California Needs a New Approach to Wildfire Planning, Experts Say. Cost Is an Issue

While fire safety advocates want California to take a new approach to wildfires, with more emphasis on anticipating and preventing the worst damage, legislation to do just that has failed to win over Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said it would have cost too much unbudgeted money.

This year was the third in a row that state lawmakers tried to mandate broadscale strategic planning for avoiding catastrophic fires, and the first such a measure made it to the governor’s desk.

Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed the bill, SB 326, on Saturday.

The sponsoring lawmaker, Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park), hasn’t committed to bringing it forward again in the next legislative session. In the meantime, the ideas it contained will be pursued in a patchwork way.

SB 326 would have accelerated the timelines for implementing Zone 0 mandates, which require clearing landscaping within five feet of homes in fire-prone areas. On Wednesday, state Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara sent a letter (PDF) to the state’s Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, urging a speedy finalization of those regulations anyway.

Meanwhile, a related bill also sponsored by Becker, SB 254, will have the state’s wildfire fund administrator model utility risk and make suggestions about how to prevent fires and manage utility costs after Newsom signed it last month.

Cal Fire’s budget has doubled to around $4 billion in recent years, but the agency is not required to do strategic planning for how to best prepare for and avoid the worst wildfires. SB 326 would have called on Cal Fire to model fire risks and estimate how they change as safety projects like defensible space or fire breaks are completed.

While other states do long-term strategic planning for hazards such as hurricanes, California does not for wildfires. Fire experts and policy advocates have pushed for this sort of planning for years, as some have criticized California’s current fire prevention efforts as looking like “random acts of conservation.”

“I was disappointed,” Becker said of Newsom’s veto. “I did notice, however, that the governor didn’t criticize the content of the bill at all in his vetoed message. He said that it was vetoed solely on the basis of cost.”

In a letter from the Senate Appropriations Committee, Cal Fire estimated it would cost more than $100 million a year to build its own model to assess and forecast risk. SB 326 would have allowed the agency to use an off-the-shelf model for around $20 million a year.

Estimates of what it would take to accomplish strategic planning, meanwhile, have varied significantly. In the 2024 version of the bill, Cal Fire estimated the cost around $12 million. But in the version proposed just a year earlier, which would have tasked the Office of Emergency Services with forecasting and planning, OES estimated the cost of complying to be under $3 million per year (PDF). The 2023 bill died in committee and faced opposition from the Cal Fire employees union, which objected to fire-related jobs being given to a different department.

“I think [SB 326] would have saved money, not cost money for the state of California,” said Michael Wara, climate and energy expert at Stanford and an advocate for the bill.

Since the 2017 North Bay fires, he said, utility companies have made a lot of progress on safety, and after the 2018 Camp Fire, they were required to create comprehensive mitigation plans. But without the need to holistically look at risk and plan for safety in fire-prone neighborhoods, Wara said, California has made comparatively little progress on making communities more resilient to wildfires.

“That is just as important as the utility safety side,” he said. “Where we are is not OK. It should not be acceptable to any Californian. And we need to make progress — measurable progress — at a much faster rate.”

SB 326, which passed through committees and both houses without a single no vote, was supported by the insurance industry and insurance regulators.

While Becker has not committed to reintroducing a new version next year, he acknowledges the issue is only growing more urgent — especially as the costs of wildfires become stratospheric. Damage from this year’s Los Angeles fires, for example, is estimated to be over $100 billion.