Senate Standing Committee on Natural Resources and Water

Thank you. This, joint hearing of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water, and the City of Community Emergency Management will come to order. We're here in the 0 Street Building in Room 2100. I'll have some opening remarks.

We'll turn it over to some other, my distinguished colleagues up here to give some opening remarks, and I'm really looking forward to the discussion we're gonna get into to today.

Catastrophic wildfires over the last decade have resulted in destruction of thousands of homes, burned millions of acres, cost billions of dollars to fight, and resulted in tens of billions of dollars of property and economic losses, thousands of canceled homeowner insurance policies,

and contributed to the housing and affordability crises in the state. Wildfire is a natural and necessary feature of the state's landscape.

Unfortunately, the impacts of climate change such as rising temperatures, increasing drought, and some of our historic fire suppression practices, among other factors, excuse me, have contributed to the increasing risk of catastrophic wildfires.

The state has taken numerous steps in the last decade to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire and improve the state's resilience to wildfire.

And I was proud to chair the budget subcommittee, on on resources here as as we now have the current chair, here with us today and and, others who have served on that committee.

Numerous studies show that the cost of prevention and preparedness are much, much less than the cost of, suppression and recovery.

We've taken many numerous steps, including, wildfire mitigation and home hardening, increasing CAL FIRE's resources, requiring the state's utilities to reduce their wildfire risk, and creating the California Wildfire Fund.

I authored SB 254 last year to further strengthen the state's response to natural catastrophes, including wildfire, and as part of that, called for the CEA to prepare a study assessing policy options to provide safe, catastrophe resilient communities, a robust property insurance market,

and affordable, safe, reliable, clean energy, and stable utilities. The Earthquake Authority undertook extensive effort with public workshops to develop the policy recommendations in their SB 254 report released in April.

This hearing is to assess the, two fifty four report, policy recommendations related to wildfire mitigation, resilience financing, and recovery.

This is the third of three Senate committee hearings exploring the SB 254 report, and the assembly is also holding hearings. This highlights how important these issues are. The cost of inaction is high, as we heard yesterday from, Mark Toney of Tern.

You know, he was issuing a red alert for crisis for rate payers, for for insurance policy holders. So the cause and action is high.

This hearing has two panels. The first will present information on the efforts the state is making to reduce wildfire risk to communities and the landscape and state funding.

The second panel focused on highlighting methods to improve recovery and financing to reduce risks. And I wanna thank in advance all the panelists for their participation. At this point, let me turn it over to, my colleague, the chair of emergency management, Senator Stern.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Be brief and just say, thanks in advance for everyone engaging, showing up across so many jurisdictional lines. These issues are complicated, and so I'm really proud of the Senate, not just today, but over the last few days.

I appreciate the work of our vice chair here also, mister Sayardo, I as well as our budget sub two chair joining us here today. Honored to have you, miss Reyes.

Yeah. We're we'll be looking at at the money side of the equation somewhat today and especially when it comes to how we've been spending and what the future of finance in this sector can look like.

And those of you who had to sit through these hearings with me over the last few years will find it, yeah, maybe repetitive but hopefully not for everybody.

I do think we still, suffer from a disparity in how we've approached wildfire resilience over the past few years, and that's really what I wanna try to interrogate today is we learned yesterday about $40,000,000,000 of wildfire mitigation funding has been spent by utilities on

minimizing their risk, given their, very unique liability framework.

We understand why so much is being spent there, and, we have authorized and helped subsidize, much of that. Over here, we will learn today that we've spent, not just yeah. About 1% of that on community hardening.

So we have a paradigm where we're we're chasing not just utility risk but also forest management in a way that doesn't actually recognize, risk to property and risk to communities and that's the paradigm I think we have to start to change here.

So that's where I'll be focused on today and look forward to all the comments here. I'll turn it over to, where should we go? The Vice Chair?

Yeah. Mister Seyarto, please.

Yeah.

Thank you very much, and thank you all for being here today. This is an important topic. It's been something that's been brewing in California for the better part of thirty years now and maybe even longer.

And, I'm glad that we are finally, to a point where we are going to have the conversations and some of them difficult conversations that need to be had so that we can figure out what the heck we're going to do about this in the future. This is all about prevention, response, and recovery.

And, in also associated with with that is affordability and insurability. And, we have a regulatory climate that we have to examine, as in one of the answers I hope to hear today is what are the hurdles that, we are having the barriers to the prevention aspect of this,

because I know that there are communities out there, that have already got their grant money.

It's sitting in a bank, and, they've described what they're going through as sequel hell trying to get the project done. So we have to address that, and we have to figure out, when we're doing more harm than good with some of our regulatory process.

And, unfortunately, I have to step out right at 10:00. I'm hoping to make a hour and a half meeting only last fifteen minutes, because this is really, really important to me.

I have a unique perspective of this, and I would like to use that unique perspective in examining what we're going to be examining today, but also some of the things that I think were examined in another, hearing yesterday. Those things are important to me.

I hope we can, arrive at, some way of of better protecting Californians in an affordable rate and, and making some progress in this. Thank you.

Thank you. Chair Reyes.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Mr. Chair. As we know, the devastating impacts of wildfires have affected Californians across the state, whether it's through horrendous air quality due to the wildfire smoke or wildfires destroying communities overnight.

As a result, the legislature has prioritized wildfire prevention and resilience activities in the budget the last several years. Cal Fire's funding, for instance, to perform wildfire resilience activities have grown over the past ten years from about 100,000,000 in 15-16 to almost 700,000,000 in budget 25-26.

In addition, the legislature successfully put on the ballot and the voters approved Prop four, which provided $1.5 billion for wildfire and forest resilience activities. However, the state cannot do it alone.

Much of the funding that we've relied on for wildfire prevention and resilience such as Prop four and GGRF are either one time in nature or at significant risk.

Now, many of us have already reviewed the 107 page report from on enhancing California's resiliency to natural catastrophes, which was in response to SB 254 authored by our chair, Becker. It's very informative.

But given the current challenging budget outlook, we all need to think outside the box just as my colleague has mentioned. We need to find more ongoing sustainable solutions for communities to truly rebuild and adapt to the new realities of wildfires in California.

Vegetation management, community and home hardening, prescribed fires, these are all activities that are not just one and done, but require careful planning, coordination, and sustained efforts. State funds are just one piece of the puzzle.

This will require partnerships at the local, regional, and federal levels, as well as utilities to truly address these issues.

I appreciate the inform informational hearings on this issue, including the one today. It's important that we talk about these issues. It is such an important issue, and I know that together, we will make informed recommendations. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much. Senator Grayson.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. An ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. To be rephrased, the, the millions in prevention is far better than the billions in recovery. With that, I'm very interested to hear what the panelists had to say.

Amen. Okay. Let's welcome our first panel up.

Okay. I think we're gonna ask the LAO to start off here and then we'll turn to Daniel.

Good morning, Chairs Becker and Stern and other Members of the committees. Brian Metzger from the Legislative Analyst's Office. Our office was asked to provide a brief overview of state wildfire resilience funding.

And in preparation for this hearing, we prepared a handout that we will use to guide our remarks today. On page one of the handout, we provide a figure that shows the increase in state funding for wildfire resilience activities over the past several years.

From 2018-19 to twenty 25-26, the state has appropriated about $4.7 billion across a variety of activities, which we break down in more detail over the next couple of pages.

Funding peaked in 21-22 at $1.1 billion with subsequent years of funding ranging from 450 to $750,000,000. It is important to note that the funding sources for state wildfire resilience activities have changed over time.

In 2018-19, and 19-20, it was exclusively from the greenhouse gas reduction fund at $200,000,000. In 2020, 2021 to 2324, a majority of that funding came from the general fund due to, surpluses that the state experienced at that time.

And in 2024-25 and 25-26, an increasing amount came from proposition four, the climate bond passed by voters in November 2024.

On page two of the handout, we provide our first detailed breakdown of the state wildfire resilience funding that is focused primarily on general fund and GGRF funded activities. This figure does not include prop four funding, which we'll cover on the next page.

There are a lot of programs on this table, so I'm not gonna go through all of them.

We aggregate the GGRF funding into two main programs for forest health and wildfire prevention, as well as fuels, cruise, research, and monitoring, and that's about $1.5-1.6 billion.

And up until 2025-26, this funding was continuously appropriated for use on a variety of activities with a specific percentage split established in statute.

As we will mention later in the handout, the new cap and invest structure under SB 840 changed how this appropriation would be calculated. Proposed trailer billing, which also would, if adopted, remove the current percentage split in statute.

You also will note that compared to other programs on this list, notably less funding, about 65,000,000 has been appropriated for community hardening programs, such as defensible space inspections and home hardening.

On page three of the handout, we provide our second detailed breakdown of state wildfire resilience funding. This time focused on the wildfire and forest resilience chapter of Prop four.

Again, there are a lot of programs in this table, but I would highlight that about 600,000,000 of the 1.5 billion available in this chapter has been appropriated.

An additional 314,000,000 is Proposed in the governor's budget to be allocated across many of the programs with funding remaining. Taken together, 4.1 billion in general fund and GGRF and 600,000,000 in Prop four gets you to the 4.7 billion we mentioned at the top.

On the last page of the handout, we explained that one time state funding for wildfire resilience activities will decrease in the coming years.

Absent Prop four, there are few sources of ongoing state funding for this work. The primary source is GGRF.

Though with the adoption of the new cap and invest structure, the amount of projected revenues in a given fiscal year will determine if and how much funding may be available for wildfire resilience activities.

Up to 200,000,000 may be available, but only after higher priority programs and projects are funded. In 2627, for example, the governor's budget projects GGRF revenues will only be able to fund about 142,000,000 in wildfire resilience activities.

Also, recently proposed amendments to cap to the cap and invest programs regulations would, if adopted, reduce GGRF revenues by roughly half and likely leave no funding for wildfire resilience activities.

The other source of state funding is Cal Fire operations funding for resource management and fire prevention, which supports activities like defensible space inspections. State funding, however, is not the only source of wildfire resilience funding.

As you mentioned, utilities have collected billions of dollars for fire prevention activities that are largely related to electricity transmission, and federal programs have also historically provided, funding after a major disaster declaration. And that concludes my remarks and happy to take questions.

Thank you. I think we're gonna, do a few questions upfront. If you if you all wanna dig in for a quick second, then we'll roll through the rest of the panel. That's okay. So if there are any initial questions for the LAO here about, confines of this report.

I know you're about to leave, Mr. Vice Chair. I don't know if wanna give you first priority there before you go or we can jump in.

Yeah. Do we have an idea of what, when we're talking about, GGRF funding and prop four funding, and you read through the list of what these projects are, these are projects that they're not one and done projects. The grass grows back. The forest grows back.

The intrusion into the, into, you know, the WUI areas, they regrow. And if we're going to use one time funding to do a project, then we're not going to be able to we we won't have the funds when the project needs done again.

So do we have a a figure that we need from from the legislature's point of view on the budget of what our yearly maintenance of those activities fund needs to be. Because it's not that's not a should we be funding this or not question. That's a priority of your budget question.

