opportunity to speak, not only on California's approach to wildfire preparedness, but on how critical, home hardening is, as part of that strategy. It was mentioned, earlier by, mister Hawkes, that, the the unfortunate statistic that if a home catches on fire, it has an over 90% likelihood that it is gonna be completely destroyed. And so that sobering stat tells us that simply put, we cannot let the homes ignite in the first place. But doing so, is is where our challenge, lies.

But in response to the dramatic increase of destructive wildfires, the state has adopted a comprehensive layered strategy that's focused not only on emergency response, but on resilience. The California's Wildfire and Forest Resilience, Task Force has outlined this strategy, which recognizes a simple but powerful truth that we're not gonna prevent every wildfire, but we can prepare our communities. And we can increase the pace and scale of of our forest health and our landscape level, treatments.

Now as a focus in on on our community wildfire preparedness strategy, it's really built on, three interconnected elements. And I'll go through each of these here, in a moment.

But those, those elements include partial level home hardening, defensible space, and neighborhood level mitigations. You cannot just do one of them. We have to have all three of them to truly, truly get to it in a a place where the neighborhood is prepared and a a resilient community.

At the parcel level, at the home level, this is where we focus on home hardening, ensuring that the individual structure itself is built or it's retrofitted to to resist the ignitions from embers, from radiant heat, as well as direct flame contact. You heard from my colleague Steve Hawkes from IBHS that a lot of research has been done that consistently shows that a majority of homes destroyed in wildfires continue to occur from the embers.

Those embers that often travel miles ahead of the front of the fire. And so really simple science based upgrades such as ember resistant vents, a class a roof, non combustible siding like, stucco or fiber, cement, tempered glass windows, all of this, can dramatically increase, a home's, survivability. That second, though, circle, of community preparedness is defensible space.

You heard a little bit from chief Morgan a a bit ago, but diving in defensible space is the creation or the maintenance of a buffer zone between the home and the vegetation. This includes removing overgrown vegetation, flammable vegetation, dead or dying vegetation, and in particular, looking at that first five feet.

I I left your comments that we're bad at marketing. Zone zero means nothing, and that is not the intent. In fact, you can see from this picture here, this house has beautiful plants. They have greenery. They have color.

But really reducing the combustible items in that first five feet, is critical. And defensible space not only reduces fire intensity near the structure, but more importantly for us, it provides our firefighters a place, to more safely and effectively, defend the property during a wildfire. The last, mitigation is really, the neighborhood scale. As was already mentioned by several panels to you already, wildfire preparedness does not stop at the property line.

So programs like Firewise Communities, bring residents together to take collective action, addressing shared risks, whether that's roadway access, evacuation planning, fuel breaks around their community, vegetation management, fuel reduction, or even maintaining green space.

You can see from this image here, you know, a golf course, an open nature preserve that's maintained all ad neighborhood scale mitigations. And we know from our experiences, but also from the science, that isolated efforts or like I I I often like to say, random acts of mitigation, they're not enough.

Preparedness must be built at scale across the entire neighborhood. Now within the broader framework, cal of California's Home Hardening strategy serves really as a cornerstone. It's it's really guided in three primary pillars, technical support, financial assistance, and incentives.

You've talked about some of those, today, and so I'll just reinforce from our perspective of the state where we see our role. The first pillar is technical support, ensuring that homeowners, builders, local governments, all have access to clear, accountable guidance. Now for nearly twenty years here in California, we have championed a building code standard, that ensures new homes built, are resistant to the ignition of wildfires. And I'm very proud, you have the home builders, here in the room as well.

Many stakeholders, ensure that this code, protects, homes of the future. But Cal Fire and our partners continue to provide, through this technical support, defensible space inspections, like the proposal that that, was in front of you, home hardening assessments, educational resources, all of which are grounded in the latest fire science.

And so we're we're continuing to work and and we'll continue our efforts, to standardize best practices. I'm I talked about the model ordinance, really helping make sure that local governments have the flexibility to meet their local needs but are using standardized science based efforts and best practices.

And and in that effort, we continue to expand training for contractors and builders, so that they can consistently apply home heartening principles. This is really about turning knowledge, into action, making it easier for Californians to understand, what needs to be done and and how to do it.

Now the second pillar, you heard from Eric, from, Mega Wildfire. A lot of really important work, needing to continue to take place in the financial assistance, space. Now for us, we recognize that there is a cost barrier for many households. Retrofitting a home can be expensive. And without support, those communities, especially those that are most at risk, the most vulnerable Californians, may not be able to afford these upgrades.

Now it's already been, talked about, but I'll just bring it up once again, and my colleagues here will expand on it. But following legislation in in 2021, by a former assembly member that is here in the room, Assembly member Wood, CAL FIRE and Cal OES joined a joint powers agreement to form the California Wildfire Mitigation Authority.

And again, while I'll let my colleagues expand upon the project, this has really been an important effort for us to learn the barriers of how do we create at neighborhood scale a cost share program with vulnerable Californians for investments of measures like vents, upgrades, to, dual pane windows or even, ignition, resistance siding. But in this program, we have been prioritizing as the legislation requires high risk, low income, and disadvantaged communities, to ensure that preparedness is not only equitable, but that it's inclusive.

Now in addition, California, Cal Fire's, wildfire prevention grant program has provided hundreds of millions of dollars, to additional programs that that, are critical in strengthening the protection of our, communities.

I don't wanna get ahead of myself, but very much in the next couple days, you'll likely see us roll out, $70,000,000, that you all have already, appropriated to us, for this program for various fire prevention, projects. But lastly, the third pillar in where we see, our role at the state, is incentives.

Making sure that we're aligning with economic signals, with public safety goals so that homeowners, when they see the a a clear financial benefit, to home hardening, we know, as was already stated, that adoption rates increase, that the collective risk decreases. Now one example of this has been, California's, insurance commissioner and his safer from wildfires framework. That insurance framework provides discounts for those who perform wildfire mitigation, work.

Now there was a lot of discussion about is that enough, but it is one step in the right direction of incentivizing, rewarding, this work. But I wanna give you one more example. There was it was referenced just a little bit ago, by by mister Hawkes. But another amazing example is home builder, Katie Holmes. They have been using wildfire preparedness and home hardening for their newest, sub, home developments in San Diego and, El Dorado County.

