A bill backed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to overhaul California’s ranking system for wildfire hazards is taking heat from environmentalists and local governments, who argue the bill would lead to a dangerous increase in housing development in fire-prone areas.
Senate Bill 610 would replace the state’s existing, three-tiered, labeling system that rates communities based on their probability of burning with a single framework that would only identify whether or not an area requires “fire mitigation.”
The hazard ranking system is a key to local development processes, building safety standards and home defensible space requirements. Proponents say the reform would simplify a convoluted system and help expand compliance with those rules.
“What we’re striving to accomplish here is create a singular set of codes so local officials can more easily interpret requirements and thus hopefully be able to more easily enforce them,” said Daniel Berlant, the state fire marshal. “That has been a challenge in the past.”
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s fire hazard severity designations were established in the 1980s in the wake of severe fires. According to Cal Fire, the assignments take into account an area’s terrain, vegetation and historic weather conditions.
The zones are historically broken up into three tiers — moderate, high and very high fire hazard — that correspond to specific and sometimes piecemeal requirements for housing developers and existing homeowners.
Home developers building in very high hazard zones, for example, must obey roofing standards and adhere to siding material rules as well as setback and parking area distances. Homeowners in those zones, meanwhile, must maintain defensible space and conduct annual brush clearance.
The requirements are also different for zones depending on whether they have been identified as a State Responsibility Area (SRA) and Local Responsibility Area (LRA), which designate which government entity is responsible for wildfire suppression.
Simplifying these requirements may seem like sensible policy in fire-prone California, but opponents of SB 610 say the plan to abolish the ranking system unnecessarily seizes control from local governments and promotes more housing construction in high-risk areas.
Paul Mason, vice president of Pacific Forest Trust, one of the dozens of opposed environmental groups, said eliminating the tiered fire hazard severity zones could have consequences that are antithetical to building new housing that is resilient to the impacts of climate change.
“We need to be making places for people to live that are close to existing roads, transportation and schools, not sprawling out into the forest because that makes our fire problem harder to deal with,” said Mason. “I fear that treating every area with the same application with no distinction between them increases the chance of that happening.”
Some 90 other environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity, called on Gov. Gavin Newsom to withdraw his support for the measure they said in a letter “perpetuates the false narrative that new large-scale development in fire risk areas is safe.”
The letter insisted that SB 610 contradicts the governor’s own 2019 Strike Force on Addressing Wildfire Risk , which urged California agencies to begin to “deprioritize new development in areas of the most extreme fire risk” and prioritize infill development in urban areas.
Opponents say their frustration also stems from the last-minute nature of this sweeping proposed change. Senator Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, introduced the bill in June. The last day for lawmakers to pass bills is August 31.
But proponents of the measure, which is up for a critical vote in the Assembly Appropriations Committee Thursday, have been quick to defend it as a common sense reform needed to help California fire officials communicate and enforce wildfire mitigation measures.
“The current mapping system is sort of a mess,” said senator Wiener, who partnered on SB 610 with Cal Fire, the state fire marshal and the governor’s office. He also stressed the bill’s support from the California Fire Chiefs Association and Fire Districts Association.
Wiener said the bill is not intended to increase development in high-risk areas, because the existing system does not dictate where homes can or can’t be built. The proposed bill, he said, merely ensures high fire protection standards for buildings in the wildfire mitigation area.
Spokesperson for the governor’s office Alex Stack said the measure would “make it easier for Californians to understand the threat of wildfire in their communities,” and is meant to help protect against blazes growing in size and intensity with climate change.
As parties negotiate back and forth on amendments, critics have yet to be swayed. The League of California cities said its letter expressing concerns about the bill consolidating too much power with the state fire marshal still stands.
“Cal Cities believes local agencies must maintain their existing authorities to make wildfire-related designations within their jurisdictions,” wrote the letter, “and the new regulations must incorporate local agency expertise.”
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