SENATE COMMITTEE on NATURAL RESOURCES and WATER
and
GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATION

Informational Hearing
Can Improved Fire Prevention Reduce Catastrophic Fires in California?

March 7, 2008
San Diego State University
San Diego, California

Senators Darrell Steinberg and Dean Florez, Chairs

	SENATOR DARRELL STEINBERG:  Good afternoon everyone.  The Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Water will begin.  I want to welcome all of you to this very important hearing.  This is also a joint hearing with the Senate Governmental Organization Committee.  Chairman Dean Florez is doing double duty today at an important hearing in Los Angeles so he cannot be here today.
	The topic of our hearing today is Can Improved Fire Prevention Reduce Catastrophic Fires in California?
	And I want to welcome Senator Mike Machado from Linden, a member of the committee, here today.  
And I want to especially thank Senator Chris Kehoe, your senator, for really pushing forward and saying that we must address this issue from a prevention point of view.  We’re here today, really, because of Chris and her leadership.
I also want to thank the outstanding committee staff for the hard work that you’ve all done to put together this hearing.  As well, Senator Kehoe and Senator Florez’ staffs.
Let me make a few opening comments and then I will turn it over to Senator Kehoe and Senator Machado for their comments.
I’m Darrell Steinberg, by the way.  I’m the chair of the committee.
We know that every year in California we receive our share of natural and people made disasters.  Just last year, we had the Southern California fires, the Angora Fire in Lake Tahoe, and a substantial oil spill in the San Francisco Bay.  Other years, of course, we’ve had floods, earthquakes and more.  All of these events share a central message;, disasters are not only about response, which is obviously key, but disasters must also be about prevention.  Prevention, time and time again proves to be cheaper and more effective in protecting public safety, public and private property, and, frankly, in this era of difficult budgets, our public coffers.
Today is the second hearing in a series of hearings in response to the catastrophic fires experienced last year.  The first hearing was conducted by the Joint Legislative Committee on Emergency Services and Homeland Security that focused on the response to the fire,; no doubt, an essential element of dealing with fire in our state.  But today we ask a different question.  How can we prevent these catastrophic fires in the first place, and when we do have the inevitable fire, how can we reduce the damages?  By prevention, we not only need to talk about fireproofing our communities with defensible spaces and fire resistant building materials and design, but also incorporating fire risks into local government’s land use decisions.  Are we actually increasing our fire risk by the way we are developing and growing in this state?  If so, is the state inadvertently encouraging development that is particularly fire prone?  Can, and should, land use decisions take a greater role in reducing the state’s fire risks?  And are we properly protecting our existing homes that are already built in fire prone areas?  These are just a few of the questions we hope to ask and answer here today.
This hearing is broken into three panels.  One is, The Status of the Fire Threat in California; the second is Improving Fire Prevention for Future Development; and, third, is Improving Fire Prevention for Existing Development.  And then, of course, we will hear from the public.
Let me ask Senator Kehoe, again our host here and the driver of this hearing, to make some opening statements.
SENATOR CHRISTINE KEHOE:  Thank you, Senator Steinberg.  And welcome to San Diego.  We’re delighted to have the committee here.  And welcome, also, to Senator Mike Machado.
I couldn’t be happier to have, especially, these two members of the Senate here to listen to this important testimony.  Both serve on Natural Resources and both have leadership roles in helping shape California policy.  And today we have many important fire prevention issues to discuss.  
We have experienced two major catastrophic fires in the past four years here in San Diego that have cost thousands of people their homes and their livelihoods; 13 people died in 2007, and 15 people died in San Diego County alone in 2003.  And the really disturbing part is that the fatalities could have been so much worse.
Today, we’re going to focus this hearing on the connection between land use and wind driven fires that ravaged Southern California those last two cycles—2003 and 2007. 
Through the work of fire professionals, the associated scientists, we have come to better understand California’s new fire reality.  Multiple fires breaking out in the same region driven by winds (in our case, Santa Ana winds) that carry burning embers half-a-mile or more close to a mile ahead of the fire line.  These are very special circumstances.  
The reality now is having a half-a-million people evacuated and being routed from their homes in little over a single day here in San Diego while fires grew quickly through the area, often with devastating results.
What we believed we knew about brush management has changed when in only the span of four years almost 70 percent of the same acreage burned again from 2003/2007.  So the idea that once it’s burned it’s kind of cleaned out is just not factually true, and the fire scientists that are here today will address that.
We also know there’s no single solution to reducing the probability of a massive fire.  The state has its updated Building Code incorporating important fire prevention elements, design characteristics, but those only affect new construction.  We now need to update our brush management regulations to incorporate the lessons we’ve learned.  
We have to look beyond simple brush management and understand that the whole scope of fuels management is important.  Structure to structure, ignition patterns have to be addressed as well.  The height of plantings and whether they are irrigated appropriately, whether fences and decks and other elements attached to the buildings are just as important as dealing with dead and dying trees or streambeds and canyons that are filled with invasive species that act as wicks when the fires start to move.  Ultimately, how we design our own communities.  
The questions Senator Steinberg raised are critical.  We have over 100,000 new homes in the wildland/urban interface in California just in the last four years or so, and 60,000 more are slated, already permitted, in the wildland/urban interface areas of Orange County and Los Angeles.  We are building homes literally in harms way.
Questions remain about the roles that electric distribution lines play in igniting fires, along with other human initiated causes.  The homes themselves can become fuels for the fire.
	Again, my thanks to both Senator Steinberg (our chairman) and Senator Machado for spending a good portion of their day down here in San Diego when they have pressing issues at home.  We look forward to all the experts that have come here voluntarily today to offer their insights and expertise.  And we want to come up with policies that will prevent, or at least, minimize the fires that will sweep through our county once again from the back country ____________ and perhaps all the way to the ocean.  That’s what we have to guard against.  So I want to thank you all for being here.  And, again, my thanks to staff.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  Thank you very much, Senator Kehoe.  Let me welcome Senator Dennis Hollingsworth, as well, also a member of the Natural Resources and Water Committee.  Thank you for joining us.