The safety focused branding, is resonated with buyers. In fire prone California, they've been able to position these homes in a way that not only reduce wildfire risk, but buy down insurance concerns by those buyers. And it has helped drive early demand, with significant share of those homes already being sold or shortly after the launch. And so that itself was was a success. Incentivizing, actually helped the the marketplace, in San Diego.

But together, these three pillars, create a system that not only informs, but it supports residents. But it also, more importantly, motivates a sustainable, action. Now assembly member, I know you know because you are just as passionate as I am and our team is. You know, the challenge is real. You know, the the roughly and and you used, you know, 2,000,000 homes, in in high risk areas.

I expanded out to all 4,000,000 that are in the wildland urban interface. 90% of them were not built to the current codes that we have today. And so our challenge of, of how do we get all of these homes retrofitted or how do we support them? How do we give them the tools, the incentives, that is is not necessarily insurmountable. We have to remain focused on all of the above approach.

Home hardy must be paired with defensible space. It has to be done at the neighborhood scale. And I and I really have to emphasize, your investments have already been essential and will continue to be essential in the work that we're doing. But we have to continue as you heard from the panels before me to expand up, these efforts to ensure that we are able to sustain this work, over time. So in closing, California's approach to wildfire preparedness is proactive.

It's science driven. It's community centered. By integrating home hardening, defensible space, and neighborhood level action, and by supporting these efforts through technical assistance, financial, resources, and incentives, we are shifting from a model of reaction to one of resilience. And so, we are not just protecting homes, we're protecting communities. We are protecting economies and we're protecting lives. So once again, assembly member and and, committee, thank you for your time. At the end, I look forward to any questions you have.

We really appreciate your enthusiasm and patience for this work also. I I want you if you don't have this answer now, but it can you tell us what the average cost has been for the homes that have been hardened with the with the CWMP program?

Yeah. It's on it's on it's on average about $50,000. And it's really important to note that based on that pilot program, and I don't wanna steal the thunder from my colleague, so she can kick me here because she's gonna expand on it. So this is just a good segue. That that project was program was looking at a cost benefit to see how much we could get done based on the biggest bang for the buck. But again, my colleague here to my right, she's definitely gonna expand on that.

You're on.

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Identify yourself.

Yeah. Assembly Members, Chair, thank you very much for having me here today. My name is Robin Fenig, and I'm the Deputy Director for Recovery at Cal OES. And I'm also still the acting state hazard mitigation officer, overseeing FEMA's hazard mitigation program, which consists of grants and planning technical assistance, in California. Through AB 38, the legislature tasked the CWMP, Joint Powers Authority, with funding pilot programs or projects that provide neighborhood or community wide benefits against wildfire.

The framing was clear. As my colleague says, don't fund random acts of mitigation. And I really like that framing because it really does get at the nature of tackling things at the neighborhood, or community scale risk buy down approach, and specifically in high risk, and socially vulnerable neighborhoods. Chief Reliance and my respective teams work together to support these communities to tackle challenges and capture best practices. The CWMP JPA is not the subrecipient for FEMA or AB 38 grants.

Naming the local entities as subrecipients allows us to understand the barriers to accessing and managing grants, while also allowing each program to adapt to the unique needs of their specific communities. We are doing this in face in the face of a very restrictive federal, federal environment, which includes I I think as the pre read included with the agenda, you know, a very long programmatic review, very long implementation and approval timelines. To say it short, FEMA money is not quick money.

Yet to date, Cal OES and our local partners have completed over 160 wildfire projects in our grant programs, bringing in just about 50,000,000 in federal funding. Up until AB 38 was passed, these projects largely funded education and outreach, wildfire early warning systems, hazardous fuels reduction in defensible space.

But we knew an expansion of the wildfire investment was coming. Our 58 county hazard mitigation plans have over 500 individual mitigation actions targeted at reducing community risk to wildfires. And so right now, Cal OES has 116 active projects, leveraging over 460,000,000 in federal dollars and another 95 wildfire projects under review of FEMA for another $577,000,000 in federal funds. That's across our entire wildfire grant portfolio.

I say that because when you include the non federal match, that investment by our local communities, that's well over $1,200,000,000 in wildfire risk resilience through the FEMA programs.

And that includes $480,000,000 of total investment in community hardening across the state, which is $360,000,000 of home hardening work that will be accomplished outside of the CWMP, largely in FEMA review right now. And so we do we must get this right. The CWMP obviously portfolio, but it's a really important one because it really set the stage for the state to to really understand, is it possible to leverage federal grant funding, so that we can scale this work?

And when we start up, when we started with this work, we really didn't have an understanding of a lot of the challenges ahead. From our perspective, I think some of the biggest barriers include, the federal review timeline, local capacity, and then contractor and material availability.

FEMA does take its environmental and historic preservation or EHP compliance reviews very seriously, but with limited staffing, FEMA's delays have really caused significant delays in our entire wildfire portfolio. Understand the the scale of what that means when we're looking at $1,200,000,000 in investment across our wildfire portfolio. Of the three pilot communities that are doing physical construction work in the CWMP, it's taken on average six hundred and eighty days or as many as thirteen hundred seventeen days to receive approval from FEMA to start.

Furthermore, FEMA is no longer extending the periods of performance of grants. Our pilot communities have a year or less left to access their FEMA funds.

We've worked with these communities to right size their approach and try to maximize the federal funds, and then turn to the state funded, projects until the end of the liquidation period. In this new landscape of federal hazard mitigation, Cal OES has not received a new approval of a single HMA grant since July 2025 due to the DHS secretary one hundred one hundred thousand review and approval process. I think we've talked about this in other other hearings.

We've also weathered multiple DHS and FEMA shutdowns, and we've even seen litigation involving our grant programs. And in a federal environment where our grants are under a microscope, it puts a lot of pressure on our local partners.

But despite these barriers together with our pilot communities, we've defied the odds and hardened 155 properties. I had to update that number for today. We got another one done. We've got 18 properties underway and 369 properties that have assessments completed waiting for their turn. The first subrecipient to complete work with FEMA funding is sitting next to me.

To date, only CWMP pilot communities have received funds from FEMA to actually Harden homes. Deanna, from North Coast opportunities is one of three people statewide to make that happen. Thus far, our average costs are reasonable and depend on the work done on each parcel. The average cost to establish defensible space is just over $12,000 per parcel on average, and the structural retrofit components for home Hardening about $49,000. Overall, our aggregate benefit cost ratio is 4.45, using FEMA's benefit cost analysis toolkit.