And that's what I wanna make sure that we understand that just because we take care of some of this stuff in one year, it's gonna be there going into the future.

And when we have billions and billions of dollars in a budget, we better use some of that billions of dollars to make sure that people's houses aren't burning down.

Thank you for the question. That is a very important point about the maintenance after the projects are completed. And our understanding is that there have been efforts in the administration to think about funding for maintenance as a part of grant programs.

So thinking about how if we're giving out grants, there could be a certain portion of those grants maintained for maintenance efforts.

But in terms of the overall magnitude of kind of how much funding would be needed for maintenance over the long term, We've seen academic articles and other sources that put it, you know, in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.

But I don't have a specific figure for you right now.

And when we're reliant on a lot of funding from the IOUs because they have the deep pockets, But then when you consider that, what is it, 12% of the fires actually involve utility type infrastructure.

And because of their strict liability clauses, that's where their liability is happening. And and that's part of the affordability crisis on our part is we're funding something. Fires are gonna happen.

And there are a variety of ways they happen, not only through utility uses, but you I'm sure everybody is aware of what those other ways are.

So that's for me, we need to look beyond trying to find somebody to blame with the deep pockets to make them pay because we're paying. We're the ones that are paying.

We need a a more sustainable approach to funding, to make sure that as this problem goes forward, no matter what's causing the problem, that we are prepared to be able to to deal with it.

Thank you, Mr. Vice Chair. Are there other comments or questions from Members here, Chair Reyes?

One of the comments made thank you, Mr. Chair. One of the comments made in, the the prior hearing was what about having fossil fuels pay their fair share?

We know that there was a a bill introduced having because of climate change and with the impact of fossil fuels on it on climate change and knowing that climate change has a lot to do with these wildfires. Having fossil fuel industry also pay their fair share. Any thoughts on that?

I don't have any specific thoughts on that. I think from a policy perspective, understanding kind of what is meant specifically by a polluter pays kind of approach to potentially funding some of the wildfire efforts is something that has been introduced and certainly that we've looked at.

But I don't have any specific thoughts on, you know, particular pieces of legislation or particular approaches to that.

Thank you. I also want to commend you on a very good, report. It helps us to look at the numbers and to see what the numbers have been over the years and to see where we are today. Thank you.

Thank you for that. I'll just try to tee up the rest of the panel because I know you all hear from Cal OES, from off state fire marshal, and then we have Patrick Wright waiting on the line with the task force.

I guess just to tee that piece up from the LAO, I wanna make sure I'm reading this right.

So if you do it by percentage at least, since 2018, I'm seeing about 1.5% of funds have gone to community hardening and 98.5% have gone to other stuff. Four sector economic stimulus, science, what, fuel breaks, resilient force and landscapes.

Is that am I reading that right? So about, like, less than 2% of the state funding has been so far used on community based things that are sort of property and structure based.

Yes. You are reading that correctly. There's about $65,000,000 as we said. That is very specifically tied to community hardening.

Now, there may be other pieces of funding here and there for things like, you know, fire prevention grants or some of these other buckets of funding where there may have been some community hardening included, but specifically very targeted funding towards community hardening is about 65,000,000.

And do you have any, data on the results of of the overall funding? I know we have we do have some data around how the pilot's gone around the community hardening piece specifically, but if you have a sense for all these other programs, is there a metric that

we use to sort of evaluate performance based on property loss avoided or structural risk reduction versus my understanding is these are mostly either acreage driven goals, carbon driven goals, things other than sort of public safety. Is that a fair assessment?

That is a fair assessment. I think there's been work done by CAL FIRE recently to take a look at, you know, for example, when we've done fuel breaks or other kind of fire mitigation efforts, how effective are they when we see a fire come through a community or come through certain landscape?

But typically, yes, these programs are focused on greenhouse gas reduction acres treated, those sorts of metrics that are specific to the grant program itself.

Yeah. My understanding is that the performance and this might not be a fire marshal question for the remainder of the panel. Maybe it's a bigger CAL FIRE question or natural resources agency question.

But that the performance is judged based on the success, at least for for some of the major force and landscape pots as well as the fuel breaks piece that they're basically judging success on suppressing 95% of all ignitions at 10 acres or less.

So it's not based on how many houses burned down, but it's based on sort of acreage and ignition goals. And I guess that's the the question is if there's enough flexibility in statute or in the funding sources to allow for a different kind of metric to drive it?

Are you do do you believe that there's discretion to to say have some of those more community based metrics even in say, a fuel break program or a fire prevention grant program or even in forest health to say, that anything in statute preventing that from being more flexible?

Not that comes to mind. No. I think to the extent that the legislature would like to be more specific about what it would like to track, what metrics it would like to track for specific programs, it can certainly do that in statute or even through budget bill language if there's funding associated with it.

I think my understanding is that the task force is working on an update to its action plan that will, focus on community hardening and will include some new metrics, aside from just acres treated. And so to the extent that those could be Yeah.

You know, more formalized, that would certainly be something legislature could do.

Okay. Jump in. Yeah.

Let's turn to Senator Cabaldon, first.

Thanks. Mr. Metzger, if you don't mind, I have a freshman question because I'm figuring I might understand what I don't understand about this.

So the in your analysis, you point out that the source and one time funding are not growing and but they may be substantially lower. But I'm I'm curious because the I mean, we we do this a lot in in state government.

We we create a funding source for something, and then when we declare to ourselves that that funding source is the only way we can pay for that thing.

So if if we if we'd never created GGRF, if we'd never passed cap and trade, and then climate change happens, happened and is happening as it did, and wildfires both in terms of their direct consequences like my colleague mentioned,

but also impacts on insurance and everything else were to happen. It seems foreseeable that we or maybe not foreseeable because in the past, we would have responded in some other way.

Like, given given fires and everything else, we would have said, okay, this is important that we deal with resilience, hardening, all these other elements and therefore, we're making a general fund appropriation like we do for some of some large percentage of the rest of the budget.

Is do we is there some legal reason or is it purely cultural that would that we're thinking about these issues at least in this analysis as we lit Wildfire lives entirely within the GGRF space and that the fact that, our general fund revenues are up up $1- $3 billion a month is of no is completely unrelated fact.

It seems like they're like that but I'm brand new here I'll make it for a year. So maybe you can help.

Like, is there is there is there a reason why we don't this doesn't show up on your list of there's one time general fund, but legislature, you know, should also worry about that because our competing needs, but that which is typically in an LAO last page.

Why is the general fund not not on the table here?

Thank you for the question, Senator Cabaldon. I don't want to preclude the option of potentially using one time general fund for this purpose.

Our analysis was specifically focused on based on current law and policy and also based on the current budget con condition that we have established under the governor's budget and not necessarily on tomorrow's May revision or what's to come,

that the availability of general fund is quite limited for particular expenditures at this time. That's not to say that this should live solely within the realm of GGRF, for example.

It's just the decision that's been made within the current cap and invest structure as well as within kind of current legislative and administration priorities to to kind of look at wildfire resilience spending that way.

But certainly, there could be different decisions made. And again, we've also got funding coming from Prop 4 that's also providing some additional support.

But I don't I wouldn't wanna say that general fund is off the table or that there's not a potential for for using it for this purpose. It's just based on the current budget condition. That's not something that we've contemplated.

Well, on that note, just briefly before we wrap this little point up, the as you mentioned at the outset, the general we are backfilling general fund with GGRF for the operational budget of Cal Fire right now and that's the governor's current proposal as well.

So that's over 1 billion that was previously generally funded.

And so I that's one option for us to consider is if you actually freed up if you took care of the operational side of Cal Fire, it with the general fund, you free yourself up a billion dollars to just do have potentially or some piece of that heavy on the mitigation side.

So previously, yeah, Prior to last year, the Cal Fire operational budget, at least that piece of it was not GGRF funded. Is that right?

That's correct. So there was budget bill language that was adopted in 25-26 that for that was contingent on whether the general fund was projected to experience a deficit. There would be a certain amount of GGRF that would be used for Cal Fire's budget.

And so in 26-27, 1.25 billion of GGRF is being used for Cal Fire's operational budget.

750,000,000 of which is coming from the legislative discretionary piece of the cap and invest structure and 500,000,000 of which is coming from the interest earnings on the cap and invest fund.

Yep. Good. Well, I do think it's an interesting point. Right? As you as we just discussed this, you know, not only are we not finding mitigation out of the the general fund, but even the Cal Fire some operational budget is is actually not a general fund.

Technically, no, actually coming out of GGRF. Yeah. For a moment, I'll just say, the report to come back to the report itself, let's tee up some of our other panels as well.

The report talks about up to approximately 2,000,000 existing residential structures in the very high fire hazard severity zones, requires some level of home hardening defensible space.

According to CAL FIRE, costs vary, but the comprehensive mitigations average approximately 45,000 per structure.

Most homes in the high risk areas were built before the modern fire resistant construction standards took effect. I've seen there's I think there's data on that elsewhere in the report.

But it does say in 25-26 state budget, California directed approximately 350,000,000 towards wildfire prevention and mitigation against an estimated statewide prevention need of 4-7 billion. Do those do those numbers kinda resonate with you as well?

We've seen the study that's referenced in the report and and do acknowledge those numbers.

Yeah. Okay. Good. Well, I think that sets the table a little bit for for all of us. So, thank you.

You know, if you can stick around for questions, that'd be great. We'll we'll now run through our next three panelists and then have questions on all community. We'll start with you, Daniel. Please go ahead.

Alright. Well, good morning, Chair Becker, Chair Stern, Members of the committee, Daniel Berlant, California State Fire Marshal, and on behalf of Cal Fire director Joe Tyler. Thank you very much for having us today.

And, a very important conversation, not just, on, the cusp of the report being released, but, as we continue to develop, the the future of the Wildfire Enforced Resilience Action Plan, and how we, take, and are taking many of the recommendations and many of the points

you are making today, under consideration and inclusion into the future, of that action plan. The report pursuant to, your bill, Senate bill 2, 54 presents an important and timely message for California.

As you have already all mentioned, the state's wildfire crisis is no longer solely a fire suppression challenge. It's an economic challenge. It's an insurance challenge. It's a housing challenge.

It's a public safety challenge, and ultimately, it is a resilience, challenge that requires a whole of society response.

We believe the report correctly recognizes that California cannot respond, to a catastrophic wildfire after disaster strikes. We must reduce risk before the next fire, is ignited.

And this is exactly the direction that CAL FIRE office of state fire marshal's community wildfire preparedness strategy, has been moving towards for years. California is, as you all know, facing a wildfire environment unlike anything in our history.

Climate driven extremes, prolonged drought, historic tree mortality, and decades of fuel accumulation have fundamentally changed the scale and the intensity of the wildfires, that we are responding to across the state.

15 out of the 20 most destructive wildfires in just the past decade excuse me, have occurred with just, in the past decade. Entire communities, as you know and as you many of you represent, have been devastated in a matter of hours.

So at the same time, more Californians than ever are living in wildland urban interface areas, and that is, where the homes meet homes and development meet wildland or open vegetation.