	Senator Machado, Senator Hollingsworth, do you have any opening remarks?
	SENATOR MACHADO:  I’m ready to go on with the hearing.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  You’re ready to go on with the hearing—very good.
	Panel-1, we have Dr. John Keeley, Research Scientist, US Geological Survey Western Ecological Research Center and Adjunct Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; and Mark Newton from the Legislative Analyst’s Office.  Welcome to both of you.
	JOHN KEELEY, PHD:  Okay, I’m going to give a brief overview of what I think are some of the critical issues.  One of the key points about what I want to talk about is to try to think in terms of fire hazard reduction in the context of natural resources because this is a concern not just with environmental groups, it’s also a financial concern.
	Now, let me give you a history of fire in California.  This is what I call the short version.  Every decade we see one or more massive wildfires.  Every decade we increase funding for fuel modifications and fire suppression activities.  Every decade is followed by a decade of even worse fire impacts.  Now, that’s not the end of the story, it’s actually the beginning of where we’re at today.  Today we’re going to explore other alternative approaches in addition to worrying about fuel modifications and funding for fire suppression activities.  We’re going to talk about fire prevention and all the things that relate to fire prevention.
	Now, in order to understand what we can do, what our possibilities are in terms of fire prevention, we have to have some idea of what causes big fires.  There are some that contend that contemporary wildfires are an artifact of past fire suppression activity and this has allowed unnaturally old fuels to accumulate.  This is really appealing to a lot of people because it implies there’s a simple solution; we can engineer a solution.  That is, we just change our fire management practices and we solve our fire hazard problem.  Unfortunately, it’s demonstrably false on a number of grounds, and I’ll just quickly go through the information that I think most scientists use to address this question.
	First off, if we look at the history of burning in California and we start at the turn of the century when we first were keeping records on fire activity—this is a graph here that shows nine counties from Monterey all the way down to San Diego and just a relative order of magnitude of burning every decade through the 20th century.  We don’t need to go into a lot of detail other than to point out even though generally the mid-part of the 20th century, about 1950, is considered the time where we really began effective fire suppression activities, we haven’t really seen much change in the amount of landscape that burns every decade; very little evidence that fire suppression policy has excluded fires on our landscape.  In fact, we have exactly the opposite problem.  
	This is a product recently produced by the Forest Service.  It’s for Cleveland Forest.  This is the Trabuco District, Palomar and the Descanso District.  And what this figure attempts to do, is show how the 20th century burning patterns have compared to what we think the historical patterns were on these landscapes.  Anything that’s blue, like these areas here, which are the high elevation conifer forests, indicate areas where suppression has excluded fires and we’ve missed fire cycles.  Everything that’s blue going up to red indicates areas that have much more fire on the landscape than we ever think occurred historically.  And what we see is much of the forest has had far more burning in the 
20th century than we believe occurred historically.  If you get out of the forest into much of the private land in San Diego County, it’s even more the case.  We’ve had much more fire in the 20th century and up to the present, than we ever think occurred historically.
Now, why is that?  
The simple answer is, we have the worst fire climate in the country.  We have the Santa Ana winds that can blow at 50-, 60 miles per hour frequently.  We have a very low humidity there; offshore flows that grow from the interior to the coast, and almost nothing can stop those fires except for what some people call the great Pacific firebreak here.
Now, an important point about fires in this landscape;, they’re not new and that’s another piece of evidence that suggests that we haven’t created the problem by our fast fire management.  
This is a picture from the 1890s in Los Angeles County looking at the San Gabriel Mountains and you can see this massive wildfire in the distance.  And, in fact, if you look just north of us, the largest fire we believe ever occurred in Southern California occurred in 1889 long before there was any fire suppression activity.  It’s a fire that began in the northern part of the Santa Ana Mountains;, burned all the way to Riverside and down into San Diego County, burning much of what today is Camp Pendleton.  This fire was bigger than anything that we’ve seen since.  It illustrates that fire management activities are not the cause of these big fires.  
And as Senator Kehoe mentioned, a further piece of evidence is the burning and re-burning from the 2003 and 2007 fires.  
This green outline here is the Cedar Fire from 2003.  
This yellow outline is the Witch Fire from 2007.
This is area that was re-burned; it burned in 2003 and 2007.  We saw the same down on the Harris Fire.  We saw the same in the Cumacha.  And in fact, we estimate over 60,000 acres of what burned in 2007, re-burned 2003 landscapes that had burned.  Another way of putting that in the management perspective; is four years ago if we had done 60,000 acres of prescription burning, that would have not stopped the 2007 fires.
Now, a real new concern in terms of resources is this re-burn area, because when our natural ecosystems re-burn at a close short interval of four years, many of native species are threatened and they’re displaced.  And so, we have well over 60,000 acres that are in risk of losing the native ecosystem.  
And this just illustrates here what happens.
This is an area, here, that burned in 2001.  
This area here also burned in 2001, but it burned just three years later in 2003.  And what you see is this landscape here is completely dominated by alien grasses, and that’s generally what happens and that’s what we should expect on a lot of these re-burnt areas in the county.  We should see an invasion of these alien grasses.  Now, there’s three reasons why we’re concerned about that and it doesn’t have to do just with conservation value of native species.  
This is an illustration in the Santa Monica Mountains of a native shrubland.  This is an area close by that burned three times in 12 years.  We’ve lost most all of the native shrubs and replaced them with alien grasses, and that has three important impacts.  
One, we lose the native _______ and we’ve replaced it with alien plants.  But we also changed the ecological functional type from the deep rooted shrubs to a shallow rooted grass, so it has major impacts on hydrology, slope stability, erosion, etc.
The third thing it does is, is these grasses greatly increase the length of fire season and so they alter the fire regime, increasing the probability we’ll have another fire.  So a lot of reasons we need to be concerned about these impacts.
