BILL ANALYSIS Ó
SENATE COMMITTEE ON NATURAL RESOURCES AND WATER
Senator Fran Pavley, Chair
2015 - 2016 Regular
Bill No: AB 824 Hearing Date: July 14,
2015
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|Author: |Gatto | | |
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|Version: |March 26, 2015 Amended |
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|Urgency: |No |Fiscal: |Yes |
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|Consultant:|William Craven |
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Subject: Fire prevention activities.
BACKGROUND AND EXISTING LAW
1)Requires the Board of Forestry (Board) to classify all lands
within the state for the purpose of determining areas in which
the financial responsibility of preventing and suppressing
fires is primarily the responsibility of the state (these
areas are known as "state responsibility area" or "SRA").
2)Requires the California Department of Forestry and Fire
Protection (CDF) to provide an annual report to the
Legislature detailing its fire prevention activities.
3)Requires the report to include the following specified data
and information:
a) The number of hours of fire prevention education
performed.
b) The number of defensible space inspections conducted,
including statewide totals and totals for each region.
c) The number of citations issued for noncompliance.
d) The number of acres treated by mechanical fuel
reduction.
e) The number of acres treated by prescribed burns.
f) Projected fire prevention activities for the following
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fiscal year.
g) Information on each of the "Amador contracts." (An
Amador contract continues CDF staffing and station coverage
through the winter.)
4)CDF and the federal government have agreements regarding
mutual aid in suppressing fires, cost apportionment, incident
command, and other aspects of fires that originate on federal
lands, expand onto federal lands, or that otherwise require
the involvement of both federal and state resources to
suppress fires.
PROPOSED LAW
This bill:
1)Requires that coordination and cooperation with the federal
government be considered a fire prevention activity for the
purposes of the report.
2)Requires the report to the Legislature on fire prevention
activities to include a map of the areas of coordination
between CDF and the federal government, particularly in areas
of high fire hazard severity or in wildlife-urban interface
areas.
3)Renames "Amador contracts" as "Amador agreements" to be
consistent throughout the section.
ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT
According to the author, the main problem this bill
attempts to address is the lack of adequate fire prevention
activities that are carried out collaboratively between the
state and federal government. Wildland areas are divided up
into a network of federal, state, and local land; however,
fires are not limited by these jurisdictional lines. While
local, state, and federal agencies often work
collaboratively in battling fires, there is a great deal of
room for improvement in collaborative fire prevention, as
opposed to fire suppression, activities.
The current framework for fire prevention activities does
not sufficiently recognize and promote collaboration
between the state and federal government. This bill seeks
to remedy that by reframing the definition of "fire
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prevention activities" to reflect a more cooperative
mission and by requiring CDF to include information about
those cooperative activities to the Legislature. This
information would be included in a report that CDF already
produces and submits to the Legislature.
ARGUMENTS IN OPPOSITION
None received.
COMMENTS
1) According to a new book, " On the Burning Edge ," (Dickman,
Penguin Random House, 2015), the fire suppression budget of the
US Forest Service (USFS) in 1991 was about 13% of its total
budget. Today, the agency which is the largest wildland fire
agency in the nation, now spends nearly half of its annual
budget on fire suppression, which in most years is approximately
$5 billion. (CDF's annual budget exceeds $1 billion.) More
telling, the USFS fire suppression appropriation has been
overspent every year since 1999. It has had to borrow millions
from its other programs-timber, recreation, fisheries-to meet
the need. Though Congress has reimbursed the Forest Service for
up to 80 percent of the fire program's overspending, calling it
disaster relief, the cannibalism of other program budgets has
become so bad that many believe that the USFS can't be both a
competent fire agency and a competent land management agency.
Historically, the focus of the USFS has been on suppression, not
prevention. This, in part, is because the USFS lands are
predominately unpopulated wildlands, although that is changing
as more housing is constructed near wildlands.
The Forest Service predicts that by 2030, 40 percent more homes
will be in the path of wildfires. Right now, with federal,
state, and local government spending included, one study puts
the total annual cost of fire suppression at $4.7 billion, and
there's little reason to believe that that figure will do
anything but rise.
At the same time, there is little evidence that the increased
spending is doing much to make towns that abut the forest safer.
Fire is a natural part of the landscape, although it has been
suppressed for generations. The homes aren't. Along with
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today's denser forests, drier climates, and more people living
in the wildlands, wildfires are burning houses with a frequency
never seen before. In the 1960s, across the U.S, about a hundred
homes went up in smoke every fire season; today, across the
west, the number is close to three thousand.
Of course, as Dickman points out, these costs don't compare to
those from a massive hurricane-Katrina cost $125 billion. The
significant difference is that the threat wildfire poses to
houses and towns can be mitigated-through forest thinning,
prescribed burns, and defensible-space work. Yet western towns
remain inexplicably ill-prepared. In 2013, fewer than 2 percent
of America's communities had done any defensible-space work at
all. In California, fire prevention activities by CDF are
documented in the annual report mentioned earlier and those
reports show very slow and gradual improvement in fire
prevention activities in most years.
2) In 2009, Congress passed the Federal Land Assistance,
Management, and Enhancement Act of 2009 (the FLAME Act). This
legislation established a separate account for funding for
emergency wildfire suppression activities undertaken on
Department of the Interior and National Forest System lands.
Last summer, as part of the FLAME Act implementation, the
Eldorado National Forest was one of two forests in California
selected to begin implementation of the National Cohesive
Wildland Fire Management Strategy. CDF and the USFS developed
"Fire Adapted 50," which is a joint effort to reduce fuel,
improve forest health, and increase effectiveness of wildland
fire response. This is an example of joint USFS-CDF prevention
work that would be reported to the Legislature to meet the
requirements of this bill.
SUGGESTED AMENDMENTS
To provide more specific information about coordination and
cooperation between CDF and the federal government that future
reports will document, the author may want to consider three
additions to the reporting requirement at page 2, line 14, that
could be provided in addition to other relevant information:
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AMENDMENT 1
4137 (a) (10) Coordination and cooperation with the federal
government, including but limited to the following:
a) Estimates of state and federal fire prevention costs to fund
fire prevention activities of Fire Safe Councils, community
emergency response teams developed by local governments, and
similar organizations who cooperate with state and federal
authorities to reduce the risk of wildfires near communities.
b) Estimates of the funding needs for forest fuel management
programs to reduce urgent fire risks near communities at high
risk of wildfire.
c) Usage of coordinated policies that promote defensible space
adjacent to communities where multiple jurisdictions may engage
in fire suppression activities.
AMENDMENT 2
The author proposes adding a technical amendment in (a) 10 and
(c)1 after the word "government" the term "on large
landscape-scale projects"
SUPPORT
Center for Biological Diversity
Crescenta Valley Fire Safe Council
Sierra Club California
OPPOSITION
None Received
-- END --
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