And Chair Becker, to your your point and to the to the notes there, we believe that today there are roughly 4,000,000 homes located in California's wildland urban interface. And here's the most important part of this fact.

90% of those homes were built before today's modern, adoption, of, of building standards. So that gives us somewhat of a benchmark of the challenge in the community that we face. The consequence of this growing risk extend far beyond though the fire itself.

Families face increasing insurance costs, loss of coverage altogether. Local governments struggle with evacuation planning and infrastructure needs.

Utilities, as was mentioned, face extraordinary pressures to harden their systems while maintaining affordable and reliable energy. And vulnerable communities often bear the greatest burden because they have the fewest resources to prepare and recover.

And I very much acknowledge, that those of you who have had recent wildfires in your, districts understand this, firsthand. Now this, SB 254 report captures, the the the reality very clearly.

It concludes that California's long term resilience depends on sustained investments in risk reduction and Chair Stern, to your point, investments in stronger community preparedness, improved coordination across agencies and stakeholders, and policies that reduce catastrophic losses before they occur.

The report identifies several overarching policy pathways, and I'm focused really in to the risk reduction into the community space here. Among those, significantly include a commitment to community wildfire risk reduction, expanded mitigation investments and incentives,

greater alignment between the insurance market and resilience actions, improved local capacity and technical support, better use of shared data and science, as well as long term strategies that prioritize resilience over recovery alone. Now these are not abstract concepts.

They are practical recommendations that really mirror the direction that California has been advancing through the state's wildfire and forest resilience action plan.

Now in the next action plan that you see, we have been developing a very focused, area in what we're calling the community wildfire preparedness strategy.

And this strategy is built around a simple principle. Wildfire preparedness must happen at multiple scales simultaneously. Wildfire, excuse me, that strategy rests really on three interconnected components.

First, home hardening. Research continues to show that embers are responsible for a majority of the home ignitions during wildfires.

These embers can often travel miles ahead of the fire flame itself, igniting vulnerable components of the structures, and again, leading to complete destruction in those communities.

Now I will say though, a moment of pride here, California has been a national leader in addressing that threat. For nearly twenty years, we have, had a state adopted, some of the nation's first wildfire building standards for new construction in wildfire prone areas.

And research and data has continued to show that those homes have a significantly higher chance of surviving wildfires. And so, basically put, our code works.

Studies, continue to show though, that demonstrate that even homes built to those modern wildfire resilience standards, while they, again, significantly survive, it's those that were not built to the standard that are, remaining to be susceptible.

And some of the higher standards, include things like ember resistant vents, class a roofs, noncombustible siding like stucco or, fiber cement, tempered glass windows, enclosed eaves, ignition resistant construction material, all of which help us improve the survivability.

But we have to recognize that the challenge before us, as I mentioned, is most homes that are at risk were built before that standard. And that is why retrofitting existing homes has become such an important priority. Now the second piece of our strategy is defensible space.

This remains one of the most effective and immediate tools available to homeowners and communities. Creating and maintaining buffers, around structures reduces, overgrown and hazardous vegetation right up around them. It interrupts pathways for fire spread.

That is something we saw in the LA fires, a much more urban conflagration, but it was those flammable pathways that allowed, the fire to travel from home to home to home like dominoes. Defensible space cuts that pathway.

And more importantly for us, for our firefighters, it provides, a safe operational space during fires to take a stand and protect a community. Now at CAL FIRE, we've continued thank you to your support and investments to expand our defensible space inspections, public education, and local, resources, statewide.

We have also increased the emphasis on the ember resistance zone, a five foot safety zone immediately around the building, Because science continues to show that combustible materials closest to the home often determine whether or not the structure is going to survive the wildfire.

The third piece of our strategy is neighborhood level mitigation. Wildfire preparedness does not stop at the property line.

Communities survive together, or they don't survive at all. Programs such as Firewise USA, Fire Safe Councils, community, fuel reduction projects, evacuation route improvements, shaded fuel breaks, and neighborhood scale home hardening all recognize that wildfire

resiliency must occur collectively. Now governor Newsom has, streamlined has made streamlining wildfire regulations one of the hallmarks of his administration while maintaining California's nation leading environmental protections.

And, Senator Seyarto, to some of your comments about some of the CQUA challenges, your community has faced, In 2025, the governor issued an executive proclamation to expedite critical fuels reduction projects while protecting public health and the environment.

And through this streamlining process, which just expired, on May 1, projects, that are being improved, are being improved in little as thirty days, reducing timelines that, yes, often, have taken well over a year or more.

So far, three eighty three projects have been approved, through this streamlining process and have now been fast tracked, and we still have more, that are under review.

The SB 254 specifically, this report specifically emphasizes that community scale mitigation has to occur across, sector coordination. It's essential to reducing our losses.

And while Cal Fire strategy has already reflected that philosophy, we cannot rely on a single solution, and we certainly can't respond our way out of this crisis.

True resiliency requires a layered protection across parcels, across neighborhoods, across landscapes.

Now the office of the state fire marshal within CAL FIRE, is uniquely positioned to lead California's community wildfire preparedness and risk reduction strategy.

Because we're not only able to leverage our statewide fire prevention authorities, our building standards expertise, our wildfire science, our local fire service coordination, but as well our public education, all under one mission driven organization.

And so while CAL FIRE is obviously very focused on wildfires and response, within the department, our office, 365 days a year, is solely focused on fire prevention and community resilience preparedness.

The office of state fire marshal already serves as the state's lead agency for dispensable space regulations, for enforcement, for education, for wildfire building codes as I've mentioned, fire hazard severity zone mapping, fire prevention policy, as well as community risk reduction projects.

We work directly with local governments, with fire safe councils, with the building industry, with the insurance industry, with fire safe councils, and with residents across the state, all giving us, that operational reach necessary to translate policy into on the ground action.

Importantly, the SB 254 report calls for an integrated approach that aligns mitigation resiliency, insurance incentives, technical assistance, and long term risk reduction. And that's precisely the work that our team at CAL FIRE is doing every day.

Through our wildfire mitigation advisory committee, that meets every single month, we have established a formal structure to coordinate across the stakeholders and across the sectors.

We bring together experts from the fire service at the local level, insurance, utilities, local governments, academia, and community organizations, all to help us align our policy and to share best practices and advance, statewide mitigation strategies.

Wildfire preparedness and resiliency can't exist in silos. It requires connection between state policy into local implementation, combining science with enforcement, scaling preparedness from the individual homes all the way to the entire community.

And the office of state fire marshal, has both the statutory authority and, again, that operational experience to serve as the statewide backbone for community wildfire preparedness. Now the scale of the challenge before us is enormous.

Again, I don't need to to to tell you that. You all understand that firsthand.

But California is not starting from zero, and I think that's important to understand and recognize. And the recommendations outlined in the report validate much of the work already underway and validate that we must continue that focus to expand the effort.

Back to the community wildfire preparedness strategy that I've referenced, we're already working to operationalize it.

We're already working to implement many of the recommendations through science based mitigation, cross sector coordination, neighborhood scale resiliency, and targeted financial, assistance and incentives driven by risk reduction.

And, Senator Stern, I heard you loud and clear and look forward to talking more about how we do that.

But as I've mentioned, and the the piece that I think is really exciting from my perspective and from the team, we are updating the California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan.

You'll hear from the director of the task force momentarily, but we are actively incorporating key recommendations from the report into our strategy and into our work.

Now incentive, initiatives that you will likely see in that action plan range from emphasizing regional planning at the county level, wildfire mitigation validation to actually validate that the work is occurring, Establishing new community wildfire data standards, and metrics.

And the report re reinforces that again resiliency, as I mentioned at the beginning, requires us to to do more than emergency response. We have to have a coordinated mitigation.

We have to have better risk information, stronger building practices, and investments into those communities to truly reduce the vulnerabilities before the disaster occurs, and that is exactly the direction California is taking.

And, again, I thank you all for your investments because we are expanding on financial assistance. We are improving risk assessment tools, strengthening model local ordinances, and increasing technical assistance.

But as our partners at the LAO have very well identified, much of it has been on one time funding. Funding we are grateful for, funding that continues to matter.

But we are charged with having to have a conversation of how do we sustain this. And I'm just gonna answer Senator Ciardo's question here.

In the latest wildfire prevention grant funds, that we made available last week, $70,000,000 through the climate bond, we are prioritizing in our fuel reduction, category maintenance over new projects, making sure that the investments you have made over the last several years,

that we are maintaining those, not just putting new work on the ground that's critical, not just chasing acres, but maintaining the work and the investment you have made.

But most importantly, the report underscores that preparedness must occur at the community scale, and we are working to move beyond just reporting on acres. And that's an important metric.

It's been an important metric in the last decade for us to change our philosophy, our emergency response philosophy. Our firefighters focused on responding from one emergency to the next.

Using the metric of acres treated helped us really track that work metric of the work that our firefighters were doing. But it also, you know, we have to continue to look at, moving away from what I like to call random acts of mitigation. It's great that we're investing in these projects.

Don't get me wrong. But when they're not to scale and when they're not interconnected, they are random. We have to focus on using wildfire risk reduction modeling to identify the right mitigations in the right place.

And we are piloting tools to do just that. Analyzing risk, providing a decision making planning platform that best reduces the risk while providing the highest return on investment.

This platform, combines AI, geospatial data, and wildfire science, all to prioritize which mitigations and which treatments optimize the resources and measures the outcome across communities and forests and fire prone landscapes all at the same time.

But here's what's really important to note that even with modern tools, sustaining and expanding this work will require continued partnerships and investment. Wildfire resiliency cannot be achieved through one time funding or through isolated projects.

It requires long term commitment, sustained collaboration, and shared responsibility across every level of government, the private sector, and the public. It is not just on the state to do it all, but I do view that it is our role to provide the tools and the guidance to

support the private sector and communities, to bring funds and continue to do this work. Now California has an opportunity to lead the nation in demonstrating what true wildfire resiliency looks like.

Not just simply responding and reacting to disasters after they occur, but proactively reducing risk before catastrophic fires strike. Not just rebuilding with the same vulnerabilities, but building stronger, safer, and more resilient communities.

And not just treating wildfire preparedness solely as a firefighting issue, but as a comprehensive resiliency strategy that protects lives, homes, economies in the future of the state.

And so in closing, again, I wanna emphasize the SB 254 report, it provides an important road map for California's future.

Our community wildfire preparedness strategy, and I say ours, but I it's really important to note back to the wildfire mitigation advisory committee, our strategy is with our local, our other state entities, our federal, our tribal, our private sector partners.

But that work and that strategy is working, and it's helping many, many in putting the recommendations into practice through home Harding, defensible space, neighborhood level mitigation, technical assistance, financial assistance, incentives.

We are moving California from a model of response to a model of resiliency.

And just last week was our wildfire preparedness week, and it was a perfect time to ensure that we showcase that we are ready for fire season and for the peak of the fire year, but more importantly, to talk about these steps that homeowners need to take so that California,

is prepared, not just for this year, but so that we're building a safer California for generations to come. So I thank you for the time, and I very much look forward to your questions, after my colleagues.