Now, let me just describe large fires on our Southern California landscape.  
This is all the fires that we know of that were over 100,000 acres, what we call megafires.  A couple of things to point out here:  
One is; we had fires long before fire suppression (the Santiago Canyon Fire), so we know that fire suppression is not required to cause these big fires.  In other words, it’s not the reason we get them; it happened long before we started managing these landscapes.  
But the other thing to note here is; since 2003 we’ve had four megafires on our landscape (the Cedar Fire, Day Fire, Zaca Fire and the Witch Fire) and that ought to be of some concern.  And it appears that we’re perhaps getting more of these big fires today than we have historically.
Now, what are the reasons?
There are probably a number of reasons but I think one of the overriding reasons is drought.  We’ve had extremely severe droughts in the last 10 years.  In fact, even more than that, this is an education of drought on what’s called the Palmer Drought Severity Index.  The only thing you need to know, is everything below zero here is a drought.  
This is the average decadal index for the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and 2000s.  We have had a very long period of extended drought, the worst of which has happened in the last 10 years, and this is almost certainly a big reason why we have a rash of these really huge fires.  There are other factors, but that’s certainly one of the big ones.
Now, one of the questions people ask is; is this indicative of anthropogenic climate change; are we changing the climate and causing more and more drought?  It seemed like that.  If you looked at the 
20th century, we’re going down hill here.  But the thing to keep in mind is it’s premature to conclude that this is climate change.  Because if you look at a long enough timeframe you’ll see that 40-year droughts or 50-year droughts are not unknown in historical records.  Go back to 1840 in Central California, and we have 40-year droughts in 1840 and 1880.  So it’s premature at this point to conclude that we’re looking at a trajectory that’s going to continue downward.  There’s every possibility that it may go back up, we just have to wait and see.  
Now, let me just conclude with what I think we ought to be focusing on in the future.
First, I think we need to recognize these fire events are inevitable.  However, the consequences in human terms are not inevitable.  
One thing that we need to recognize about fuel modifications is we can’t think of them as barriers to fires.  And this is illustrated here.  Here’s a fuel break here that is just adjacent to Scripps Ranch.  This was the Cedar Fire.  That Cedar Fire jumped that fuel break and readily burned into Scripps Ranch.  So when it comes to fuel modification, we have to realize they’re not going to act as a barrier to the spread of these big fires.  That doesn’t mean they have no role, though.  For example, they’re extremely critical at the wildland/urban interface around homes.  However, there’s a lot of debate now about how much of a fuel modification we need.  At present, there really is no evidence that beyond a 100-foot perimeter fuel modifications are going to have a significant impact.
The other really big unknown, is once you’ve been away from the wildland/urban interface, how effective are fuel modification treatments?  And at this point, I would have to say we really need a lot more research to understand not only how effective they are when scattered across the landscape, but, strategically, where are they most effective?
SENATOR KEHOE:  Dr. Keeley, what was that last photo supposed to show?
DR. KEELEY:  This is a fuel break that was created on the Los Padres Forest; and this should have been all native shurblands.  And this is on the ridge behind Santa Barbara.  This is about a 1,000-foot fuel break here—a lot of the ridge top.  And what the whole point is, at this point we don’t know really how effective those are in altering outcomes of fires, nor do we have a good idea strategically where they are most effective?  It’s an area of research that really has been neglected.
Now, in looking towards the future, I think there are a number of things we need to keep in mind—this will relate to everything we’re going to talk about today.
We can reduce the frequency of fires through direct fire prevention activities.  Now, this has been a concern of a lot of firefighting agencies in the past.  A lot of it has been directed at individual responsibility and perhaps one of the places we ought to shift our emphasis is thinking more in terms of responsibility of agencies.  For example, power lines, Senator Kehoe, ranks this issue.  
I was reading a document the other day from 1904.  In the Angeles Forest the number one concern with wildfires was power lines.  When you put these power lines through these wildland fuels they are a potential threat for igniting fires, and particularly when we get Santa Ana winds.
Now, that raises a possibility of how we might be able to effect some change.  We can think in terms of underground power lines.  Now, people shudder when we talk about underground power lines because it’s extremely expensive.  We don’t necessarily have to put them everywhere, though.  For example, we know a great deal about Santa Ana wind corridors.  This is just for the Los Angeles area and these are corridors of known Santa Ana winds.  And so, it’s possible we might be able to pick out areas of high risk—focus underground power lines just in those high risk areas.
Most fires in Southern California start along roadways.  It’s possible we can think in terms of barriers.  For example, we put up sound proofing walls; what about walls that prevent the spread of fires from roads to wildland areas?  
Power equipment and wildlands:  Last week I took a tour of Camp Pendleton.  One of the things that surprised me is the resource agency there said that when there are Santa Ana wind events, they have a ban on all use of power equipment.  And so, that’s something we can think about, particularly because Santa Ana wind events are predictable in advance.  We can tell often a week ahead of time when one is going to come and we can potentially put restrictions on use of equipment in wildland areas.
Now secondly, I would say we need to think about reducing impacts of fires.  In addition to just preventing the fires, prevent their impact.  An important point to keep in mind about most of our houses that are lost in fires is more often it’s the embers that sometimes are carried a mile away from the fire that ignite the homes.  
And here you see an illustration of a house that was lost in this wildfire, yet, the foliage around that house is still green.  In other words, it’s not the fire front that has burned up to the house and ignited it, it’s embers that have been scattered from a distance.  
A lot of different things we can do to improve housing construction.  Here’s just one example, instead of having open eaves where embers can get into the attic, which is usually how these home ignite, there’s closed eaves where they’re completely closed off.  That potentially can reduce the loss of houses.
The last thing I want to mention is zoning the restrictions.  And what, I think….Robert Kennedy, who is the former chief of National Parks Service, wrote a paper.  In fact, he wrote a whole book on this idea of the flames, of about how the fact that there are designated areas we can map as being in the flame zone and we can think seriously about how we zone them for development and for houses.  In other words, how we alter  our planning decisions within this flame zone.  
