Will Newsom Sign California’s ‘Biggest Step’ Toward Saving Fire-Prone Neighborhoods?

In a year marked by the costliest California fires on record, state lawmakers sent a large package of wildfire bills to the governor’s desk. One measure in particular promises outsized impacts for protecting neighborhoods — and it’s largely flown under the radar.

Senate Bill 326, sponsored by State Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park), would accelerate fire mitigation efforts, particularly in these older, at-risk neighborhoods, by mandating the removal of flammable trees and bushes for certain homes.

“We’re seeing more extreme weather conditions and we’re seeing wildfires spread at a speed that we’ve never seen before,” Becker said. “That’s why we need this bill.”

While “not a panacea,” said Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program and senior research scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, “it’s the biggest step we can take this year.”

The thorniest problem in the state’s effort to guard against wildfire devastation is how to protect the millions of homes that already exist in fire-prone areas, Wara said.

“What we need to do is change how flammable people’s gardens are in places where there’s high risk,” he said. “That’s important if we want to have affordable insurance, affordable electricity. It’s important if we don’t want to lose communities like we did in Altadena.”

While newer homes are built to relatively high fire safety standards, the vast majority of California’s housing stock — built before the 1990s — was not designed with fire resilience in mind.

The new regulations mandate a Zone 0 space, or an ember-resistant zone extending five feet around a house, where there is non-burnable material like river rocks instead of plants or mulch. It’s controversial, in part because it would dramatically alter the appearance of many neighborhoods. Homeowners are understandably reluctant to tear out beloved, beautiful plants.

However, fire prevention advocates see this as the simplest, most affordable way to quickly improve fire resilience in vulnerable neighborhoods. Tearing out a bush, for instance, costs far less — and is much quicker — than retrofits like replacing a roof. And the current draft regulations do not call for removing permanent features like a wooden deck or fence within 5 feet of the home. Supporters argue that the absence of coordinated fire-resilience planning wastes state resources. While California develops long-term plans for resources like water, it lacks a comparable approach for wildfire prevention.

The bill moves up the timeline for Zone 0 requirements in high-risk areas, implementing some of the requirements as early as Jan. 1, 2026. If enacted, the legislation would also require Cal Fire to create a strategic, regularly updated plan for better assessing fire danger in the state and planning how to prevent destruction before a disaster hits.

If vetoed, Zone 0 requirements — the details of which are still being hammered out by the state Board of Forestry — would apply to new construction after Jan.1. Three years from now, at the end of 2028, it would apply to all homes in high-risk zones.

If SB 326 is signed, it would also apply to rental properties and houses for sale as of Jan.1. Wara said the rationale is to take a measured approach.

“It doesn’t say everybody has to do this right away, because that would be too much,” Wara said.

However, the bill authors believe, people who have rentals and are making money from their house in a high-risk area should contribute to reducing risk in the community.

“Also, if you’re selling your house, you’ve got to do this,” Wara said, “because it’s a time when there’s cash available and where you might be more open to making changes in your backyard that will create safety.”

California has 1.3 million homes in high or very high severity areas, and retrofitting those homes would cost tens of billions of dollars, said Matt Weiner, CEO of Megafire Action, a nonprofit advancing policy to avoid catastrophic wildfire.

For right now, Zone 0 is “the most important tool that we can move quickly on to guard against ember-driven fires like we saw in Palisades and Altadena,” Weiner said. The bill also provides funding to counties working to implement Zone 0.

Up to 90% of homes destroyed in a wildfire burn down from embers finding their way inside the structure and burning it down from the inside. Relatively few homes burn down from coming into contact with a flaming front.

Researchers from UC Berkeley estimate that 50% fewer homes would burn down in the extreme kind of conditions seen in the L.A. fires if neighborhoods hardened homes and had defensible space. Just complying with Zone 0 alone would reduce structure loss by an estimated 17%.

With California spending billions on firefighting and homeowners bearing soaring insurance costs, advocates have argued that it’s time to move beyond the traditional “business as usual” approach.

“Frankly, we knew we needed to do this back in 2017 and 2018,” Wara said. Those years saw terrible losses in Wine Country fires and the fire that destroyed the town of Paradise. “There was legislation [passed in 2020] that would have required it; it was supposed to take effect in 2023,” Wara said.

But the state’s Board of Forestry missed the deadline, struggling to balance the concerns of homeowners with the desires of the insurance industry. In February, following the Los Angeles firestorm, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the rules to be completed by the end of this year.

The bill will also require Cal Fire and the State Fire Marshal to develop and use models to assess where risk is highest and how risk changes as safety projects are completed. The key, Weiner said, is to have cohesion between wildfire prevention work being done on the landscape level, the neighborhood level and the parcel level, by communities, utilities and homeowners. Currently, there is little to no coordination, which advocates have said risks wasting money and effort.

Proposals to require comprehensive fire planning have been introduced before, but have never made it to the governor’s desk. The heart- and record-breaking devastation from January’s fires in Los Angeles helped give it added urgency this year, advocates said.

You want “somebody looking at the entire picture and helping inform the highest impact work to be done,” Weiner said. The state is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to prepare for fires. “You want somebody to assess that holistically.”

The bill’s technical nature may have hidden it from public attention — despite its potential to save homes and lives, Weiner said.

“I think one of the reasons [this proposal] doesn’t get enough attention is because whenever you start talking ‘tech,’ people think about it as a sideshow, nice to have but not a fundamental need,” Weiner said. “And nobody gets excited about creating the enabling conditions for future work.”

If signed, the bill would increase the responsibility and work demands placed on Cal Fire and the State Fire Marshal. It would also impose some accountability in the form of requiring annual reports that would give a comprehensive overview of how they could strategically lessen wildfire risk.

Those reports would aid lawmakers in overseeing their work. When it passed its final vote in September, no representatives voted against it.

KQED reached out to Cal Fire to discuss SB 326. An agency spokesperson said they do not comment on pending legislation.

Critics have claimed that the state’s fire agency has been more motivated by responding to and fighting fires than working to prevent them, and has fumbled key responsibilities for management and mitigation, despite a historic budget.

Cal Fire Chief Joe Tyler has, however, spoken extensively about the need for the agency to be able to both prevent and fight fires, and is making progress in their preparedness goals. Becker aided Cal Fire in getting their budget doubled to 4 billion dollars this year as chair of the state’s budget subcommittee for natural resources.

“We need better, more targeted prevention action to reduce the risk of losing entire communities like what happened in January,” the lawmaker said. “This is about getting every dollar we spend on wildfire prevention exactly where it needs to be as fast as possible … and making sure every dollar truly reduces wildfire risk.”

For homeowners, wildfires costs have exploded. Recent analysis by Wara and colleagues indicates that the average state homeowner is paying $266 more per month in insurance and electricity costs than they were in 2020, largely because of wildfires.

The insurance industry has also openly supported the bill. Industry scientists said in a report this summer that Zone 0 was critical in preventing home ignitions. In a September letter to Newsom urging his signature on SB 326, the state’s top insurance regulator, Ricardo Lara, said: “With millions of homes in the Wildland Urban Interface, the early adoption of mitigation is critical to wildfire safety and insurability.”