Excellent. Good. We'll use a lot of words we like to hear in comprehensive, coordinated, you know, sort of bang for the buck. A lot of good stuff. Appreciate it.

We'll, move over now to you, Robin. Thank you.

Good morning, Chair Stern, Chair Becker, committee members. Thank you very much for having me here today. My name is Robyn Fennig, and I'm the deputy director for recovery at Cal OES.

And I'm also our state hazard mitigation officer tasked with overseeing FEMA's hazard mitigation assistance program, and how we implement that in California. First, I wanna provide a brief context on the AB 38 pilot structure that informed our early home hardening efforts.

Through AB 38, which was passed in 2019, the legislature tasked the California Wildfire Mitigation Program or CWMP, Joint Powers Authority, with funding pilot projects that provide neighborhood or community wide benefits against wildfire.

Chief Berlantz and my respective teams work together to support these communities, tackle challenges, and capture best practices. The CWMP JPA is not the subrecipient for the FEMA or AB 38 grants.

Naming the local entities as the subrecipients allows us to understand those barriers, assessing and managing grants, while also allowing the program to adapt to the unique needs of their communities.

Moreover, the legislature mandated specific criteria to evaluate risk and prioritize by need with social vulnerability criteria built into the bill language.

The JPA ranked counties using those criteria and worked with local experts to identify the communities that best met those criteria within the communities in the counties, as well as the groups to specifically manage those programs.

Additionally, the intent of this funding was to match with FEMA grants. At the time, it made sense for us to leverage federal funds. We didn't have any reason not to. And up until then, most of our FEMA grants for wildfire were largely for education, outreach, and warning systems.

And we also had zero home hardening grants to point to. So this is really important work for us to undertake, really understand what those challenges were, and then try to figure out how to scale.

Obviously, we are where we are today, and we have a big task in front of us. A few years a few years later, we have learned a lot, and we are consistently incorporating those lessons learned across our entire FEMA grant portfolio, not just the CWMP or even Home Hearting alone.

It may be helpful to clarify that the CWMP is one important component of our broader approach to community wildfire risk reduction, but not the strategy in its entirety as Chief Berlant had mentioned.

Framing it as the whole strategy could unintentionally overlook the significant work being done by teams across both Cal Fire and Cal OES.

For awareness, in our FEMA hazard mitigation grants portfolio, we have over 116 active projects for wildfire, resilience alone with over 460,000,000 federal dollars being being used right now. We also have another 95 projects under review of FEMA for $577,000,000 in federal funds.

When you include the the the non federal match that our local partners and tribal partners are are bringing to the table, this investment totals over $1,200,000,000 in wildfire risk reduction in the FEMA grants alone.

This includes $480,000,000 in community hardening across the state, and that's over 360,000,000 outside of the CWMP. So the work that we're doing through CWMP is funneling outside and helping other communities stand up their programs.

CWMP has helped us tremendously understand FEMA's EHP process, and it's allowed us to build tools that support appropriate scoping, collection of property information, and helping us shift staffing at Cal OES to align with the subject matter expertise, that we need to get these grants moving more quickly.

Prior to these shifts, it has taken on average six hundred and eighty days or as many as thirteen hundred days to receive FEMA approval to start a grant, in the wildfire space specifically.

We cannot begin until FEMA approves the grant within our hazard mitigation programs. Otherwise, we jeopardize all of the funding.

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

We've worked with the communities to right size their approach and try to maximize the federal funds to then turn to state funded projects until the end of the state liquidation period ends. How could the effectiveness be improved?

The simplest answer is to get the federal grant flowing and to get it flowing more quickly.

This new kind of landscape of hazard mitigation that we're operating under means that we honestly haven't had a FEMA hazard mitigation approval of a new HMA grant since July 2025 due to the DHS secretary $100,000 review and approval policy.

It's recently changed with the appropriations bill that was passed to re to reopen FEMA if you will where Congress also now has a role to play in grants with $100,000 more or more in federal funds across all Stafford Act programs.

We've also weathered multiple DHS and federal shutdowns, which means the EHP process has slowed down even more. And we also have seen litigation involving our grant programs.

I know as Karsten and I have had some other conversations about BRIC, about last week in the Assembly Budget Subcommittee four, we had a similar discussion to the one we're having today and heard from several local entities working to tackle wildfire risk and increase insurability in their respective communities.

There has largely been success with some local groups funding that work, and we're also trying to capture those things and and share those with our CWMP communities as well. Thus far in the CWMP, we've hardened a 155 properties.

We have 19 properties in active construction and 370 properties with assessments completed waiting for their turn to start. Our average costs are pretty reasonable, establishing defensible space defensible space costs on average just over $12,000, and the structural retrofit components are just over $49,000.

The JPA has been successful in helping pilot programs build their capacity and identify best practices to scale other mitigation programs across the wildfire and home hardening portfolio.

Some of the highlights that we're able to share are one, completion of a home hardening framework, that helps an entity start up a program by walking through all of the considerations, and recommendations based on the pilot program experiences and also other communities

who are starting to engage in that work. We have used this to properly scope other programs outside of CWMP and right size existing programs under FEMA review.

We also have a standardized homeowner application portal built with the collection of environmental and historic preservation information in mind. We've also trained FEMA to actually use it to manage our EHP processes moving forward.

We've also leveraged our understanding of the overall EHP process to advise federally funded projects on which areas to prioritize to access those that have reduced barriers and prioritizing network first to kind of scale and build the momentum within communities.

We the JPA has also trained 53 assessors in our pilot communities to address unique property specific risk that property owner education is a really vital component to what we do with the JPA.

We've also established minimum quality standards or what we call the MQS, which are program guidelines for material selection and performance quality.

It's a blueprint for how each retrofit should be completed, providing the subrecipient, property owners, and contractors an easy way to identify what work is being performed and why, and how the retrofits increase protection.

And there are also references to relevant building codes and external program standards that thoughtfully align with other state initiatives and partners like IBHS. It's also got pictures so people understand this is what this retrofit means.

This is what it looks like and how it kind of accomplishes the the the task. Moving forward, we're also taking lessons learned in trying to streamline the delivery of the Prop four, grant program.

We don't have federal dollars available to match, and if we did, we would still recommend delivering the Prop four program with only state funding.

The Prop four Wildfire hardening program has legislative mandates including prioritization of low income communities on the fire risk reduction list and in high high fire severity zones.

Through CWMP, we have learned about specific roles that have impacted program success and used those to help the kind of the next generation of home hardening communities to model after to facilitate program delivery.

In our selection process, we will factor in proximity to contractors as well as selecting sites near the existing Cal Fire funded defensible space or fuels treatment areas to help maximize state investment.

Thank you for your time today, and I stand by to answer any questions after the other panels complete their presentations.

Okay. Thank you, deputy director. We'll we'll turn lastly to Patrick Wright. I think he's gonna be able to remotely testify here while Fire and Force Resilience Task Force. Mister Wright.

Can you see me?

You are with us.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. Delighted to be here. Apologize I could not be, there in person with you. It turns out I'm actually in Nebraska with all of the Western States and the Forest Service leadership, trying to discuss how to deal with some of

these same issues to better align our efforts and to deal with the many changes that are underway at the federal level. I'm now going to share my screen and walk you through just a short, set of slides to give you a sense of where the task force is going, where the stage is going,

and then end with some specific thoughts on, in response to committee questions on how we're trying to work with regions to better prioritize and report on the benefits of projects. As many of you know, the task force not able to get anything else.

We're with you. Yeah. We got you on the screen, your task force, your PowerPoint.

I see that, but it's not advancing.

Oh, it doesn't matter.

Edith, can you help out here?

I cannot

I'm gonna have to I'll stop my sharing and maybe you can try yours. There we go.

Next slide. I'll try to run through these quickly.

As many of you know, the Task Force was created the most recent version about five years ago. In response to the development of the Nation's First Wildfire and Forest Resilient Action Plan, where we're able to put together in one place for the first time. All of the related activities of state, federal, local, agencies in dealing with our wildfire crisis, very much a science based program that's designed to align the agencies and to grow regional partnerships throughout the state.

Next slide. We get a lot of our work done through regional meetings up and down the state where regional leaders have been able to hear firsthand from Secretary Crowfoot, Chief Tyler and the federal agencies on where they're going and for us in turn to hear about the key issues and priorities in each part of the state. These have been tremendously successful and we certainly hope to build on them in the future. Next slide.

We've accomplished a lot as Chief Berlant has said in the last several years, coordinated over $6,000,000,000 of state and federal investments.

We've ramped up treatments to over 700,000 acres annually, including more than a doubling of prescribed fire. We also have considerably streamlining processes as Chief Berlant also mentioned, projects that typically took a year or two to get approved are now being approved in thirty days. And we're now working on potential solutions to that, effort to make sure that it extends beyond the period that just ended in May. We spent a lot of time building a regional capacity.

The State Department of Conservation has a program known as the Regional Forest and Fire Capacity Program where millions of dollars are flowing to partnerships throughout the state, to give them the capacity they need to address their priority areas.

We've also developed a series of interagency strategies for things like prescribed fire, reforestation, landowner assistance. These are programs that previously candidly were operated in silos. You'd have a State Park Program, you have a CalFire Program, you have a Forest Service Program, you have an NRCS Program over and over again. We've brought these agencies together to integrate and align those programs to better leverage funding and make a difference on the ground. And then finally, we spend a lot of time.

I'll come come back to this at the end of developing new tools and data to much more effectively design our projects to make sure we're hitting the highest priorities and to report on the results of those projects as well. Next slide, I think gives you just the framework for how our action plan update is heading.

We will have a comprehensive landscape resilience strategy that we'll be outlining, in the near future together with a community strategy led by CalFire that includes many of the elements that Chief Berlant talked about together with the framework for trying to get the regions to go where they need. At the county level for community work and at the regional level for landscape work. We're doing everything we can to give local and regional agencies the tools they need to scale up, go bigger, and go faster.

The next couple of slides give you again just a short flavor of each of these strategy.

The Landscape Resilience Strategy is really focusing on prioritizing the high and very high hazard areas. Our scientists are telling us if we can be laser focused on those areas we get a much bigger bang for the buck than if we scatter our projects across the landscape as Chief Berlant was mentioning. So we're going to be spending a lot of time with various decision support tools that help regional entities better plan and prioritize those projects so they can hit these high priority areas.

We also need to work to build our fuel break network. We've got a federal network, we've got a private network and we've got a non-federal network that's being built by CalFire.

We're in the process of integrating all of those networks so that we have a comprehensive fuel break system throughout the state to better protect communities and help firefighters, as fires do occur. And then finally, spending a lot more time recently on restoring recently burned areas.

We face a real risk in this state that up to half of our store forest could be lost if we don't get in there aggressively and start replanting areas that have been burned at high intensity and simply can't recover on our own. So those are some of just some of the brief highlights of our Landscape Resilience Strategy.

The next slide walks through just the broad strokes of the Community Preparedness Strategy that Chief Berlant summarized, everything from home hardening, defensible space, community wide programs, particularly at the county level, which we think is a real sweet spot to get integration of work in our communities around the state. A big effort with both utilities and CalTrans to reduce unwanted ignitions and then again to continue building out that fuel break network to protect communities and critical infrastructure throughout the state.