And this is an illustration of probably one of the worst flame zones.  This is not a wildland/urban interface area, this is a wildland/urban intermix area.  And some recent research that Alex Syphard, who is here in the audience, has shown, it’s in these intermix areas where we have the biggest threat not only at houses being lost, but of ignitions from the development carrying out into the wildland.  And so, there’s a lot we can do to think about development.
And to put it another way, one of my colleagues, CJ _____________ points out, in the end I think we are going to be far more successful if we think about engineering our infrastructure rather than trying to engineer nature.  One of the analogies I used is with earthquakes.  Wildfires are a lot like earthquakes and no one talks about trying stop earthquakes, though.  We shouldn’t be talking about trying to stop wildland fires, we need to recognize they’re inevitable and talk about how we can engineer our infrastructure to make it safer to live in a wildfire region, just like we do with earthquakes.
And let me just end on this slide here.  This is a picture that Rick Halsey recently sent me, and it shows what I think is an excessive amount of clearance around a house.  This is a 300-foot clearance.  Now, there’s no doubt that that house is going to be safe under most burning conditions.  But, there’s a lot of reason to believe that there is not much significant increase in the safety if they had just done 100-foot clearance around a house.
And this is what I call hazard reduction in a vacuum, because it illustrates the thinking that went into 20th century fire issues.  And that is for most of the 20th century fire hazard was the only wildland/urban interface issue and as a result, if any action had any effect whatsoever in reducing fire impacts it was acceptable.  But this is the 21st century and we are allocating significant amounts of funds towards many resource issues—rare species, invasive plants, habitat planning, etc, and as a consequence we need to think about fire hazard in a context of these resource issues.  And I suggest that we need to move away from the idea of anything that has any value at all, we think in terms of cost benefit.  What’s the cost relative to the benefits of that action?  And those costs have to include resource costs.
Thank you.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you.
SENATOR STEINBERG:  Thank you.  That was an excellent presentation.  Let’s hear from Mark Newton.  And then, we’ll take questions from members of the committee.
Mark, welcome.
MARK NEWTON:  Thank you.  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and Senators Kehoe, Machado, and Hollingsworth.  It’s a pleasure to be here.
I’ve prepared a handout entitled, States Wildland Firefighting Costs Continue to Escalate, for the committee and public which I will follow-up and add to in my comments. 
I’ve been asked to speak briefly on the current statutory responsibilities for providing wildland fire protection; to look at the state’s funding history in providing this level of protection; to look at what’s been driving the continually escalating costs of providing fire protection, looking at ways of addressing these escalating costs; and also discussing the role of fire prevention, which is the topic of this hearing both in terms of state programmatic responsibility, and also in terms of the issue of who should pay and how much for fire protection services.
	So turning to the first page of the handout, just briefly on the statutory responsibility; the state has responsibility for providing involvement in fire protection in what is called the “state responsibility area.”  This responsibility is very broadly worded in statute.  Essentially state responsibility areas include timberlands, rangelands, watersheds; these are mostly privately owned lands.  The question arose at a recent hearing of the exact percentage and that’s actually 99 percent privately owned and just one percent publicly owned.  And part of the reason for that is that federally owned lands are never a state responsibility area.  And also, locally incorporated areas are not under the SRA designation.
	In terms of designating state responsibility areas beyond this broad description in statute of timberlands, rangelands, and watersheds, the State Board of Forestry administratively has set a guideline for making the determination of when land is or isn’t a state responsibility area.  And through the Board of Forestry’s own guideline, if there are more than three housing units per acre, that takes the land out of the state responsibility area designation.  So in total there are….actually roughly one-third of the state is state responsibility area—about 31 million acres of the roughly 93-, 94 million acres statewide are under the SRA designation, so that is the broad state responsibility.
	I’m sure many are aware of the existence of many intergovernmental agreements in terms of who actually provides the service.  So I’m wanting to make a distinction between who is fiscally responsible under statute, but who actually may practically provide the service.  
So there are agreements by which the local governments hire the state to provide services _________ their agreements ________ where the state hires a local county government to provide wildland fire protection in state responsibility areas and that’s reimbursed.  And then there’s this concept of mutual aid.  And mutual aid simply is that the concept of the first able responder responds to a wildland fire regardless who is fiscally responsible in law.  The financial arrangements are worked out ____________ 12 to 24 hours of assistance for reimbursement arrangement _________.
	In terms of fire prevention, the State Department of Forestry and Fire Protection does have cover rule and they perform a number of activities, including what is known as mechanical fuel reductions.  Or you may think of that as __________ prescribed burning as was eluded to, as well as inspections of homeowners to ensure that they meet what are called defensible space requirements.  
	So just looking at the calendar year 2006, the Department performed over 55,000 inspections; issued a number of citations; treated for fuel reduction in over 4,700 acres; and prescribed burning on 
10,000 acres.
	Now, when we turn to page-3 and page-4, we’re looking at actually how the Department spends its time and what it responds to.  And what is shown on the graphic on page-3 is that in terms of number of incidents that the State Department responds to, a vast majority are not related to wildland fires but are actually related to medical emergency response in local or in SRA areas.  The vegetation fires and wildland fires are actually a small portion of the number of responses, but this can be somewhat misleading in terms of the amount of time spent.  And if you turn to page-4, the vast majority of the time spent by the Department in terms of hours is on the wildland fires and vegetation fires; they’re much more labor intensive.  But nonetheless, a significant portion of the Department is responding to medical response and structural fires.  To some extent, that is being reimbursed, but to some extent it isn’t.  For the fairly to short responses, if you’re dealing with the response that doesn’t last more than 12 or 24 hours, essentially the Department is not being reimbursed for that service.
	So turning to page-5 on the funding issue, over the last 10 years the Department’s fire protection budget has increased about 150 percent.  In 1997/98, we were looking at just a little over $400 million.  In ’07/’08, we were looking at over a little over a billion dollars.  And in the proposed budget for 08/09, it’s $1.3 billion for fire protection.  That isn’t the Department’s total budget, but it almost is.  