And so that's based on avoided future losses. Obviously, we don't have a lot of wildfires right now in communities that are undertaking these this work. So it's we are, working on refining our methodology to continue assess continue to assess our return on investment and actually have a whole team of, experts, with Cal OES that we've just brought on to with a lot of fire risk experience.

Got some very smart people on staff looking at these, the assessing the success of these, programs and projects across our entire hazard portfolio. Money earmarked by the state for home hardening has also had that additional requirement of supporting socially vulnerable low income areas.

Without cash flow to fund the match, this limited the ability of many property owners to participate. Pilot communities brought this feedback to our joint powers authority board, who voted to cap the matching contributions for low low income participants to increase the uptake of program participation. It was a huge barrier until this happened, but I would also note that residents with more than 120% of area median income, not state median income, but the area median income does not get that level of financial support.

In communities like Lake Shasta and Siskiyou Counties, 120% of of Harabedian income is still less than the state median income. 70% of our participants who've submitted applications fall under the state median income, and 18% about the state median income.

Only 7% of applicants, that's not the people who've actually received funding, but we're we allow everyone in these communities to submit applications. Only 7% of the applicants have, household incomes, above state average. Well, the JPA has been successful in help where we've been really successful in helping the pilot program, entities build capacity and identify best practices to scale, other mitigation grants across wildfire and home hardening, is really going to impact our projects, not just be in the CWMP.

I'd say some of our biggest wins would include completing a home hardening framework, that helps any entity start up a program by walking through various considerations and recommendations based on the pilot, community experience. We used it to properly scope other programs outside of CWMP, and our website has that on online.

We've trained 53 assessors in our pilot communities to address their unique property risk. We've also established the minimum quality standards or the MQS, which are the program guidelines for material selection performance quality. We're also pairing that with photos of actual retrofits that touch what those quality standards are. And that helps not just entities like North Coast Opportunity, but homeowners and contractors, understand how their retrofits thoughtfully align with the state initiatives, codes, requirements, and other things like the IBHS, prepared home standards.

So, with that, I just wanna say thank you for your time today, and I stand by to answer any questions with our other panelists.

I have a number of questions. I'm just curious what what what do we have here in terms of I mean, we we basically we have four more panelists here. If they're all gonna take that kind of time, we're gonna run out of time. So Yeah. Do you guys have much?

Finance, we're just here for questions.

Great. Good. Alright. How about you? What's how late how long is your presentation?

I have about ten minutes.

Great. Well, we're ready. Go ahead. Alright. Then I'll ask questions.

Thanks

for having me. So North Coast Opportunities was founded in 1968.

You're not holding It's not working. You got it. Yeah. You almost have to hold that microphone there to yeah. Push it nice and close too.

Thank you.

Alright. So like I mentioned, my name is Diana Fernway. I'm the Program Manager with North Coast Opportunities. And North Coast Opportunities was formed in 1968, not only as a nonprofit, but a community action agency for both Lake And Mendocino County. What we do is we really focus on building community by providing opportunities for individuals and families to build stability and self reliance through a wide range of programs and community based initiatives.

One of those are home hardening. We also do emergency preparedness, food security, housing support, and early childhood services to name a few. My involvement with NCO and the home hardening program really stems from my desire to help my community. Before coming to NCO, I worked for the Lake County Chamber of Commerce, and I had the opportunity to help during the Valley Fire in 2015, and it really instilled the urge to do more for my community.

NCO has really led the way with emergency preparedness programs such as Listos and Neighborfest and more. So when district supervisor Paiske brought home hardening to NCO, we knew it would be a great fit for our organization as well as our community. Lake County has lost more than 75 70% of our land mass due to wildfires in the last decade. So preventable programs such as the CWMP and community education are really vital for Lake County.

My experience working with the CWMP has really profoundly reshaped how I understand what it truly takes to protect a community. I don't have the years of experience in the the fire world or even the decades like many here. And so experiencing the coordination, the commitment, and really the courage of our first responder and the many teams behind them has really been profound.

If there's one idea that really defines the last four years of developing our local home learning program, it's that we're building the ship as we sail it. Piloting a program of this scale wasn't built overnight, and it wasn't built alone.

Our OES and CalFire teams have been really central to this success. They've provided consistent support, technical guidance, and boots on the ground whenever we needed them. Their partnership has been invaluable. And so by aligning our resources, expertise, and community education, we're already seeing meaningful and measurable progress in our community and a strong foundation to scale this work even further. The CWMP board funded this idea, but together, we're creating a functioning program that can be replicated across the state.

And actually, it's already happening. I can't speak for other CWMP communities, but, personally, our reach has been so much further. Our knowledge and our support hasn't just stayed in our small little community of Lake County. As you can see from the screen, our knowledge and support is spreading all across the state already. At the heart of this work, our our community members, families trying to stay in their homes, maintain their insurance, and feel safe where they live.

This work directly impacts whether communities like Lake County remain viable. That's why continued consistent support matters. This program is working. It's building momentum, and it's strengthening trust and creating lasting resilience.

So I know some of our partners have been curious about our progression of our local program development.

So I put together a very brief timeline highlighting some of our key milestones along with some of the challenges that we've navigated. Like any successful program, we're certainly gonna have some of our hurdles along the way, but I think the most notable was working with FEMA's environmental review and approval process. That being said, we did work through these time delays and used this time intentionally to develop our documents, our solicitations, and our contracts, and really built a strong framework of our policies, procedures, and processes.

So when construction did start, we were allowed to really just focus on refining, streamlining, and scaling up the program. As you can see from the timeline, it did take over a year for us to receive our official nonissue parcel list.

So we knew exactly which homes we could assess and right scopes of work to go out to bid for. Had this federal review timeline been shorter, we would have been able to move into construction much quicker, and we would have had a lot more homes done by now. When we first started construction, you can see that we started a little bit slow, but we stayed consistent. We continued to develop the program processes, and another large key factor was educating our contractors.

Some of these retrofits had never been done before.

We also worked in bringing our planning and building department up to speed. During this time, I was also expanding my team and training them, and we work closely with our amazing OES and CalFire teams on assessment training, Salesforce development, and community outreach and engagement. Also, something to note about these numbers is this construction was done with a very small Lake County team.