The next slides speak to the big differences we're facing in Northern California and in Southern California. As you know, Northern California is really faced with forests that are way too dense. So our highest priority there is getting more thinning done, more beneficial fire done, more reforestation where that's needed and to expand our Wood Utilization Program so that we can save money and make productive use of the material that's coming off of all of our forest.

All of that, of course, has to be coordinated with community and home resilience efforts if we're gonna get our biggest bang for the buck. In Southern California, the situation's a little bit different.

You see from the next slide, certainly we need to continue our emphasis there on community and home hardening efforts, but sorry, I didn't go back a slide, but we're also, have a different situation on the landscape where reducing ignitions from roadways and utility corridors is really the highest priority in Southern California. So we've developed this unique partnership.

This is one of the benefits of the task force brings where we have CalFire, the Forest Service, and CalTrans working very aggressively to take care of all the high priority roadways in Southern California to reduce that ignition risk, in ways that help each community in the state, prevent the kinds of fires that we've seen recently there. The next slide goes into a little bit more detail on how we're beginning to track and report on all this work.

We do have an interagency treatment dashboard that allows you and others to track every one of the 2,000 plus projects that we funded on the state side and another thousand or more on the federal side.

We track them both by activity. Is it thinning? Is it prescribed fire? Is it reforestation? And also by ownership.

Is it on federal land? Is it on state land? Is it on private private land? We've got a comprehensive setup. The next phase of this is going to be to start to put in a plan projects so that we can get a better sense of where all the different projects of the different agencies are across the landscape.

The next slide zeros in a little bit more in Southern California to give you a sense of some of the issues that we've had with this approach. As Chief Berlant has said, it's wonderful that we've funded hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of projects in Southern California, but those are each isolated projects that require a grant application, requires a review, requires a report, requires crews to be hired, requires permits to be had. We simply aren't going to solve our wildfire crisis on a project by project basis.

So we're beginning to shift both how we do projects, how we fund them and how we report on them. The next slide is a really good example of how CalFire is moving in this direction whereas previously it would have funded those isolated projects.

CalFire and other agencies are now moving to block grants. In this case, where they took $5,000,000 of forced health money, $5,000,000 of wildfire prevention, money and gave the Southern California groups a $10,000,000 block grant to fund 23 projects at one time. So those will be increasingly block grants to these individual sub regions or block grants to the region as a whole.

We think this approach is vital if we're gonna be able to scale up in the way that we need to to attack this crisis more cost effectively. This approach also allows us to better measure results.

It's very challenging to report on the benefits of individual projects. But when you group those projects, it allows you to measure how they can work together.

This next slide from Southern California is tells you where we are on this process is we're right on the cutting edge of this, but this is a great example where the fuel break network that the Forest Service and CalFire are building together with the ignition reduction. Work that's underway is going to significantly reduce the burn probability throughout Southern California.

Again, this is just one metric but it gives you an example of how we're trying to move rapidly beyond acres treated to give you and others a better sense of how these projects are working collectively to reduce risk across the state. The next slide, which is from a different part of the state, from the Placerville region gives you a similar story.

The map to the upper left shows the areas that the consultant team, the modeling, the data, the community have arrived at as priority treatment areas. And the map on the bottom right gives you a prediction of how the burn probability in that area will change if we actually implement those projects. Again, this is all cutting edge work but you're going to see more and more of this from us and from CalFire at both the community level and the landscape level.

The final slide takes it even one step further where we can take some of the same information. In this case, it's a project near Sonora on the Stanislaus National Forest where they've used these same tools to implement these projects and are reporting on significant risk reductions to homes, to power lines, to communication sites, to watersheds, carbon, etcetera.

So again, as every day goes by, we're getting better and better about getting beyond acres treated and using a sophisticated new set of tools to both better plan and prioritize projects and to better report on the results.

The bottom line for us is all about going faster, smarter, and bigger to link work at the community level with link with work at the landscape level and to be able to better report to the legislature, to the administration and others the effectiveness of this work and the benefits we're getting from the dollars we do have. Thank you again. Happy to answer any questions, you have as we go along.

Great. Thank you. Well, we really appreciate all of those presentations, and we'd like to dive in now. Any questions?

Can I start with, bringing you back up, Mister Wright? And just to kind of dive back into the previous point, you know, I don't know if you wanna there's a couple slides I guess I wanna focus on. Maybe you gave us the Stanislaus example just now, but then you sort of you outlined your NorCal and SoCal strategies. Do you actually have a number of how many homes or communities will be will have risk reduced from this whole range of projects?

No. We don't have information quite down to that level. The biggest challenge we have right now is that the landscape level, we have tremendously good data on the condition of vegetation throughout the state down to the three meter level. And we also have sophisticated fire models that track fire as it moves through vegetation. So our predictive capacity at the landscape level is very high.

The challenge that we have at the community level, and certainly, Chief Berlant can talk about this, is we're now getting there. But the challenge to date has been to get that parcel level information. Who actually is doing home hardening? Who is doing defensible space? And how do you track fires as they progress through the community, not vegetation fires, but structure to structure fires.

Great advances are being made in each of those areas every day, which is why you heard from Chief Berlant that CalFire's committed, to working on a new set of metrics and models for the community level that will be able to match what we've done at the landscape level.

But I guess what I'm getting at is your central goal here is not to avoid property loss from fire. Is that correct?

Well, I think our we have multiple goals. Obviously, we wanna risk, we wanna reduce the fire risk to everyone, both communities and landscapes.

I get that there's multiple goals, but what I'm saying is I saw acreage on every single chart of how you track your progress. And I also saw forest growth as a metric with actual concrete data, but that there is no concrete data driving your hardening strategy. And in fact, as I saw it, your NorCal strategy is about landscape resilience and it assumes that the whole North is a bunch of forests from what I can tell.

And the last time I checked, like in the hills of Orinda or throughout the East Bay or in all the very high fire severity zones or high fire zones that are experiencing massive insurance crisis that impacting that market is not the central driving thesis of your spending strategy. Is that a fair assessment?

No. I don't think so. I think we are our goal is to try to align in community work with landscape work. And as you've heard from Daniel and Cal Fire, they're about with us to launch a comprehensive strategy, that is focused on community preparedness, particularly at the county level. We're gonna be aligning that with a landscape strategy, that focuses more on the regional and subregional level.

They both go together.

Sure. I get they go together, but it's like, if when you have 1.5% of the funds for one piece of it, you can say it goes together. But what does that actually mean in terms of impact?

I think the concern here, you know, we can look at both the GGRF piece or the Prop 4 piece where the bulk of the Prop 4 funds are also at least as of right now, programmed in a way that chase acreage or say watershed health, or other goals aside from avoiding property loss and preserving public safety.

And so, the question is whether you can start to reform your administration of these other programs to make community safety the driving metric and what restrictions you have on doing so?

So for example, if we wanted regional if we wanted forest health, for example to prioritize community safety, is that possible under

Oh, no. I think that's very much what's happening now as I tried to show in some of our brief graphics. We're prioritizing high hazard zones as you see from the

Hey, can we pull that one back up? I'm I'd be good to go through it. Look, pull that landscape resilience strategy up. I get I was looking at high hazard zones and I saw huge stretches of the Eastern Sierra in there, which is great. There's a lot out there to do.

I just didn't think that many people live there. That seems like the bulk of the landscape.

Well, no. Actually, I think the highest risk area from the landscape perspective, you can go back to the previous slide that shows the high hazard zones, is the Sierra Foothills area that is extremely vulnerable to fire. And so with the landscape

Take it back just real quick. Take it back to that Landscape Resilience Strategy slide. Can we go there for one second? I don't know who's in charge of them.

I think you need to go back to

Slides here. Yeah. Go back a little more if you don't mind. A little bit more. A little more.

One more. Keep going. There we go. Yeah. Right.

Oh, that other one. The one you just passed. There we go. Right. So I see the red areas are where you have what you're calling high risk.

Right. So but that wildfire hazard potential doesn't actually weight potential property loss. Correct?

I, no. It's this is dealing with hazard rather than risk, but we have increasingly sophisticated tools, of course, that could do both of those things as we're planning and prioritizing projects.

Yep. No. I appreciate it. And some of it may be that the statutory direction is so multi pronged that you sort of you're chasing everything and you're not actually, you know, we've set it up in a way that sort of leaves the community safety or the measurability of outcomes from a insurance, risk reduction, or insurable loss reduction.

So I'm wondering how much you can do to adjust that now or if we actually need to work that out through the budget or some statutory changes around all this.

Because it seems like the the lack of waiting of home and community safety and it's just it's getting in your way of of delivering outcomes. Because so far, I haven't heard a number of homes. I know from the Community Wildfire Mitigation Program that you all are administering through your JPA. You're shooting for 2,000 homes, I think was the goal. 2,000?

I know we're not even close to that at this point. But if you say, okay, we've got a $100,000,000 to get to 2,000 homes. Chief Berlant, you said we have 4,000,000 homes? Okay. So we're a little short.

Right? We've sized it based on, okay, we're gonna try to hit 2,000. Well, we got now 3,980,000 more to go, and yet that's the full scope of the funds that we're looking at. So I just I don't see how our state strategy is right sized towards the scope of the insurance risk and the overall economic risk the 254 report articulated. I know that's sort of a more of a rhetorical point maybe and maybe you all can't quite answer it today, but I do think it yeah.

It's a, I don't know what we're aiming for here, and we're a little concerned about the scale.

Senator, if I could I know it's rhetorical, but I absolutely agree that is the number one challenge. It really has to be the first step, for us of implementing the community provider strategy has to be figuring out our common set of data to really understand. Because I use the number of 4,000,000 homes. That's what we know physically is in the wildland urban interface.

What we don't know though is how many of those homes on their own have been retrofitted, how many of those homes, you know have had work done on them.

And so, really the first thing that has to be done here is ensuring that we have a common set of data, and then being able to put it pull it together to truly understand where is the greatest risk.

Your points are all valid about, you know, the maps that show hazard, don't necessarily incorporate where are the communities that have the greatest impact, and that is what you will see when the action plan is released, is got to be step number one for us, making sure we're aligned on the data and then crunching it all together.

Do we have, are the folks from AON here who are with us? Who you gotta go now? Jump in. Go go go jump.

Can I jump in?

Yeah. Please go.

Because some of we'll answer a little bit of.

What's the fastest way to reduce risk to the homes? The fastest way.

Yeah. It's a great question. Defensible space, reduces the emmer collection right around the edge. Right?

Fuel modification.

Correct.

Correct. So, to me, that's you know, I'm I hear some great plans, but plans aren't what's going to reduce the risk. The risk is done at the ground level where we actually get the projects done. And so that is where I think my colleague is also concerned about is, hey, this other stuff is great, But right now, our biggest risk is those homes that are in the WUI areas and and how to get that fuel modification done in that defensible space.

Over the years, that defensible space model has changed.

Correct?