The other activities in the Department aside from the fire protection are resource management, as well as the Office of the State Fire Marshal, but collectively, those are roughly maybe eight percent or so of the Department’s budget.  So the Department is very much a fire protection oriented department.
	So turning to page-6 in trying to understand why the Department’s costs have escalated so significantly, we highlight two issues here.  One is through the changing involved in fuel conditions, but that the key one, though, which has already been eluded to, is increasing development in the wildland/urban interface.  And the graphic on page-6 shows a trend towards increasing housing units in state responsibility areas.  So while the total acreage of state responsibility area hasn’t changed significantly over time, the number of housing units in state responsibility areas have increased.  You’ll see a little dip in the ‘90s, and that was due to a number of annexations that took place in Southern California where former SRA land was annexed to local jurisdictions.  But the trend, though, for housing units is on an upward trajectory.  So currently there are about 870,000 housing units in state responsibility areas statewide. 
	So looking at the two very broad options for controlling the state’s fire protection costs, these are options that our office has thrown on the table for the last number of years that the first (which I’ll just discuss just a little bit later in very brief detail)….is the concept of enacting a fire protection fee on private landowners who live in state responsibility area who do benefit directly from the State’s service.  Our office’s recommendation is for a sharing of cost.  Not that these landowners would totally pay the State’s cost, appreciating that there are some very broad public benefits and public trust benefits from the State’s fire protection services, but to partially pay given the benefit that they receive.
	The second issue is more of a legal one and a governance issue in terms of sharing fiscal responsibility for fire protection with local governments.  And one recommendation that our office has had is to clarify, in law, state versus local responsibility for non-wildland fire protection.  Currently, statute is explicit and clear that the State is responsible for wildland protection.  It is not clear or explicit that the State isn’t responsible for, say, structural protection in state responsibility area. 
In terms of local responsibility, there isn’t a statute that’s very explicit on local responsibility either.  So one option for the Legislature is to clarify, sort of, who is responsible for what in terms of wildland fire protection, as well as non-wildland fire protection.
	A related issue is this issue of our boundaries for the state responsibility areas.  Changing the boundaries would potentially trigger a shift in who is responsible to the extent that you take land out of the state responsibility area designation.  So as I mentioned, statute does not provide anything apart from very broad parameters for what are state responsibility areas.  Essentially the designation has been handled administratively; it will be open to the Legislature to provide more explicit parameters and direction in terms of what is to be included or not included in a state responsibility area.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  You have a question here.
	MR. NEWTON:  Certainly.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  Mr. Newton, what’s the current definition of state responsibility area relative to how many structures there can be per acre or whatever other measurements are used?
	MR. NEWTON:  Essentially, what statute provides is just simply a description of the land—wildlands, timberlands, watersheds, the like.  That’s three houses per acre.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  Three houses?
	MR. NEWTON:  Three houses per acre is an administrative decision of the Board of Forestry, not statute.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  It’s not statute, but that is how the Board of Forestry currently…
	MR. NEWTON:  That’s correct.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  If it has three structures per acre…
	MR. NEWTON:  If it has more than three structures per acre then it is not state responsibility area; that’s considered too high a level of development.  
	SENATOR KEHOE:  Okay.
	MR. NEWTON:  There is also a requirement I should note that the state responsibility area designations are reviewed every five years, under statute, by the Board of Forestry, so there is an ongoing process to re-look at the boundaries.  As I’ve noted, essentially the amount of acreage in state responsibility area hasn’t changed much over the last decade.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  So even with the development that we’re seeing in the back country, whether it’s state responsibility area or not, I’m guessing that some of it must be….there isn’t an automatic re-designation or anything?  The Board has to act and to designate it as state responsibility area and they have not acted?
	MR. NEWTON:  And they have not because the development while it has increased, the three housing unit per acre designation has accommodated the growth and it has allowed the SRA designation to be the same.  It is certainly open to the Legislature to look at this issue of how those lands are designated.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  How do you mean it’s accommodated it?
	MR. NEWTON:  That even though the housing units have increased significantly; that the three housing unit per acre formula hasn’t been potentially contravened; that the housing development has occurred.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  The houses may be up there but the designation hasn’t changed.
	MR. NEWTON:  Yes, that’s correct.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  Okay.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  Can I follow up?  Are there a regular audits by the Board of Forestry (inspection, I suppose that’s the better word here), to determine whether or not these new developments are actually in compliance?
	SENATOR HOLLINGSWORTH:  I’m not sure Mr. Newton is saying that the development is more than three per acre and the Board of Forestry is not taking the designation away, I think what he’s saying is that the development has not reached three units per acre.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  That’s what I’m asking.  Is there any way to check on that?  In other words, there’s all this development going on (a huge increase since 2001), and the assumption is, maybe the reality is that the developments are three units per acre or less.  I just want to know whether somebody actually goes out there and checks on that?
	MR. NEWTON:  I think, Senator Steinberg, in terms of this five-year review, there’s mapping of where we do know where the development is and it’s that review that guides whether the boundaries should change.  So it does take place every five years.  Whether there is a body apart from the Board of Forestry that is independently looking at this issue, I’m not aware of _________.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  Senator Machado.
	SENATOR MACHADO:  So, then, what you’re saying is, we don’t have an accurate picture as to how many three-acre per acre units there are out there that have not been identified to be removed from an SRA?
	MR. NEWTON:  I believe….I mean, the Department in its five-year review, sort of looks at that.  So there clearly is a lag time between the reviews, so compared to __________ happens even after the Board has made its review.  So I guess the question, Senator Machado, is, as of this very point in time we certainly don’t have a comprehensive view of where we are on this exact data apart from the last review that was done a little year or two ago?
	SENATOR MACHADO:  Will this be something that would be appropriate for local governments to be responsible for reporting?