So if we were to double or triple in size, we can only imagine the big impact that we really would be able to make. So speaking of homeowners, I won't reiterate a lot of what's already been spoken here today, but for the most part, our homeowners have been incredibly engaging and positive and really interested in these efforts.

But a part of the program, I really didn't anticipate being as complex as it is. When we talk to community members, many don't understand why home hardening works or what it actually involves. They know their insurance company wants it. They know that they wanna feel safer, but they really don't know what is involved, especially when it comes to our ember resistant retrofits.

On top of that, they're getting mixed messages from different insurance companies, certification programs, and contractors, which really leaves homeowners overwhelmed and they're really unsure of what really matters and what they can realistically afford.

That's why programs like this make a real difference, especially for low income, elderly, and disabled residents who don't have the financial or physical means of doing this work themselves. Another key factor in resiliency is our strategy to cluster our hardened homes. In this map, you can see our hardened homes, and they're all within a square mile radius of each other as the crow flies with many being neighbored to each other.

In this map, you can see over 300 of our homeowners who are all within the same vicinity, who are waiting their turn to participate in the program. And we actually have over 400 homeowners on our interested parties list.

But as I continue to add pegs, we couldn't see any more land mass, so I left it at this. We found that during our time in this community, we've not only built trust amongst our partners, but trust amongst our homeowners. And this is why this work has been successful. The trust that we've created in this community has created community buy in and really accelerated the outcomes. These homeowners have not just become our participants, they've become our advocates.

So as I come to the end of my testimony, I just wanted to share some quick current stats. We actually have 61 completed homes as of yesterday. 12 are in active construction. We have 400 homeowners ready to participate with that number growing almost daily. For every dollar invested, saves roughly $6 in avoiding loss.

So our local $20,000,000 investment could result in a savings of a 120,000,000. We have four insurance companies willing to take homeowners off of the fair plan and into standard policies. Each company has their own underwriting policies, but for the most part are willing to recognize these retrofit efforts individually and having the wildfire prepared home certification from IBHS has really accelerated the interest of insurance companies in writing more policies, particularly in this community. So not only is the CWMP creating safer communities, it's creating insurable communities.

And last but not least, we have 900 shovel ready projects ready to go.

The momentum, partner alignment, and framework we've built here together are too important to lose. Now is the time to sustain this effort without gaps or funding interruptions so that we can continue protecting our communities long term. Thank you.

Thank you very much. LAO, a new brief summary.

No specific comments, but here for questions.

Great. Thank you. I know you've given us some thoughts on this. My first question, can you clarify how much FEMA hazard mitigation funding we've actually received to date versus how much we are have expected to come?

Robyn Fennig, I so it's roughly I know that we have just under $50,000,000 in FEMA projects or funding that we've received on completed closed out projects. Of the projects that we have underway, some of them, I think it's like it is a reimbursement program. So of the the 116 active projects, I don't have in front of me the exact dollar expenditures for those of what we have seen expenses for.

But for those 116 active projects, we have the funding has been obligated, and so communities can draw down on that at any time. It's for the 95 projects, for an additional $577,000,000 for which we have not we have not received obligation on, so we cannot draw down on that funding.

Got it. Thank you. If you have more questions, let me know. But two quick specific questions. One, you mentioned that it was $12,000 on average for the defensible space and $49,000 on average.

So put those two together as 61,000 is the cost for doing a property.

Yes. That's correct.

Alright. So it's $61,000 average for each property. I'm sorry. I'm trying to shut this thing off. Okay.

That's helpful. And then is it possible is it possible for us to get the addresses of the properties that have been completed, or is that not possible?

I have to check with our legal team just because we typically don't we don't typically provide property specific information to folks outside of the grant management, side just because there's a lot of PII that can come with that. I can take that back to our Cal OES legal team and follow up.

Trying to find out whether that's legal or not. I mean, bottom line, when corporations get funding from the state, people know who those corporate corporations are, etcetera. We're trying to, I'm trying to find out whether that accountability applies in this situation or not. So if you could, do that. I think we tried to ask for this question if we've asked for this question, but you don't have that answer at this point in time.

Yeah. I'll, so what I can say is that we do have, like, a standardized homeowner application portal, where all of the application all of the homeowners in CWMP and we anticipate expanding that beyond CWMP, have all of their information. We have all of the information. It's just how can we share grant data with folks who aren't part of the grant management process.

Yeah. I've just I've been asked a question more than once by people who would like to know who's receiving the grants, who's not receiving the grants in in terms of doing this. And I just don't know the answer to the question, whether we can legally get that information or not. Let me offer this. This is was a great program when they came up with this program.

Assembly member Woods back in 2018. We didn't have anything else going. And so it was important to see this home heart. That was a recognition that home hardening is important and that we ought to try to figure it out. And so I think it was a wise investment to say, let's let's figure how do you get money from the state?

How do you coordinate people? How do you get contractors in? What kind of cost is it going to be? But that was then and this is now and you've already heard. And so I go to to what end do we keep doing this program and expanding this program?

If we've recognized that it's unsustainable to do $61,000 per home, that's that's not something we can expand statewide. So the pilot program taught us some things. But to what end do we keep expanding this program? We we can't expand this program statewide. We don't have the funding anywhere near the funding to do that.

So to what end? What's the justification? We've been very clear before this hearing, and that's why we I I didn't wanna cut you guys off. I wanted to give you a full opportunity to respond. You know, we're questioning this program.

These communities, as you said, people are people really want this, right? The question is a question of equity. Do we fund a few people yet big? I mean, you know, enthusiastic community. Yeah.

You're bringing in $50,000, $60,000 grants for everybody. That's gonna be an enthusiastic community. But how is that fair to low income people throughout the whole rest of the state that won't get any funding be if we do this? Couldn't we take the precious few dollars we have, and they will get more precious over the next couple of years and come up with some better way to, implement mass home hardening and something that is equitable for low income people.

That's the fundamental question, and I would assure you that there are many Assembly members that have talked to me about this.

This. So this is this program is being questioned hard at this point in time. Not because it's not a great program, but it's that it's sustainability moving forward doesn't nobody's making an argument that seems to be convincing at this point in time. So I really want to to emphasize that as we get ready to go into sort of our overall questions.