Yeah. Correct. With the recent, especially ember resistance on wall adopt creating the regulation.

Noe we're looking at ember cast as opposed to what we had before, which means the fuel modification area, the defensible space area is different. It's-

And we've expanded as more homes are in high hazard areas, requirements to maintain defensible space in communities that maybe traditionally did not maintain or have local defensible space ordinances.

Correct. And so it's, you know for me, it's really important for us to be able to put. Because it sounds like we've been doing a lot of great work and starting to use the all the tools that we have to identify where the problems are the worst and how we gotta get there.

But we gotta get the people on the ground, and that's the other part of that is there's a workforce for now and a workforce for going forward that we're gonna have to deal with from the budget perspective. Because otherwise, we're not gonna be able to get the work done. And as I had stated before, tell me really quickly about the, Governor's orders as in relation to being able to or CEQA exemptions.

Where is that? Because I got cities out there that are stuck in CEQA hell. So fix that.

In late 2025 through May 1, we accepted applications through the California Natural Resource Agency to streamline projects. So far, 383 as of today projects have been fast tracked in less than thirty days. We are still, the team is reviewing several 100 more, but it is important to note that was through an emergency proclamation that has concluded.

And so as Patrick, alluded to as well and probably policy conversations for you all as well of how do we take the lessons learned from that streamlining. And determine whether they should be implemented as ongoing fixes.

As because here's what I don't wanna see happen. I don't wanna see the mitigation money. They got the grant money. It's sitting in the bank. They're going through this process.

And because it fell outside the window of this mitigation or the sequel exemptions, that they burned down neighborhoods

While their mitigation money sits in a bank because we have an environmental thing that says, oh, you know, this modification, you're gonna have to get this permit and that permit, because the worst of the scenarios is that the entire hillside burns down and there is no plant life and there is no animal life. And so that's what we're trying to prevent and that's what, I hope our efforts are going to be, on this next step. Identifying what we need to do is one thing.

Getting it on the ground is the to me, that's the most important part. And that's the part we need information from you, what we need to give you to do the tools to do the job.

Now I'm gonna go fight in appropriations. I'll be back in a little bit.

I appreciate that. For the other committee members, I'll just mention though, we even accepted applications from projects that were not funded. So we encouraged applicants to apply for the streamlining even if they didn't have the money in the bank to make sure that the streamlining CEQA was approved. And now as we, release fire prevention dollars or soon to be available dollars awarded, they'd have the CEQA documents all ready to go. And so your points are valid.

I just wanna stress that even projects not funded

In the bank?

Yeah. That's it.

They should have been streamlined already. So that's my point.

I look forward to working with our Vice chair on extending the Governor's Executive Order and finding a way to codify some of those elements from the VTP. I think it's a point well taken and I watched a goat project get turned down by my local county and that exact hill size would burn down all of Big Rock just now and killed my next door neighbor. So I'm I Yeah. Betty's not here. She stayed behind.

She ran our local movie theater. She was blind in her nineties and I told my wife every single day about that hillside. And we were having a baby and she thought I was just a crazy paranoid person, you know. And so the neighbors raised a fuss with the county, under the previous Supervisor and then we walked away from few million dollars and then that entire hillside, just burned us all down. So I am not, trying to advocate here that you don't focus on landscapes at all.

And Mister Wright, please don't take my criticism as, any sort of, yeah turning on that. It's just to put community safety at the heart of it all and I think it'll really help tighten things up. I wanted to see if AON, I know you guys had done some modeling in the 254 report on this front. We talked about it briefly in the hearing yesterday. Do you mind just coming up briefly and jumping in on this panel?

Just I wanted to get your perspective because if you did put say I don't know what the metric is. In short avoided insured losses or fair plan remove. I'm not sure quite what it is but, when you look at the sort of state of mitigation funds that we've been evaluating today. Is there a way to get more bang for our buck from a community safety perspective?

Yes. Thank you very much for the opportunity to to join the panel here. When we did our modeling, we performed the mitigation modeling kind of in two different ways. One, where we did a kind of randomized approach to just selecting structures and mitigating this one, mitigating that one. And as expected, you kind of get this slow decrease throughout California if you're just kind of applying applying the

Random acts of mitigation.

Random acts of mitigation.

For the sheet.

Yes. Exactly.

So, then we prioritized based on communities and based on areas where we were able to segment and say, here's one area, here's another area. Actually, just as you called me up, I texted my lead modeler to say, exactly what is the definition of that area so we can get that back to you.

But we prioritized areas and we said, if we actually were to mitigate these in order, which is admittedly a little bit of an extreme example because you don't mitigate just one community and then move on to the next.

But we said, if you were to carry this out, how does that change the overall effect of the mitigation? And the reality is when you if you're able to really hyper prioritize your highest risk areas, then you can significantly reduce the overall exposure of California, much more quickly than with those random acts of mitigation.

Sorry, when you say risk, you don't mean hazard as as they're defining it.

Right. We we're actually looking at structures and we use the average annualized loss of a structure and of a community. So we accumulated this not just by the number of structures exposed but the modeled average annualized loss within a community, using a suite of wildfire models.

Understood. Mister Wright, do you have a comment, either a reaction to Aon's modeling or there was a presentation from Milliman yesterday on the same kind of concept. We'll get into a little more with the the upcoming panel with Professor Werra. But, yeah.

Yeah. I would say we at CalFire are very much aware of those modeling efforts as you saw from some of the examples I showed you from, Stanislaus in Placerville. That's exactly what they're doing. They're modeling different treatments around those communities to try to figure out which exact locations give you the biggest bang for the buck. And it turns out that there's a mix.

In some cases, you need to treat right adjacent to the community. In other cases, you need to supplement that with treatments further away from the community because you've got really dense forest that are gonna provide a wick for fire to come right into the community. So it's really an all of the above strategy, but there's no question that it's a community first strategy in both our landscape resilience strategy and our community strategy.

Because I saw on the Stanislaus side I gotta remember the number. Was it a 16% sort of projected risk reduction?

Something in that ballpark.

I think that's what I think that's what you hit. I know you had you you had a couple acreage numbers in there too. But is that based on average annualized loss or is that what that 16% get at? What?

That's getting at the, what economists calculate as an avoided cost, which is looking at the value of those properties and the reduced risk of those properties, being, consumed by fire. Mean, I don't have all the detailed economics on that, but there are standard ways of calculating those things now that we and others are using.

Okay. But it's not necessarily your statutory directive to do so. You're using it, but we haven't talked to.

We are working with with CalFire and others to develop these highly sophisticated models that you just heard about to help each region do that because each region has a different risk profile, a different set of vegetation, different risk structure. So rather than the state going out and deciding where the priority areas are, we're funding counties and regional partnerships to scale up and do that work themselves. So while you might argue we don't have a specific mandate to do that, that's exactly what we're doing.

That's the key focus of our strategy across the state, at the community level, and the landscape level to give local and regional agencies the tools to do exactly that.

Look, I appreciate that there's a sort of regional focus, but I think there are even random regional acts of mitigation that are possible. And so when I when I look, for example, at what the JPA has done that it's focused on, what is it, six counties? seven counties? skipping over the most populous parts of the entire state for the initial funding tranche. That doesn't say to me that you're putting avoided average annualized loss or avoided cost at the front.

You're trying to come up because of us often, we say, oh, what about my county? in my county?

So right now, we're so we were the sole state funder of say Tuolumne or Shasta. But meanwhile, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Orange, LA, not on your list. Now you're that's for the Community Wildfire Mitigation Program. I'm not talking about your work, Patrick, but talking our our friends in the JPA here.

So, you know, we're I just worry we're talking past each other a little bit with this, and I'm not sure quite how to reconcile, but I think it'll be important work for this, for our working group and our process going forward.

Great. A few things on my end. So I guess one thing I'll say for for Daniel. For the Community Wildfire Mitigation Program, when funding became available, was the local capacity or material and contractor availability the larger barrier in terms of getting the program up and running?

For the Joint Powers Authority?

To Robin.

Yeah. You know, I not part of the initial barriers.

You know, the the the first several years, the main focus was really and now we have these tools, building the prioritization tool to know which retrofit should be done, being able to actually build an assessment tool to walk around the home and figure out based on the actual risk profile of that home, where is it adjacent to an open wildland area, what are the construction features, then be able to prioritize using cost benefit tools determining again the prioritization of the actual retrofits or mitigations that need to be occurred.

Those were some of the initial barriers. I'll turn it to my colleague, but I'm gonna make one comment. The biggest barrier has been as, Deputy Director Fennig has mentioned, being able to access the federal dollars and not being able to actually start work on the homes that are in the pipeline until they get FEMA approval.

That's I really have nothing to add. I think that is honestly the number one barrier is trying to get the homeowners the retrofits completed because of the access of the FEMA dollars.

But Senator, your point about the contractors and the labor just yesterday met with the contractors association, a meeting I have quarterly with them, talking about how do we continue to scale up the education of contractors to be able to do this work. The building code has been around now for twenty years, so builders know. The building industry has been part of writing that code.

But the point you brought up is a barrier, maybe not the largest barrier but making sure that there's the labor force to do it and the skilled contractors, to wanna bid on these projects. We wanna make sure that we've, closed that gap, and so that's where ongoing work with the contractors, is a focus for us.

Okay. This feel like an important work stream here. The for Deputy Director, are there other stage these could be effective partners in home hardening beyond Cal OES and State Fire Marshall?

Yes. So I know the housing and community development through the CDBG programs both the disaster post disaster allocations those kind of after the fact, appropriations for disaster recovery, as well as their traditional CDBG program. There are specific programs that they have set up or trying to set up with locals to do some retrofitting or defensible space. And it really is dependent on the specific appropriation notice of funding opportunity. And, HUD is as the federal sponsoring agency.

The CDBG DR program in particular has a lot of kind of headquarters discretion for the notice of funding opportunity process, which is very different than the FEMA you know, grant making process.

But, I think the HUD grants are kind of the more traditional avenue outside of the FEMA grants that Cal OES administers or the grants that Cal Fire administers.

Okay. Thank you for that. For Mister Wright, the I don't know either repeat been repeated calls to provide more granular and detailed data transparency. We talked a lot about data here today, the way we data comments concept. So any can you comment any challenges related to collecting and making data available?

Well, again, as I said earlier, I think we've got a really good handle on landscape scale data. The real challenge, but we're working on this with CalFire, with the insurance companies and others, is getting that parcel to parcel data on who's done defensible space, who's done home hardening. Once we get that information and can put it into models, then we'll be able to significantly improve our ability to pinpoint high priority areas.

Can you just run your proposed spending plan through Aon's model in 254?

I'm sorry. I'm not sure what you're referring to as our proposed spending plan.

Oh, I was saying you're outlining all your landscape I mean, all the spending you just outlined.

Well, again, most of the most of our work at Cal Fire's work is accomplished through grants to local and regional entities. They then take their bundles of projects and run them through these models. Some areas are further along than others.

