Governor Gavin Newsom
The Honorable Toni Atkins, Senate Leader Pro Tempore
The Honorable Nancy Skinner, Chair Senate Budget Committee
The Honorable Bob Wieckowski, Chair Senate Budget Subcommittee 2 on Resources, Environmental Protection and Energy
The Honorable Anthony Rendon, Speaker of the Assembly The Honorable Phil Ting, Chair Assembly Budget Committee
The Honorable Richard Bloom, Chair Assembly Budget 3 on Climate Crisis, Resources, Energy and Transportation

Re: Wildfire Resiliency Budget Action Recommendations

Dear Governor and Legislative Leaders,

We represent tribal, environmental justice, climate justice, local government, public health, and environmental and economic sustainability organizations throughout California. Together, we are dedicated to realizing solutions that prevent and mitigate the human and ecological impacts of California’s wildfires. We write to encourage sustained funding for wildfire preparedness, and to provide recommendations on specific areas to be addressed.

The increased scale and impact of wildfire is one of the greatest challenges facing California. Fire is an unavoidable – indeed essential – force on our landscape, but forest and land management for the last 170+ years, the suppression of cultural burning by native Tribes, and our aggressive pursuit of fire suppression for the last century, has created a landscape that has no natural historical analog. Climate change and associated drought is further exacerbating the situation. Tribal, environmental justice, and rural communities are particularly affected by the environmental, economic, and health impacts from wildfire. California is in an urgent race against time to restore our landscapes and redefine our relationship with fire.

As representatives of a wide range of stakeholders and interests, we appreciate the major investments California has already made to pursue a multi-pronged approach to the wildfire challenge. State appropriations in 2021 reflect the scale of investment needed, but one-time action will not address the scale of the problem. Fortunately, California is blessed with a period of prosperity and budget surpluses which can facilitate sustaining these important investments.

Building the momentum necessary to reach our fire mitigation goals requires stable, consistent funding. We urge the Wildfire and Forest Resilience package be approached as a multi-year commitment: at least $5 billion over the next five years. Establishing predictable funding is essential to workforce and infrastructure development, and to achieving the pace and scale necessary to meet the challenge.

In addition to committing to sustained funding for proactive wildfire preparedness, we offer these additional specific recommendations:

Let the Action Plan be your Guide

The January 2021 Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan, when taken together with other state efforts, is a solid roadmap to addressing our fire challenge. Wildfire investments should track back to the Action Plan and the ongoing implementation work of the Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force.

There are specific aspects of the Action Plan that are ripe for substantial increases in funding:

Implementation of the Strategic Plan for Prescribed Fire, Cultural Burning, and Prescribed
Natural Fire

There is no way to achieve our forest resilience goals without massive increases in the scale of ‘good fire’. The new Strategic Plan for Prescribed Fire, Cultural Burning, and Prescribed Natural Fire provides an actionable framework for achieving the necessary increased scale, and we urge that it be fully and robustly funded.

The renaissance of ‘good fire’ provides an opportunity to support and learn from California’s Tribes and cultural burners. Past actions by the state have profoundly harmed native people, and the aggressive pursuit of fire suppression further harmed their culture and increased risk from wildfire. Fortunately there are still tribal burners who carry the traditional knowledge of fire use, and seek to share and restore the culture of beneficial burning. The state should support tribal burning efforts in several ways:

• Establish a network of Prescribed and Cultural Fire Training Centers located in representative fire-adapted ecosystems around the state, actively coordinating with regional tribes to create facilities that are led by (or co-managed) by Tribes and integrate traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) with western science and fire service approaches. These facilities can also leverage local education institutions to catalyze workforce development and ecosystem restoration, while providing essential live-fire training
• Establish endowment funds to provide ongoing support for continued outreach and training to expand cultural burning and other forms of indigenous

Reducing the Health Impacts of Smoke

Health impacts of smoke tend to accrue to economically disadvantaged households and communities, presenting an urgent need for the state to help address this issue so that we can protect our most vulnerable. The state should expand funding for programs that help reduce the impact of unavoidable smoke on vulnerable populations. Many of these efforts have benefits beyond mitigating smoke impacts: Low Income Weatherization Program reduces energy consumption, while also keeping smoke out of homes; Community Resilience Centers provide shelter and resources in heat waves and other disaster events, and can also provide a refuge from smoke. Providing air filters to homes and facilities that serve sensitive groups in severely impacted communities can reduce smoke exposure and indoor air pollution. Outdoor workers like farmworkers are particularly vulnerable, and should have dedicated resources including expanded initiatives to reach outdoor workers and inform them of their rights to respirator masks and increased enforcement capacity at Cal/OSHA during wildfires.

Improve Integration with Climate, Conservation, and Biodiversity Efforts

State goals intend to “treat” one million acres annually, a goal broadly consistent with the scale of the wildfire challenge. To date, the wildfire policy and funding conversation among administration and legislative leaders has largely been focused on forest thinning, creating fuel breaks, and other near-term projects. These treatments have their place, but to change fire behavior over the long-term and meet our climate and biodiversity goals, we need to transform forest management to restore more complex, older forest structure. Restoring more natural, carbon-rich forests is an essential part of achieving modern forest values including fire resilience, safe carbon sequestration, well-functioning water production, and habitat conditions that support fish and wildlife refuge while balancing human use and achieving socio-ecological resilience.

While often necessary, initial fuel reduction treatments are not enough – we need to secure commitments to future climate-smart management through enforceable agreements with landowners that guide future land management and conservation actions that allow for safe,unfragmented, burnable landscapes across both public and private lands where ‘good fire’ can be used to maintain resilient conditions. Achieving long-term sustainable resilience requires placing near-term interventions in a framework that allows us to achieve the desired future conditions. State support of agreements that maintain improved landscape conditions allows the public to help share the financial burden of management changes with the private landowner/steward. And, when well designed, these efforts can also help address the historic injustices burdening generations of indigenous peoples.

In conclusion, meeting the scale of our wildfire challenge – including protecting our forests and landscapes for climate, biodiversity, and water security – will require sustained financial support from the state and an approach that promotes ‘good fire’ while preventing loss of life and property, and mitigating the unavoidable impacts of fire and smoke. These diverse efforts require an approach that recognizes the uneven impacts of smoke and fire and prioritizes support and assistance to the most threatened and vulnerable. The investments proposed above will expand and sustain the state’s commitment to wildfire resilience by establishing facilities and mechanisms to learn from Indigenous knowledge of fire (TEK); strategically implement, expand, and enhance existing state policies and programs; and place actions in the context of durable commitments to climate-smart management practices that restore the state’s landscapes.

California is blessed with an extraordinary budget condition, and we urge you to take this moment and commit to a stable, predictable $1 billion annually for at least the next five years so we can build the policy and implementation momentum necessary to address the scale of the challenge. We respectfully ask for your support of these budget priorities.

Sincerely,

Micah Weinberg
Director
CA Forward Action Fund

Mike Young
Political & Organizing Director
California EnviroVoters

Lucas Zucker
Policy and Communications Director
Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy (CAUSE)

Brenda Gallegos
Program Associate
Conservation Hispanic Access Foundation

Paul Mason
Vice President, Policy and Incentives
Pacific Forest Trust

Laura Tam
Program Officer
Resources Legacy Fund