But, if we could have, all of the panelists, if you could move up to the front row because we're gonna let these people continue to fact is if we would have the finance people, if the two of you would mind moving, then we could have the other panelists come up and let's have insurance and make and and the and yeah.

And Mega Fire. Here we go. And LAO, you can step down. Mega Fire right here. So we've got a representative of panel three here.

We've got a representative of panel one here. I'm sorry. Panel two. We got representative of panel three here, and we got representatives panel four. Right?

So go ahead. I've drawn a blank on your name. The fire yeah. Fire official there. Yeah.

Come on up. Right? There there we go. Okay. And then the rest of you are going to use this microphone.

So if the Sergeant could get this microphone keyed up for us so as we ask questions, if you'll jump to that microphone, if those of you that are in the front row for that. So first, just let me say here, we've we appreciate everybody. This was a very informative hearing, but it's the beginning. It's the kickoff of what we have to have because there is as you said, there is lots of patient there. You guys have it.

Many of us have it in the legislature, particularly after Eaton and Palisades. It popped this whole thing to a to another level. But it was a patient for me ever since the Thomas fire when we lost the houses on my street, and we're all involved in that. And I saw home hardening worked. It literally worked.

It kept houses from burning right next to a house that was on fire just because they were, they were hard. The hardest thing for us to do, right, I would offer to you. You had up on your thing. I saw this tech. We need technical support.

We need financial assistance. We need incentives. But the hardest thing for us to do is to coordinate ourselves, is to coordinate all of this work. So as we saw from the Marin person, you pointed out that you had so many different agencies that had a part of this that you created one authority to coordinate it and suddenly you had a more coordinated message.

You got rid of zone zero in a box and you came up with ember resistant, which is a much better, you know, term.

We're trying to do this statewide. We're trying to coordinate this whole effort statewide. That is something that people with passion need to work together to try to use the energy that we have and recognize that we need, as much cooperation amongst each other to get the coordination as possible. It's going to be very easy for us, for people to get territorial about this. It is very hard for agencies to work together.

It's just a natural tendency. It's a human tendency. It's gonna be very hard for programs that currently exist to recognize modifications of that program going to be necessary, you know, to go forward. So I want to emphasize that that's what I think is the hardest thing in front of us. And I think Mega Fire pointed that out really well.

We're trying to change the goal to turn this into a consumer product that we're helping the consumer purchase. So there's a great way to sort of phrase that a consumer product that we're helping the consumer purchase. If we want the consumer to purchase something else, you know anything, we have to deal with all of these barriers that the consumer is going to face out there. Right?

Now one way to do it is $60,000 is a great way to be able to help consumers do that, but just we can't do that at the at this massive scale.

So, first of all, I turned to this program with with a couple of questions, and that is the second thing I would point out is that the the second hardest thing to do besides getting coordinated is to count on the Federal Government to actually come forward with funding. You saw how slow they were in this situation. We now have a Federal Government that actually wants to have engaged in retribution against California. So we can't count.

So one of the big justifications of this program was we were going to spend this money to leverage all of these dollars.

There's just no way we should realistically count on leveraging all of these dollars. So what do we do with these dollars for this program? What do we do with this? I would offer from what I'm hearing is that we ought to use these dollars to try to get to the point where we recognize this as a consumer product.

We need consumers to purchase and to try to come up with a little bit of money here, a little bit of money here, a little bit of money here to try to do all those things.

The approach that, Marin helped us with, which was even high income people need a little sweetener to do it. And somebody might say, well, why should we sweeten a high income home at all? And I would offer to you that when Palisades is almost exclusively high income homes, but every low income person in California is paying higher home insurance rates now because Palisades burned out. We need to know we're all in it. We all have to harden.

If you can afford to do it, you have a greater responsibility to do it. If you can't afford to do it, you still have to push and recognize you'll save money in the long run if you spend that. And they so to the to the program, some the proponents, alright, to Cal OES. Realistically, where would this go? Where does this program go?

And in light of federal funding not being there, in light of, the difficulty, I wanna give you a final opportunity to do that before we go into these other things.

Yeah. I think so I've got two thoughts in response to that, and I'll try to be as quick as I can.

Thank you.

The first thing is that we the state has allocated funding and put income related restrictions on it. So that immediately changes how able people are who meet those those those requirements, those criteria are, to participate, especially in areas that are high risk, and we know how much their insurance is and how high their housing costs are relative to their incomes, as well as all the other things that were factored into the ranking criteria, right, for hope for CWMP.

But once you add that income restriction, we have to be able to assist more financially because those folks who are socially vulnerable, and low income really have an inability because of their financial situations to be able to pay. It's not just about sweetening the pot. It's we actually have to fundamentally help them do the work because a lot of them cannot physically do it and they don't have the funding to hire somebody to do it.

And that's something that we've learned, especially working with Lake County and Shasta County, through their scaling of their efforts. The other thing that I'll say too, is that you know, looking kind of forward to Prop 4 and implementing that program, and we're in the process of scoping that, I agree. We do not recommend trying to pull in federal dollars with that because we'll never get it done. I mean, honestly, if we even get the grants approved at all.

But I think, like, the difference between CWMP and the things that we've learned, we don't have to do I'm I'll say like, the the Mercedes or the everything in every home.

There are higher risk homes within each of these communities that are going to require the whole gamut of home hardening to protect the community, not just to protect that structure at the the parcel level but the community as a whole. It's going to be a more impactful structure to do everything on. And then as you move in from the high risk area, you don't necessarily need to do every single component to also get the same risk, reduction for the whole community, if that makes sense.

So that's something that we're taking into consideration as we're scoping that Prop 4 grant. And then also trying to co locate that with other state investments.

CalFire is has amazing programs for fuels treatment, to reduce hazardous fuels, and the risk that they pose to communities. We should be co-locating our state investment with other state investments. So trying to prioritize those areas is also very important. So we don't necessarily have to do the cadillac for everybody. It's really finding the correct scope of work based on the specific risk of that community and not necessarily doing everything for every single property.

Being thoughtful about that, that's something else that we're putting into the scoping of the Prop 4 program.

Can CalFire do clearance on private property?

We do not use our own crews to do the clearance. We do fund projects to fire safe council and others that do work on private property.

Great. Thank you. I appreciate your response. I still have trouble.