I was just saying, like, the Stanislaus you projected 16% if you would just if you could take that proposal, for example, and run it through if you're lacking data, is there an issue with that? Are you for 254, we just have you we have, your models on loan right now, basically, through your agreements. Is that something that we can sort of get a more an updated set of kind of granularity about what kind of bang for our buck we've our plans currently have is that

We we'd have to work with CEA on how to do that. That happen.

Because you've sort of done it. You didn't base your projections on what CalFire's articulated here per se. You did your own version of sort of, working backwards from avoided annual average annualized loss avoidance.

We started with a a California wide, what we call industry exposure database and then modeled that, and then carried that through

Yeah.

A suite of models like I said.

Maybe that's something we can follow-up on. And is that something you'd be open to, Mister Wright, Chief Berlant here of how to sort of I know we do have data gaps, but if we're able to utilize industry data, at least in the near term, to give ourselves some directional sense of what we could accomplish. Is that something we we might be able to just go through the the exercise of seeing what we could I mean, I'm looking at the Prop 4 funds.

We got $577,000,000 left, and we've got whatever it is on the, GGRF side projected potentially, take all that, run it through the model. How far do you think we can get with the money? Is that something we can do?

I absolutely look forward to the the conversation.

Okay. Thank you.

Yeah. We'll go quickly. I'm gonna do a couple of quick things. Just for Mister Wright, because I know we'll probably talk about it in the next panel too. Do you have any comment on the effectiveness of the utility spending on wildfire?

We'll be getting into that shortly probably. But do do you have any comment on you know, we've talked about the probably $9,000,000,000 a year the utilities are spending. Do you have any comments on that effectiveness?

So as far as we know, we're working very closely with utilities on trying to match our efforts with theirs. These regional and subregional plans we talked about, increasingly, we're including utility projects in them so that we can model not just our work separately from utility work but model the benefits you get when you combine them.

There is a fairly comprehensive process led by the Office of Energy Safety to review those community plans that you can look to for, to tell you exactly their view on the effectiveness of each one.

There also is we should note, there's a there is a $19,000,000, very small, but within Cal Fire also for you all to reduce risk from electricity transmission. That's is that correct?

Any plans for that at this point?

Yes. That's correct.

Yeah. We're working with

Not a lot of money.

Yeah. In terms of $40,000,000.

It is a small amount of money, but we are working with utilities to kinda coordinate how do we, really build upon the work they are doing in and around communities, fund local communities to expand their efforts.

Interesting. Okay.

Great. Well, a couple of things. Just wanted I just wanted to thank CalFire and plug a couple bills we have this year. So the County Coordinator Bill that we have this year to continue that and to kind of find that really successful model. We appreciate your recommendation to improve home inspections.

And we've put forward SB 911 in that vein. And so we appreciate you bringing that to our attention. We hope that bill that's meant to close the loophole in the Wood Bill where upon transfer, that's a great time to go in and do those home inspections. But we heard from CalFire, they often don't know when those sales occur. So we're just trying to close that loophole.

And we hope that bill continues to be moved forward. I mean, there was a price tag put on it but hopefully, that continues to move forward because it's really just about helping you all do what I think what you're you're trying to do. Just a question, you know, if CalFire is doing risk reduction modeling, why do you think SB 326 last year was vetoed? Because that was really all about this kind of coordination piece we've been talking about.

Yeah. I don't wanna opine on, the governor's decision there, but what I will stress to you is the policy on really moving towards risk reduction modeling continues to be something we are building from. I know you'll hear from Michael Warren, and there are a number of others in this space that very much have been leading the direction. Milliman is such a great example as well.

And so how we figure out within the tools and the resources that we have available to us, how we start to incorporate that.

I mentioned in the testimony, we are really excited that, we have been able to, fund with our one time dollars a platform for our own CalFire units to use risk reduction modeling to help us determine which mitigations and where. And I think for us, what we'd like to see based on available funding, being able to scale that up so that communities have access to that as well so that county level CWPPs can run through that same risk reduction effort.

And so what I'll tell you, we've got, again, opining on the bill's status last year is just that we very much recognize that we have to move away from, again, just random work into really using risk reduction, but it's easier said than done. I just wanna be clear on that. Like, some of my comments here, it is much harder to get agreement to the datasets we are using.

You referenced the WUI Data Commons. That has worked to try to tackle that and has really pushed us in a good direction. But then how do we collect that data? That's something we've been piloting as part of this process is being able to figure out at a local level, local scale, getting home hardening data. There is no database we can just access that tells us today did the homeowner go and do some retrofits on their own.

We have to actually figure out how do we get either inspectors on the ground or, again, access datasets that we can then incorporate in at a statewide level. But at the end of the day, what I think a lot comes down to is just figuring out how do we provide stable and ongoing funds to be able to do not just the risk model projections, but the work to then actually do the mitigations.

And, you know, one piece I just want to be clear on. It is not our perspective that the state is responsible for hardening 4,000,000 homes. We very much have focused in on those that are most vulnerable in California. But it is our, responsibility at the State Fire Marshals Office to provide the tools and the resources to local governments, whether that's model ordinance programs, whether that is training for inspectors, and whether that is educational materials.

The resources to make the locals be successful is part of that overall strategy but it's not necessarily on the state and, you know, that may be a policy conversation. We all determine what's that right level, but with the available funds that we have, we very much narrowly focus in on vulnerable communities.

Well, thank you. I think we do need to focus on on who should be doing which work and make sure that we're doing that coordination. So I think we're all aligned here today, but you know, probably some good follow-up to to come out of all this.

Yeah. And I would just ask especially our friends from the private sector who are helping the state here with this. Are there shortcuts you think on the data side? Do you do I mean, your reaction I mean, this whole data gap or trying to understand, seems like the insurance industry has plenty of data. Maybe you know, there's competition between different models and parametric insurance and things like that.

I'm not saying there's one magical data set, but is there a is there a faster way for for CalFire, those State Fire Marshal to kind of get to that without having to spend two years and more budget time and just wait on a data collection exercise here?

There's always multiple datasets, multiple models that can be used. I sympathize actually with with CalFire on the challenge that it is to actually find a dataset that that meets the particular needs of the modeling that you're doing, and the granularity of that data. So I would say there there is collaboration that is that is possible. I agree. We look forward to the discussions.

There is a a British statistician involved in World War II. You might have heard this phrase before, Henry Bucks, All models are wrong and some models are useful. So one of the things that they and we deal with is selecting the right model for the application that you're using and then knowing that all the modeling requires then interpretation.

So we look forward to the collaboration to use these indicators to help us find and triangulate on what truth is.

Thanks for that. Thank you to LAO as well for coming to testify and we'll let you guys off the hook for now. Thank you. Yeah. Appreciate all your work.

We will move on to our second panel here. Miss Chen, if you don't mind joining us up here along with Mister Brown and Mister Wera.

Joy, if you don't mind, maybe you you can start us off here and then we'll we'll get into it. Hopefully, we can have a good robust discussion too, in addition to your your presentations. But please, it's yours.

Floor is yours.

Thank you, Chair Stern. Thank you, Senator. My name is Joy Chen. I'm an Eaton Fire Survivor and Executive Director of the Every Fire Survivors Network, the nation's largest survivor recovery hub, and, with over 10,000 Eaton And Palisades fire survivors. I'm also a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles.

Let me tell you how this all started for us. For two years before the fire, I was the admin of the pickleball WhatsApp of the Altadena Country Club. We scheduled games and used it to share pickleball memes. Then on January 7 at 06:24PM, someone texted into our chat, there's a fire on the mountain. Instantly, that chat became our emergency evacuation network in the absence of official evacuations.

We triangulated where the fire was based on who could see it from their homes, and we rushed to call friends, evacuate everyone that we could, and get our own families out of harm's way. There were no firefighters in Altadena that night, and so we became our own fire brigade. When the fire advanced to people's homes, we rushed over and put out spot fires with buckets of water from pools. It was chaotic and terrifying. Thank God and thanks to our pickleball chat, we all survived.

But 19 of my neighbors died that night. By morning, our country club was gone, half our homes were gone, and every one of us was displaced. In the weeks that followed, I called every official that I could. Thank you. There there was no one single number to call.

No point of contact at the state. No map of how recovery was supposed to work. So we built it ourselves. We invited everyone that we could find to come into our pickleball WhatsApp. It was no longer a pickleball WhatsApp.

We reached out to friends in the Palisades. We invited Palisades friends in. When we outgrew WhatsApp's 1,000 person limit, we moved to Discord. And we set up about 50 channels, a channel for all different, like, FEMA, soils, remediation, etcetera. And we set up a channel for every insurance company, so that we could together understand how different insurers were, you know, understand our policies and just figure out how to navigate our claims.

A few weeks in, I noticed something unusual. Whether a family was recovering or not depended largely on which insurance company they were with. It was pretty obvious very quickly that the worst private carrier was State Farm. We reached out to commissioner Lara seeking help. We collected nearly 500 first hand accounts from Eaton and Palisades fire survivors of misconduct.

We asked him for help. And we asked him, if we break the law, we go to prison. Why would a company violating the law on a massive scale be rewarded with a billion dollar rate hike. And then we met Senator Sasha Renee Perez. She immediately jumped in to champion us.

Together, she and we pushed publicly and persistently until commissioner Lara finally announced a market conduct exam last June. The exam con concluded last week. The findings were staggering. 398 violations across just 220 sample claims. Everything survivors have been saying for sixteen months was confirmed.

But honestly, the findings were not just damning of State Farm. They were damning of the state government that has allowed all this misconduct to continue for sixteen months. The nonprofit Department of Angels has surveyed LA fire survivors and found that seventy percent of insured LA fire survivors are having delays and denials and underpayments derailing their recovery. Seventy percent. Right now, insurers owe survivors tens of billions of dollars while families spiral financially and emotionally.

This has precedents in history. After five the five major California fires between 2017 and 2020, only 38% of destroyed homes have been rebuilt by 2025, eight years later. And the biggest predictor of recovery was whether insurance paid what it owed. The second, by the way, was whether the if a utility was at fault, whether the utility paid. That's another matter we discussed yesterday and that we can go back to today if you'd like.

So when the state fails to regulate the insurance industry, the insurance industry has has massive financial incentives to delay denial deny delay and deny, and the entire Los Angeles recovery goes into crisis. Where are we now? Two out of three LA fire survivors are still displaced according to the Department of Angels. Forty percent can only afford temporary housing for a few more months. Credit cards are maxed, retirement savings are gone, and mental health providers report rising suicidal ideation tied directly to financial stress and housing insecurity.

And despite the market conduct exam confirming massive illegal conduct, thousands of survivor complaints filed with the CDI, California Department of Insurance, still are unresolved. For survivors, complaining to the state feels like a black box. As the LA Times has documented, complaints are often closed before disputes are resolved. Survivors are then told to stop contacting their own complaint handlers.

And when one thirty two year veteran CDI agent CDI complaint officer cited State Farm for what she called shoddy and shameful conduct, State Farm's lawyer complained to the department, and the department reassigned her caseload and docked her pay by 10%.

