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 ----------------------------------------------------------------- |Author: |Gatto | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- |Version: |March 26, 2015 Amended | ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- |Urgency: |No |Fiscal: |Yes | ----------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------- |Consultant:|William Craven | | | | ----------------------------------------------------------------- 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 AB 824 (Gatto) Page 2 of ? 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 AB 824 (Gatto) Page 3 of ? 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 AB 824 (Gatto) Page 4 of ? 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: AB 824 (Gatto) Page 5 of ? 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 -- AB 824 (Gatto) Page 6 of ?