I recognize that there are some people that can't afford to do the home hardening. We have a fundamental question in front of us. How do we help those people? But that's something we have to really thoughtfully come up with now that we've, you know, learned things from the pilot program. Now that's something we have to come up with and go, how do we do this?

How many how many low income homes are there out there? We're trying to get do a survey right now or we have a request, and hopefully we get a survey bill forward to find out, you know, do we have the resources to fund those program, you know, fund those people and and those programs at at that dollar amount? So I appreciate that putting a low income cap on here means we're dealing with the neediest people.

But if we have this many neediest people and we're only going to have the funding for this, is that the best thing to do is to just pick a few winners and a whole lot of people we don't have the resources to do anything for? Or do we find some other way to leverage this money so that we're doing all low income people or or vast majority of low income people get something?

That's what I think has to be explored before we just do some more and find a a a few fortunate, deserving, but a few fortunate winners that that are out there. So with that, I'm gonna try to get into these other questions, and then I'll take catch you, after I get into those.

Can I just ask a quick follow-up on that to your point?

If it's quick.

The quick one is just what about partial hardening? And because it seems like we're focused on full hardening, and that's expensive. Right?

But we could do things like venting of screen of the venting events, things like that that maybe are partial or helpful. Lease is better than nothing, and maybe we could spread those dollars to more people. Is that something that could be done?

You know, that's actually something earlier in the thing we talked about, which is having a first level, where you make the minimum investments for ember resistant. And that would be an example of how we could stretch dollars farther. Right? And it would be for low income people. So appreciate you doing that, but I'll go ahead and let-

Let Yeah. Sure. Go ahead.

It's okay if I answer that question.

Yeah.

Steve Hawks with IBHS, and that's a very good question. That's something that we grapple with all the time. Under these extreme wildfire conditions, when we experience the most structure loss, it's critically important that the homes are hardened to a high level to be able to withstand that exposure. Because once the ignitions begin to happen, then that home creates an extreme amount of heat, flames, and embers that propagates the fire and continues that structure to structure fire spread. So preventing the ignitions is a really important part.

And so ensuring that homes are hardened to be able to withstand that ignition potential is important. So just doing one or two mitigation actions as I pointed out in my slide on our post fire analysis from LA, that it has some benefit. But under those extreme conditions, you really need to stack on those sets of actions to make the meaningful.

You know, as I started to get involved in this and I've heard from the insurance companies and it made perfect sense to me, you know, partial hardening doesn't doesn't win you a big insurance discount because it's partial. Right? But partial hardening does have a significant benefit if you go to the ember resistance level, for example.

Bare minimum.

Exactly. So the insurance companies are always going to say, you know, we need it. We need it all. And I understand that. And that those that this is bare minimum.

But if in the reality that we have in terms of the resources that we have and we're trying to get massive adoption, One of the things that you need to do to get massive adoption is to have people take the first step. The minute that person pulls out that bogan via, they crossed the line. You know, it's just like, you know, proselytizing. The minute you try to convince one person to do something, suddenly you're more invested.

So we have to deal with the reality of we can't say, look, it's gotta be everything or nothing.

We've gotta get people to start moving along. And five years from now, we may say, now you want a good discount. You gotta take more steps, but let's get the first things done as we're moving forward.

Chair, if I could just very quickly mention in into the Assembly member's question, we've been piloting a tool that specifically allows us to know a risk profile of a community and then use it as a decision making tool about where do we place our fuel breaks and what does that do to the risk, portfolio of that home so we can determine do we need to harden all of the homes or is it the homes on the outer edge?

And again, as Robyn had mentioned, as you go further, maybe we're focused more on ember resistance, but really at least focusing first on those homes where the flammable pathway is going to bring the fire into the community, prioritizing those mitigations, and then prioritizing which mitigations are the right ones based on local conditions, fire behavior, etcetera.

And that's exactly what I was thinking. Like, combine that with, you know, the fuel reduction that we're doing for vulnerable communities. If you had both of those things going on at the same time, you would I would think you would dramatically reduce the risk. Absolutely. So do both.

So this is the most important part of today, which is these questions. We've heard the presentations. We all now have some some some of the same information in front of us. And the way we get the most value out of this is just that if you want to add in, just put your hand up and add in. But please keep it brief if you're if you're adding in because I have many, many questions I have to get through.

I promise I would get these questions asked, but it's for you know? So if you think you've got a good answer to that question, jump into I may direct it to one person, but if you go, hey. I wish you would have asked me that question. Jump up and let me know what in terms of how we do this.

And so this is gonna bounce all over the place because I have so many questions that and I was writing some of them down as you were doing your presentations that I can't possibly put them back in in some kind of rational order.

But we tried to identify the most cost effective, you know, things that we can do and how can we have homeowners take those incremental steps. I think we heard pretty good things. I want to try to summarize what I heard on this, which was that area when the embers I'm talking about ember showers right now as the thing that seems to impact the most number of homes, if I'm correct.

Now I know a forest fire, which is very different than an ember shower, a forest fire when it comes in. But we have far more communities in the, you know, exposed to ember showers than we do to the forest fire approach to it.

So that's one of our challenges in terms of coordination as a recognition of that. But if it's ember showers, it's that having the ember resistant zone around the house as the most effective followed by the vents and the roof. I should say the roof has to be the ember shower. The roof has to be number one.

But most people, not everybody, but most people have class one roofs now because even if you had an older home, when you put a new roof on, it had to be a class one roof.

So assuming that from an investment standpoint, most people have the right roof, it would be the ember resistant, which is a much better term than zone zero, and ember resistant at the at the bottom and the vents. Anybody disagree with that out there? The of of the panelist that that we have. Alright. Great.

The key differences between the IBHS wildfire zone and what's happening with the draft. Is there a good key difference from an insurance standpoint, between what you're talking about and in the amber resistant area versus, what the draft is? And what is that key difference if you could do that quickly for us?

Yeah. There is. So our research, as I mentioned earlier, both at the lab and in post fire events on the nation's most destructive fires, has significantly and routinely found that when there's combustible items in that five feet and it doesn't matter what those combustible items are, whether it's mulch or fence, or vegetation, that the embers, the flames from the fire will ignite those items under those extreme conditions, leading to the loss of the house.

So our requirement for the wildfire prepared home program is a complete non combustible five feet out from the walls and attachments.