To survivors, this feels like our department is working for the industry it is charged to regulate rather than for the people. And despite leading the nation's largest survivor recovery hub, I have never been contacted by a California state official asking what survivors need or whether state farms are act or whether state programs are actually reaching families. We are in direct contact every day with thousands of survivors trying to navigate insurance, housing, smoke remediation, rebuilding, FEMA, mental health crises.

If a state has programs, resources, grants, or protections survivors should know about, I ask you to work with survivor groups, people that survivors already trust to help get that information out. I'll close with four suggestions.

One, fix the evacuation alert systems and firefighter coordination failures. Communities should not have to depend on pickleball chats to survive. Two, resolve the thousands of insurance complaints that survivors have already filed. Publish transparent public recording on how many complaints were received, how many were closed without resolutions, how many resulted in enforcement action, and how many remain unresolved. Reopen complaints that were prematurely closed and enforce the law.

When 70% of survivors cannot act access the insurance benefits they're owed after Reco after a disaster, Recovery will never move forward in California. Three, pursuant to the previous panel's excellent discussion, provide guaranteed insurance coverage for fire safe homes. This is something that 94% of Californians want, guaranteed fire insurance for fire safe homes. We need to incentivize people to make these investments in our homes. There's no you know, survivors are terrified that when we remediate, when we rebuild, we won't be able to get insurance.

Survivors every survivor wants to make our home fire safe. But, you know, how could we make that investment if we don't know that we can get insurance on the other side? Four, when the state creates recovery programs, collaborate with survivor groups to make sure that people actually hear about them, understand them, and can access them. When your offices do create programs or survivors for resources for survivors, I'd be glad to amplify them through the Every Friar Survivor Network newsletter, Discord, 1,000 person Zoom webinars.

And, if you want to understand what recovery actually looks like on the ground, I invite you all to subscribe to the EFSN weekly.

More than 10,000 survivors and allies get it every week, and you'll see up close what families are facing, where recovery gaps exist, and where there are opportunities for government to help. That's at efsurvivors.net. Thank you. And also, chair Stern, chair Becker, pursuant to yesterday's discussion, I did bring information on all those different audits that we referenced Okay. On wildfire mitigation spending.

So if you wanna chat about that, I'd be glad to.

Yeah. Okay. You wanna run through?

Yeah. Let's keep going and then Yeah.

Well, thank you for that. And I was pulling up an email from a good friend of mine that and I quoted from that at a previous insurance committee hearing. But, you know, for and so it's just a friend writing, you know, a lot of what you just said. So this system, they have to appear to help, but all they wanna do is, you know, cut corners, pay out as little as possible, find loopholes, make us relive the pain. I mean, this is his experience.

And I said the pain is real and long lasting. Unfortunately, it hasn't dissipated in a year, probably won't for a long time. So I'm sure that is similar to many feeling many of in your network. So, thank you for being here. Thank you.

Let's go through Mark, do you wanna we'll go turn to mister Brown next.

You bet. Good morning, Chair Becker, Chair Steward, committee members. My name's Mark Brown. I'm the executive officer for the Brynn Wildfire Prevention Authority. Prior to that, I was the deputy fire chief for the Brynn County Fire Department, which is a contract county.

A contract county, as Senator here knows, performs Cal Fire's mission within our county rather than Cal Fire having a presence in that county. So we had a robust wildfire mitigation program. I also spent fifteen years as an operations section chief on a CAL FIRE incident management team. And some of the incidents I was assigned to range from the Nuns Fire, Thomas Fire in Ventura, the Camp Fire in Paradise, the August Complex, and the North Complex up in '20 out in 2020.

My experiences on those wildfires really changed the direction of my career.

After thirty years of chasing fire, I decided it was time to put my energy and effort into pre fire work and get the work done prior to fires ever igniting. My household has been evacuated twice. Once from the Nuns fire, once from the glass fire. Glass fire was 200 feet from my house. I I cannot I compare to your experience, the closest home that was destroyed to my house or near my house was my high school friend five doors down.

And I've been non renewed for high State Farm and had to get new insurance, and now I'm kinda glad I got an auto renewed and I was able to get farmers insurance after hearing that last story. Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority is a 17 member joint powers authority that was born in 2020. We came about after a lessons learned panel that we conducted of the North Bay fires in 2017. We invited the land management fire and law enforcement agencies from Sonoma County down in Marin.

We asked them what they were doing before the fires, during the fires, after the fires.

We asked them what do their successes were and what their challenges were. We came up with six and a half pages of action items, and not a single entity was charged to make sure those action items occurred. They crossed all jurisdictional boundaries. They all crossed all disciplines of government. And then you guys know government budgeting as well as I do.

If you don't increase revenue source, you have a zero sum budget. Zero agencies were budgeted to do this. So that's why we created the joint powers authority with a property tax of 10¢per square foot of built space, and it's now generating about a $23,000,000 a year budget for us. We have five goals in our strategic plan with very detailed measures

I just repeat that again. So what what was the finding mechanism we can say at one time?

10¢per square foot of building space, commercial and private or, residential. So that brings us to a $23,000,000 a year budget. We have five strategic goals with, very detailed measures of success. Our budget funds is vegetation management, public education, grants for our residents, evacuation routes, improvements, evacuation alert, and warning system improvements, and also inspections. Approximately 55% of our budget goes to on parcel work.

We're in a process of developing our seventh annual work plan and it just feels like now is when we are getting our stride. It took us quite a bit of time to get our stride. We're performing over 30,000 inspections per year. We have a very aggressive grant program, perform vegetation management, will inform of many shaded fuel breaks along the wildland urban interface boundary. We have over a 100 miles of shaded fuel breaks.

We have a couple 100 miles of evacuation routes we've cleared. We also have We've hired the right people for environmental compliance. When we started, we thought sequel was gonna be a huge hurdle for us. We would now have well over 40 projects that have been approved and through environmental compliance. No litigation on environmental compliance.

And we actually no longer see environmental compliance as a hurdle because we've learned how to get through the system. We have four, CalVTP approvals. We also have taken advantage of the governor's exemption for work within our coastal zone, which was vital. We were held up with that. That was a tremendous hurdle to get through the coastal commission, but the the governor's proclamation has allowed us to start doing work in the coastal zone now.

Being a lifelong local government employee, I tend to believe that these types of problems are best solved and attacked at the local level with the state in support. At the local level, we are the trusted source of information. We're the people that the community comes to. We can also tailor actions to best meet our community's needs because I think you guys all know this. One size fits all doesn't work.

Even within the tiny county that Marin County is, probably one of the smallest counties in in the state. Home hardening and defensible space needs are different and opinions on how to implement them are different throughout Marin. This allows us but being, working at the local level, we're able to tailor our programs to meet our community's needs. We also are able to prioritize because as we've been talking about, we can't treat all the properties and all the acres at once.

Our grant program has treated more than 5,000 homes since we've started.

We find that p even people with financial resources need support and or motivation from a grant program.

What we're finding is for every dollar that bring wildfire spends on a grant to help our residents, they're spending 6 to $7 So while the residents I feel are getting a return on their investment by paying taxes and getting, they could participate in a grant program, that I see this as a return on our investment as we're in wildfire, seeing our community members amplify the dollars we're giving them by six to 700%.

And we've also had some of our residents through our work get off the California Fair Plan and into an admitted market insurer. This has just happened. We're really excited about this latest success.

And we find that public outreach and education is so vital and important. Just having the firefighters come to the house and say, we need you to do this because we told you so. Doesn't work so well. You need to let people know why and how. I had a neighbor, a friend of mine who had to become zone zero compliant in order to get his insurance, and he had no idea how to get how to do it.

That's why we've started what we are calling our EMBER Ready program. EMBER Ready is designed to help our homeowners become zone zero compliant and home hardened. We figured there's gonna be one of three reasons people are gonna wanna do this or maybe a combination of reasons. WAFAR preparedness, coming in alignment with ordinances, we're probably most likely insured. They wanna be insured.

Because a lot of insurers are gonna say, you will you shall be compliant or we're not gonna insure you. So our our team is designed to work our and work with our residents to become compliant. We have a tremendous amount of data. No. I I I could I think I can honestly say no one has more data in a for a county than than we're in wildfire.

Through over a 150,000 inspections that we perform, we have millions of data points for on parcel. We do not share the parcel level data with anybody except our member agencies and our modelers.

We also have great vegetation management data and rather than just modeling or counting our acres to your point, we're actually showing the decrease in the rate of spread, decrease in fire line intensity, and decrease of how much fire is actually getting into the canopy Because we know that once fire gets in the canopy, that's when we get spotting, and that's when we start getting the urban conflagrations.

This allows us to plan and be strategic about where we do our work, but it also allows us to show our residents their return on investment that they're making in us. Because we don't want to show up by having a fire ripped through one of our communities and say, look at the great work work we did.

And we also are using that data with our new CWPP, Community Wildfire Protection Plan that we are about to approve in two months. And we are, producing risk maps at our evacuation zone level, and we have seven different themes of risk. And this is allowing our member agencies to really tailor their work to meet their communities needs.

And I think the last thing I'll touch on is that one of our messages that we've been really powerful or been strong about is that we want our residents to accept their responsibility that they have to keep their homes from becoming ignited. They can't just wait for the government entities to take care of it for them.

We need to be there to support them, but we also need our residents to take responsibility on their own to get that work done for them. And I think our partnership as a county level agency with our 17 member agency remember, 17 members within the JPA, that's how we get down to that granular level. And we feel that again, my my bias, seven thirty five years of local government employment. I think this is where we can get the work done.

I very much appreciate the support we do receive for the wildfire task force.

I meet with Patrick quite frequently, and we do get a lot of support from the the task force. We get a lot of support from Cal Fire. We just need to start, I think, streamlining the way that we can get the money into the local's hands. But I also think that the locals need to have a stake in the game. They need to be able to come to the table with some type of revenue because the state and federal dollars aren't gonna make it sustainable.

We need to show that the locals can be able to carry the mantle when the state and federal dollars dry up. Thank you.

Really terrific. Thank you. We will get to questions in a moment. Thank you. Mr. Juarez.

Good morning, Senator Becker, Senator Stern, Senator Saratos, Senator Press. Thank you for having me, today. I direct the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford University. Today, I am speaking in my personal capacity, but many of the things I'm gonna say are really influenced and informed by the support team that supports me at Stanford. At the highest level, this problem is one that has changed enormously in the last quarter century, and we need to recognize that.

It's due to climate change. It's due to lots of land use and fire management decisions we made over a hundred and fifty years. But because of climate change, the problem is going to continue to get worse. What that means in practice is that events like the LA firestorm in January or the correlated wind events in 2019 that caused camp and Woolsey to occur on the same day are much more likely now and even more likely in the future than they have been in our history.

And that really means we need to change what we're doing.

We need to change our approach to fire management in fundamental ways. I think we've heard today a lot about how we need to maybe adopt a different balance in our fire investments in the state. We spent about 6,000,000,000 mostly so far on fuels reduction, but I think we heard from the prior panel from chief Berlant and from, Patrick Wright that that focus is shifting and that is appropriate in my view.

Five years ago, I was arguing for that kind of a balance, and I'm I'm heartened to see it happening today. But what is missing?