Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation in San Francisco on Tuesday to speed up wildfire mitigation projects, make it easier for homeowners to protect their properties, and invest in new tools to prevent and fight fires.
The laws make permanent the emergency actions Newsom took through executive order and proclamation, which have fast-tracked more than 500 priority wildfire prevention projects covering nearly 130,000 footprint acres and over 310,000 activity acres of treatments across California. Projects affected by the new law will move fuel reduction, forest restoration, and community protection work from planning to implementation faster, saving a year or more of review and red tape.
"From day one, we've worked to transform how California prepares for and responds to wildfires," Newsom said. "These new laws carry that work forward by speeding up critical prevention projects, helping Californians protect their homes and communities, expanding proven prevention tools, and giving firefighters every possible advantage."
The package expands prescribed and cultural burning by extending State-Certified Prescribed Fire Burn Bosses' certification from one year to three years and requiring the State Fire Marshal to explore ways to expand the pool of burn boss instructors. It also establishes a Fire Innovation Unit as CAL FIRE's innovation arm for wildfire technology research, coordination, procurement, and deployment.
Other measures create a low-interest loan program to incentivize home hardening and defensible space work, establish the California Wildfire Preparedness Program to support county-level coordination, and require the California Public Utilities Commission to update rules for removing permanently abandoned transmission lines. Urban retail water suppliers serving high- and very-high-fire-hazard-severity zones will incorporate wildfire preparedness and response into their disaster and emergency plans.
Newsom signed 17 bills, including AB 1699 by Assemblymember Chris Rogers (D-Santa Rosa), the Good Fire Act; AB 1749 by Assemblymember Dixon (R-Newport Beach) on drones interfering with wildfire suppression; SB 1079 by Senator Henry Stern (D-Los Angeles) creating the Fire Innovation Unit; and SB 1370, also by Stern, on consolidated and expedited review of covered wildfire mitigation projects.
The streamlined permitting has already produced results, including a 600-plus-acre fuels reduction project near the Palisades footprint in Los Angeles, a 450-acre prescribed and cultural burning project in Humboldt County, and a nearly 3,000-acre fuels reduction project in Siskiyou County.
Earlier this month, the Governor and Legislature allocated $25 million from the climate bond for a statewide community wildfire mitigation program and $117 million in Greenhouse Gas Reduction Funds for prevention, resilience, forest health, and home hardening projects. CAL FIRE has added an average of 1,800 full-time and 600 seasonal positions annually over the past five years, and the state has invested over $5 billion in wildfire and forest resilience since 2019.