Great. That's the difference.

Yep.

That's what I wanna check on. And the second thing is there there's been a request that perhaps our voluntary certification program that CalFire, if the bill passes, would be charged with doing that meet the same standards as the insurance. Now that creates some interesting questions as to whether we should have a standard set by private, you know, by private entities for a state standard. Do you have any examples of where that's already happened and examples to the positive sense?

This is something insurance people are interested in.

Yes, Chair. Thanks for that question. So both the CWMP has voluntarily adopted a non combustible five feet as part of the standard for that program, as well as the Department of Insurance's Safer from Wildfires initiative. One of the 10 items that's in this follow-up regulation to that initiative has a provision for a non combustible five feet requiring insurers to offer discounts if they meet that requirement. So there's two state funded programs that are already in existence that are utilizing the science of a non combustible fire.

They're utilizing the science, but this would be a legal requirement. In other words, would we if we said to CalFire, "hey, your voluntary certification program can't be less restrictive than the insurance institutes program". That's we'd be putting that into a law rather than them just using that.

I'll jump in really quick. We very much partner with IBHS. A lot of our science and our code comes from IBHS. But I think it's really important to note that in throughout the building code, we really use standards to assist us. But our code is the minimum, for the state.

And so to use a private entity or anybody else who creates a standard and intermix it in with the code creates some, some disparagement. And so we would advocate that we make sure that the state standard is the standard that we're certifying against.

And is there any instances where the state standard just can't be below a private industry standard that you're aware of? Electrical appliances or any of those kind of things?

No. Because most standards are voluntary. And in our consensus based, how we develop codes is we take standards and we make sure they meet the needs of California.

But this would be a voluntary certification that homeowners would be engaging in. So it's not mandatory. This would be a voluntary home.

Some time or maybe the easy out. Obviously, we haven't had a chance to review any language in that bill.

Okay, great.We'll go on.

But that's why I just separate a standard from the code, and we would very much advocate that the code be set by the state. But we do use IBHS to help us set those codes.

Thank you. Appreciate us being able to do that. The local government and we well, we asked that question already, and that is, you know, what can the state do to better help local governments. Of the current programs that you see out there? And I'm gonna go to Mega Fire or other two locals of the current programs.

Do you have an do you have which ones do you feel which state programs are the most beneficial and which state programs would you you rank as I don't wanna have you say aren't, but it's less beneficial.

If you had if we had if we were asking, where is it that you wanna make sure we keep funding and and keep doing something? And where is it you think there's some opportunities for some modification of that? I will start with MegaFire and have the two of you also if you if you wanna do that. Right?

Well, thank you for the question, Mister chair. There there aren't that many programs that are direct assistance to homeowners for this work. I mean, the CWMP is really the flagship, the first program of its kind in California to really try to provide that direct homeowner assistance. And I concur with, you know, your assessment that this has been an outstanding learning experience to actually see how this plays out and especially the opportunities to leverage federal funds.

I would say that, you know, when we look at the scalability of the program, as the State Fire Marshal mentioned, I mean there are 4,000,000 homes in the WUI.

And if we were to say, you know, just spitballing here that a 100,000 of those homeowners are very low income, and we wanted to have a program that was designed to serve them at the rate of spending per home right now at the CWMP, that alone, that demographic alone, that would be $6,100,000,000 of investment. And so I do think that we must try to find a way to learn from what IBHS is doing with wildfire prepared base.

I mean, wildfire prepared base is not just mesh fencing. I mean, this is zone zero plus multiple other mitigations that, as Steve described, we're seeing expenditures in roughly the $15,000 range.

And I think if we can get the the core cost of home hardening for the base standard to to be $15,000 or less and then try to find ways as, in the case of Marin that they're doing, as in the case with the Go Green program that they're doing with solar to leverage private capital at a 7 to 1 ratio.

It sounds like Mark's reaching on the grants that, you know, folks are putting in $7 of their own capital to $1 of the grant program. With the loans, you're seeing in the energy financing space, folks able to leverage $12 in prep private capital for $1 in a loan loss reserve for low interest loans. I think that we'll be able to reach, the number of homes that we need to serve here.

Great. Thank you. Mister Watson?

Yes. Thank you. Steven Watson, Executive Director of Fire Safe Council of Ventura County. I had a few comments on that. One, I think just from our perspective, we've worked primarily with wildfire prevention grants.

So I mentioned this earlier, less of an emphasis on acres treated, more on this home hardening defensible space, which I know is the movement moving forward.

Say that again?

Less of an emphasis on acres treated. Most specifically example, this last CalFire cycle for the grant cycle, it was I wanna say maybe 98% focused on acres treated, and not education focused.

The other thing I'll mention is defensible space assistance is a lot easier for us, at least, to find funding for than home hardening and home retrofits.

I thought that was important to mention. And then, I guess we'll wait to see how the California Safe Homes Act plays out, also to see how that works from a state level.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you for the opportunity. Mark Brown with Marine Wildfire. We haven't been able to tap into any of the home hardening grants that have been offered at the state level, so I can't opine on that. We've had great funding for vegetation management through the CalFire and fire protection grants.

Great fun great funding for what?

For our wildfire protection grants and vegetation management projects into Assembly member Gallagher's statement. We've actually coordinated those fuel management projects to our most vulnerable home components. So we have been able to tie those together. So I think there's great effectiveness in that. And I'm with you.

We need to find a balance of how we support those who don't have the financial resources, but also recognize that those with the financial resources need that nudge because when thousands of homes are destroyed, everybody's impacted.

Thank you. You know, it's no question that part of the solution, the problem is somehow we need technological improvements that lower the cost of hardening homes. That's a key element. If we could find and that's why I'd be very willing to invest some dollars in innovative strategies that would lower the cost of coming up with a way for a home a home to be hardened. It's just a real challenge that we have out there.

Question that well, let me jump down here to this other issue that I have because give me one second here since I wanna get that question. For the insurance folks, vinyl fence vinyl fencing, and this is for the CalFire also. Alright? Vinyl fencing is a lot better than wood fencing, but it also has some risk involved in it. But does it meet the the lower bar standard of being ember resistant?

And is it good enough? Because it has a significant impact on people trying to figure out both replacing fences or people that have already put up vinyl fences. So I'll start with you, and then I'll go to insurance.