	MR. NEWTON:  We haven’t analyzed that issue but it would be closest to the, sort of, land-use decisions ___________
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  All right.  Please conclude.
	MR. NEWTON:  Just very briefly on the fire fee, which members know that this is an option that we have put on the table for the Legislature as part of our office’s alternative budget; the Legislature did enact a fire protection fee a few years back.  It was rescinded in law before ________ took place.  Basically our concept here for a fee is to ultimately tie the fee as directly as possible to the benefit received by a landowner, but also in terms of the risk presented by the landowner too.  So a fully refined fee would reflect the risk issue and that’s where fire prevention activities will come into play.
	So on page-9 we give an example of what a fee structure may look like.  I just want to be clear; this is not the LAO’s recommendation of the fee structure but just appreciating that there are quite a few policy choices that need to be made when structuring a fee.
	The first and major one, of course, is the level of cost-sharing between the State and the beneficiaries of the service.  So we have put on the table 50 percent of cost-sharing, and of course, the Legislature could easily change that to a lower level or even a higher level.
	And I think just to conclude, the second option on the issue of addressing the State’s cost is this issue of clarifying the State’s fiscal role for fire protection.  So I think I mentioned previously, a role to clarifying in statute what the State is and is not fiscally responsible for.  And we feel that if the statute were clear that the State were not fiscally responsible for non-wildland fire protection, that that clarification would hopefully encourage local governments to provide not only accurate funding for those activities, but be a little more conscious of the land use decisions that would affect fire risk; that would affect their cost that they would be responsible for.
	I’ll be happy to answer any questions from the members.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  Thank you very much.  I have one question (and then I’ll turn to Senator Hollingsworth) for Professor Keeley.  You mentioned one potential prevention strategy is to fireproof fires to ride freeway walls, since most of the fires, as you say, start from roadway…
	DR. KEELEY:  The roadways.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  A roadway source.  Have you costed what the magnitude of such a strategy would be for Californians?  I mean, we’re talking prevention here.  That was the prevention strategy that, sort of, came right out front to me; what would it cost?
	DR. KEELEY:  Most of these issues haven’t been studied.  We have no idea, for example, what roadways would make a difference and what _________ didn’t.  So it’s an idea that’s out there; it’s an idea that’s being studied.  I have no idea what the cost would be because I have no idea where it might strategically make a difference.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  I would just suggest that might be one good follow-up from this hearing.  I certainly would like to know that answer.  We’re always talking about big bonds and bond issuances.  And if we can incorporate into our next transportation or environmental bond the idea of helping to prevent these kinds of catastrophes, it should be something we ought to consider.
	DR. KEELEY:  And part of what we don’t know about it is, is that what type of a barrier would be effective?  We probably don’t need something as big as the _________ wall, because most of the fuels along the roadways comprise of grasses, and so the flame licks are going to be low.  Probably, you don’t need a real tall barrier, but that’s another area of research.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  Senator Hollingsworth.
	SENATOR HOLLINGSWORTH:  Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  
Mr. Newton, I know I’ve asked this question before, but your presentation has actually, I think, brought it even more to the forefront.  And that is, if people are going to be required by the State to pay a fee in a SRA area for fire protection under the theory that the State is providing them with some level of fire protection and that the structures are increasing the State’s costs of fire protection—in other words, that the argument has been that the more structures we have in state responsibility areas, the higher the costs, therefore, we need to have those people pay for the service that they’re getting; why is it your recommendation that, then, we would turnaround and the State would, then, lower its responsibility for non-wildland fire protection in the state responsibility areas?  Because the big question that I’ve asked previously is, when people are in these state responsibility areas it’s not as though they don’t have other fire protection as well.  They’re already, many times, most times, paying a local assessment for their local fire department and what are they going to be getting in return for paying the State this fee?
	MR. NEWTON:  I think the way to answer that question is that the State service has always been different than any locally provided service.  What is clear in law, is that locals have no responsibility on the wildland fire protection side.  So the State, certainly in preventing wildland fires within wildland/urban interface, that by addressing wildland fires you’re addressing structural….you’re providing structural protection and homeowner protection too.  That is a level of service.  That is service that is not being provided locally and it’s a real State cost.  So I think it’s not as if one will be paying twice for the same service, but would be paying….continue to pay for the local service that will be provided locally and with, perhaps, greater clarification of what the scope of that service is, and then partially paying for a service that, essentially, the state taxpayers have been paying but where there is a very direct benefit from the wildland fire protection to the landowner.  So we don’t see it as double dipping for the same service, but just two different services.  But the clarification of law would not change the degree of wildland fire protection that the State is paying but just perhaps make it clear that some of these added services that the State has been perhaps providing under these mutual waiver, so that will be more of a local fiscal responsibility.
	SENATOR HOLLINGSWORTH:  Well, I’m not sure that there are very many local fire protection districts that will say that they don’t have wildland fire responsibilities as well.  I think it’s not generally believed that that’s the case; that maybe they don’t have the responsibility solely.  But I think that the idea that you’re going to levy the fee on homeowners because homeowners are the cause of increased cost for CDF or CalFire fire protection in state responsibility areas, and, then, we’re going to take the responsibility for protecting those structures away from CalFire just doesn’t seem to pass the smell test with me, at least, and probably isn’t going to with most homeowners.  
But I wanted to ask just one final question, if I could.  On your analysis on page-3 you have the number of incident responses from CalFire at just south of 180,000 a year for emergency medical responses, am I reading that correctly?
	MR. NEWTON:  Well, essentially, what the bracket shows, Senator Hollingsworth, is that all three bars for each type of fire is a response by the Department.  So essentially, with medical emergency response that you’re correct __________ 180,000 for land that is actually in a local responsible area.
	SENATOR HOLLINGSWORTH:  This may not be your fault, but are you familiar whether or not CalFire has reported that to you by breaking out which are ones that they’re actually responding to?  Because, there are a number of areas where CalFire handles the dispatch for all such calls and counts them as a response even though they dispatched a local fire agency, whether it’s a wildland fire, an emergency medical response, or a structure fire it’s counted as a CalFire response because CalFire handled the dispatching of it even though it might have been a local agency that actually rolled to that call.