You know, vinyl still melts and it's still combustible. But what we have seen and you know, I used the example in San Diego and actually received it as well, Dixon Trails. And they were actually able to bring in a a metal fence that was a lower cost than the fencing that they were required by the city to use. And so the fence in that case actually ended up being a a cost savings, for the development.

But, I don't wanna necessarily opine specifically on the on certain brands, but there are a number of different materials.

And to your point, very much in the last couple of years, we've seen a lot of innovation, especially in the fencing and the gate area where we're seeing a lot more non combustible types of materials at a lower rate. But I definitely would defer to my, research partners here who who can, elaborate on that.

Yeah. The one of our research, partner organizations, NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, did a lot of research on fencing material, and they found that, vinyl fencing is very flammable as well as when it melts, it pools flammable liquid that ignites and can lead to the ignition of the fire or the house. So it is better than wood, but not much better.

And I agree with cheaper land's assessment that as we, continue our efforts for home hardening, that there is going to be more products, and we've already seen that, come on to the market that are non combustible options that will not translate the fire to the house.

Are there people are there investments that we could potentially help along this whole issue of research into ways to harden homes that are less cost have a lower cost?

I think that's a policy question for for you to consider. What I would tell you is there's a significant amount of funding that's coming in from, nonprofit groups, to really focus in on the innovation of new products. And and as was mentioned, there's already stuff that's coming to the market, and there's newer products, and testing standards that are really, trying to ex, go faster in getting those products onto onto the market.

Thank you. And then I have, I think-

SB 2504 and role that it's given the California Earthquake Authority, and, in some ways, I see that as decreasing our ability to coordinate if from our perspective, CalFire has been involved in a lot of this. Cal OES has been involved, and now we have the earthquake authority involved.

What's going on in terms of the coordination amongst those three agencies, number one. And number two, does it make sense to have three different agencies doing this? And the other question that goes along this is, does it still make sense for Cal OES to be doing the CWMP program when Cal OES was doing it because of the federal mitigation grants. And since we're not getting federal mitigation grants, does it still make sense for this to be done through Cal OES?

So that whole issue of CEA coordination, Cal OES, and Cal Fire.

Let me take a stab here. The SB 254 report really provided a really good framework of what needs to occur, not just in the community space, but beyond, partnering with utilities and insurance and some of the market impacts. But I would definitely say that from the State of California and through the administration, you know, CalFire is your fire department. We are your wildfire, prevention and mitigation agency.

We partner very closely, as was mentioned today, with Cal OES, who as well, oversees, all-natural disaster mitigation.

I'll let Robyn expand on that. But really, we, we find that report, as we continue to go through it, but through our input, really continues to emphasize the strategy that I mentioned, the holistic strategy, all of the above strategy is really the, emphasized throughout that report. And we look forward to continuing to work towards actually meeting many of those objectives through funding from the legislature.

I'm gonna speak frankly. Here, and that is all the above is the easy thing to say. We need an all the above strategy, and all the above means you now have to coordinate everything. And then the second thing is I constantly hear in public testimony, the agencies all say we all work well together. And I constantly hear outside of public testimony.

Oh, they are not doing it right. They are not doing it right. This is not you know, we we can't do this because they won't do that. A you know, a lot of internal frustration with the lack of coordination between the agencies. So I'm just I recognize it's very hard publicly to say anything.

You all work for the same administration and stuff. But the probably the another way to say it is should there be more single entity coordination for this to happen? And I'll take that answer offline, from whoever wants to offer that, as they go forward.

But how about responding to whether Cal OES should have the same role since it was designed to leverage federal mitigation money that, as you acknowledged, would be not wise for us to be thinking about any of that funding coming our way.

Yeah. I mean, what I'll say about being, you know, tasked with managing all of the Stafford Act processes. So, every time we get a Federal Disaster Declaration, whether that's something that happens with it's just a Fire Management Assistance Grant, we manage that. We manage the State of Emergency Process. We do a lot more than just manage like, participate in the CWMP.

Sure. Absolutely.

I'll say that, like, the way that we get to work with communities across all hazards, we actually have a lot of information about how a lot of our local partners, whether they're funded with our FEMA Grants or not, are operating their grant programs. I think our recovery director in particular; we're a grant we're a grant management team. Like, we work with communities on things that are $10,000. We work with communities that are doing you know, elevations for flood for floods.

We also support we also fund some of the CEA Earthquake Retrofit Program through FEMA Hazard Mitigation Funds, that come from our office.

So we are working with a lot of these local entities. We also work a lot with our state entities, for their implementation of their various programs. And we're actually I mean, we're afforded the opportunity to be in a joint powers' authority agreement with both Cal Fire, specifically looking at home hardening and also with CEA for the earthquake retrofits. So, we we kind of have this opportunity to kind of be in all these different spaces to manage grant programs.

How about the coordination with CEA? Have CEA has CEA reached out to both of your organizations about the 254 and what they're doing?

Yeah. Absolutely. We've worked really closely throughout the whole process to gather information, to kind of give them an insight to again, I think there's especially in the home hardening space, like, I think people assume, yeah, you know, we're gonna give them all that information, but also all the other disaster recovery support that we offer a lot of communities and and coordinate.

So that's also part of it.

CA reaching out to CalFire?

Yeah. We were on the steering committee for the 254 report. And one piece I wanna just hit on coordination, we meet monthly, with the insurance association, with the builders, with Cal OES, with our other state and local fire agencies all brought together. I'm sorry to do another plug, but Assembly member, Former Assembly member Woods wrote legislation that requires us to meet every single month, and so coordination is occurring. Now 254 in SCEA's role, we look at as providing that report to us.

And now it's our responsibility as agencies to take those initiatives that are in there and figure out through the resources and the funding provided to us how to then coordinate together as agencies to implement.

So they are targeted, you know, the bill targeted, assign a lead for the state coordination on wildfire risk. Has that happened? Has there been a lead assigned for state coordination on wildfire risk?

I don't wanna speak on behalf of CEA. And again, my-

Are you aware of are you?

Yeah. Maybe the we I will be happy to follow-up with you because I I'm not aware.

Alright. Yep. I mean, that that's an example. I mean, bottom line is if somebody's gonna be coordinating this, we all need to know who that is and, you know what role they anticipate playing.

What role should we should we then have other legislation feed through that or do something else?