	MR. NEWTON:  That’s a very good point, Senator Hollingsworth.  I think we’re aware of that distinction.  I think we try to refine the data.  I don’t think that refinement was readily available with the data from the Department.  But you’re quite correct, when their incident response data is on this initial level through dispatch but in some cases the amount of time or the major role may have been __________, that’s quite correct.
	SENATOR HOLLINGSWORTH:  Thank you.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  I just want to close the circle on Senator Hollingsworth’s questions here.  I want to make sure I understand your recommendations.  We could raise the fee, or impose a fee, excuse me, on the private landowners and we could also change the definition of state responsibility areas but we don’t necessarily have to do both, correct?  They’re separate options?
	MR. NEWTON:  Separate or they could be…
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  They could be.  But if we were to raise the fee but not change the definition, we would not be, then, lessening the level of protection for existing homeowners, correct?
	MR. NEWTON:  That’s correct.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  It would be only if we did both that there could be a legitimate argument that we would be reducing the amount of state fire protection for residential structures in these areas.
	MR. NEWTON:  That’s correct.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  Okay.  And let me ask you this.  Could fees be used to fund the kinds of studies that Professor Keeley was talking about regarding the roadway prevention issue?  Can you use fees to pay for some of those studies in the beginning of whatever that fix might look like?  
	MR. NEWTON:  I think we certainly have used fees for that purpose.  And there would be a connection with the fee-payer in that you are trying to lessen, ultimately, what the fee might need to be when you have prevention activities.  
I probably should just clarify for the committee just one important point in terms of the fee option at this time; is that the Governor has proposed to fund a significant portion of the Department’s activities and then some additional activities with a surcharge on the insurance policies statewide.  And the amount of, sort of, fund shifting involved is about $45 million.  Our view on a basis of, sort of, fairness to who is paying that, that there is not a sufficient nexus between insurance policyholders statewide and who’s benefiting from these services, so our fee is an alternative to that.  If the Legislature did not accept either the Governor’s proposal on surcharge or a fee of some other option, there will be a significant problematic _______ Governor’s budget which involves closing of fire stations and the like, so it’s a very significant part of their project.  So I’m not saying that to say that fees are the only way of going, but just in terms of the budget discussions that if not the surcharge that ____ have a problematic ______.
SENATOR STEINBERG:  I think this is an important point and let’s clarify it.  Without the fees or a surcharge, we’re talking about trying to find a way to maintain the same level of service while dealing with the State’s serious budget deficit.  You’re saying if we do nothing, because of the Governor’s proposed cuts, if we were to follow them, there would be, by definition, a reduction in service?
MR. NEWTON:  Forty-five million dollars reducing in service.
SENATOR STEINBERG:  Senator Kehoe.
SENATOR KEHOE: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.  In addition to the report that you just delivered from this month you have an older report on wildland fire protection going back to 2005.  And one of your conclusions that you draw there to reduce cost pressure on the State, is to encourage local land-use decisions that attempt to minimize the risk to structures and people from wildfire and from local governments to budget an appropriate level of local resources.  I think the opportunity that the State has with the State imposed fee, if we get there.  And it’s a very steep climb; we all realize that.  It isn’t like there’s a State fire and then there’s county fire and then there is a city fire.  We need to have a bright line between the agencies that are responding to an event; the amount of money they’re putting towards it, who’s paying, which group of taxpayers?  But the bottom line is, we’re all in this together.  And every single level of government here in San Diego, every fire district, every city, I believe, and the county, all know they need more money and fire prevention and fire suppression.  The county wants 50 state fire trucks stationed here permanently.  So there are agreements that go back decades and decades where responsibilities and costs, mutual aid and incident command and all that, the money is traded back and forth through reimbursements.  
The fact is, every level of government knows we need more money for firefighting and we need to figure out a fair way to direct the resources to the agencies—local, county and state.  And that’s the opportunity we have if we can design a fair fee and get it passed and signed.  
And so, that’s the discussion that I think we need to stay focused on.  Because here in San Diego, we’re going forward with consolidation of our back country fire departments; an important step forward but it’s going to cost millions of dollars of new money every year just to do a partial consolidation.  And then, there’s the equipment issue and personnel issue.  So I think that LAO’s recommendations are very good ones.  I think you’re really trying to deal with the reality and it’s up to us to work out the policies that can make some sense.
I want to ask Dr. Keeley a couple of things too.  Of many of the questions I had, you answered very clearly in your presentation, so I appreciate that.  I am interested in the increasing development in the back country—wildland/urban interface or intermix, whichever kind of definitions you want to use.  But we’ve seen these numbers of 60,000 homes are already in the pipeline in Los Angeles County, 20,000 homes in Orange affect….there’s some maps in the L.A. Times, and I don’t know if you’ve already seen this article, showing new homes in risk areas—Ritter Ranch, Newell Ranch, Monte Verde, East Orange, Mountain Park, etc.  You’re saying this complicates our firefighting response and our fire prevention response.  What kind of policies and what kind of research do we need to get done to begin to deal with how can we better direct this kind of local development?
DR. KEELEY:  Well, I think one of the big issues is thinking in terms of fire risk and planning for development patterns, and there are certain high-risk areas.  For example, we have certain corridors….the Santa Monica Mountains ____________.  We have certain corridors where fires blow through those corridors at periodic intervals because those are the courses of the Santa Ana winds blowing.  And the Santa Ana wind driven fires are the fires that we’re most concerned about.  Those are the ones that are the most difficult, if not impossible, to stop.  
And so, one of the lines of research that I think is most useful and something that we’re now carrying on a dialogue with Senator Feinstein’s office ________ last December she was very interested in understanding better where are the known corridors of Santa Ana winds and how might that direct planning decisions?  So research on patterns of Santa Ana winds certainly could contribute to understanding risks. 
The other thing to understand about development patterns is through the 20th century we’ve seen aggressive movement of development from the coast to the interior.  Now, our worst fires are Santa Ana wind driven fires.  Those are offshore flows.  In other words, the flow is coming from the dessert to the coast.  The further inland the ignition source is, the greater the chance is that you’re going to get a very large fire.  If you have a fire start at the coast and if the wind is blowing toward the coast, it’s not going to be a big fire.  As we move development eastward we increase the probability of an ignition during one of those wind events.  So those are two ways that develop patterns that affect the size of the fire.
SENATOR KEHOE:  We’ve heard this business about the wind corridors being a particularly critical element in the fires, and they were in our last two fires—very high winds and very low humidity and the other factors like topography if they’re on steep slopes.  So is it too early to say, then, if you’ve got a Santa Ana wind corridor, that’s going to be an ultra-high fire hazard zone; it would be like the 100-foot flood plain or something like that?
DR. KEELEY:  It’s going to be a higher risk area than areas that are not subject to Santa Ana winds.  And it’s not like every part of Southern California is subject to Santa Ana winds.  There are certain areas where there are no passes.  Because these winds have to be funneled through passes and there are certain areas where there simply are no passes that the funnel the winds through and the winds aren’t a problem.  So, yes, the areas with the Santa Ana winds, I think, you will be safe to say are a higher risk than areas without those winds.
SENATOR KEHOE:  And then, I was also interested in the pictures you were showing of the extremely cleared land, you know, that sort of, mowed around the house.  You’re saying where the fire flames, where the embers are going out a half-a-mile or more in front of the fire line, that 100-feet, 300-feet really doesn’t make that much difference?  Am I putting words in your mouth?
DR. KEELEY:  Well, let me just put it this way; when it comes to homes igniting there are two concerns.  One, is the flaming brush.  And the research indicates, even in heavy fuel, if a house is set back 100 feet from the fuel, the flame in front is not likely to ignite that fire.
SENATOR KEHOE:  The house.
DR. KEELEY:  Excuse me.  The fire is already ignited (laughter).  It’s not going to ignite the house.  But, that leaves open the question of embers.  Now, we don’t have enough research at this point to say exactly what the impact is of 100-foot versus 300-foot on embers, but, we have a lot of reason to believe that it probably isn’t going to have a huge impact because the embers are likely to be coming much further than 300-feet away.  Now, it’s an area that’s open and ripe for research.  We need to actually understand the issue of embers.  There are clear differences in what’s susceptible to embers and what isn’t.  For example, out ________ canyon are going to be much more susceptible to embers because embers are going to float down slope.  Houses on ridges, probably less susceptible to embers, but then houses on ridges are more susceptible to the radiant heat of the fire front because fires heat going uphill, so there are different tradeoffs there.  And all I can say at this point, is we have some general understanding that 100-foot is probably what we ought to be shooting for but we really have room for a lot more research.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you.
SENATOR HOLLINGSWORTH:  Senator Kehoe, if I could just…
SENATOR KEHOE:  Sure.  Absolutely.  Go right ahead, Senator Hollingworth.
SENATOR HOLLINGSWORTH:  Professor, if you could qualify that you’re talking about Santa Ana wind driven fires when you’re talking about embers and not just your every day fire that’s topography driven or fuel driven.
DR. KEELEY:  Yes.  Basically, we’re talking about Santa Ana wind driven fires because those are the fires that people are most concerned with.  I mean, I know I’ve talked to a lot of firefighters and they’ll tell you, if you give them a fire that happens under moderate weather conditions, they generally don’t feel threatened by it nearly like the Santa Ana wind driven fire where they’re really forced to get into defensive action.
SENATOR HOLLINGSWORTH:  But if you’re talking about the advantage of a topography driven fire having 300 feet of clearance versus 100 feet of clearance, minus the Santa Ana winds, you’re talking about a big difference.  You’re not talking about embers flying a mile and a mile-and-a-half, you’re talking about if you’re in a heavy fuel area; you’re talking about flame lengths being determined by the topography.  The flame lengths could be more than 100 feet.  If you’re sitting on a steep slope and you have 50- or 100 feet of clearance but you have heavy fuels (and we’re not talking wind driven), that flame length could be more than 100 feet, could it not?
DR. KEELEY:  Yes, everything changes when you start getting on steep terrain.  If you have a house on a ridge things could be different.  
Now, the research that’s been done, to my knowledge it didn’t take into account steep terrain.  But the research that has looked at heavy fuels and fire fronts generally conclude that beyond about 100 feet, you’re not likely to ignite the fire with the radiant heat.  But that study, and there’s really only one study that I can think of (but Max Moritz is speaking later; he might be able to talk more about that) I don’t think it included steep terrain.  And maybe a larger clearance might have some value under steep terrain conditions, but I can’t really say because I don’t know of any studies that have looked for that.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Senator Machado.
SENATOR MACHADO:  Thank you.  Mr. Newton, in 2004 there was a statute that was passed that, then, Assemblywoman Kehoe, introduced that required local jurisdictions that contain state responsibility areas or high risk fires, to submit safety element portions as part of the public plans to the Board of Forestry for review.  Do you know if there’s been any sense of compliance by local governments with that, and if so, will the safety plan be of any value to be able to react to any of these recent fires?
MR. NEWTON:  We’ll have to look into that, Senator Machado.  I’ll make a note of that __________.
SENATOR KEHOE:  But it’s an excellent question, Senator Machado.
SENATOR STEINBERG:  Well, are we ready to move to the next panel?  All right, thank you both very much.  You’re off to a very good start.  Let’s call up Panel-2, Improving Fire Prevention for Future Development.  We have Cary Lowe, Ph.D. for the AICP, and is a land use attorney; Max Moritz, Ph.D., Assistant Cooperative Extension Specialist and Co-Director of the Center for Fire Research and Outreach at UC Berkeley (go Bears).  
Welcome.  Dr. Cary Lowe, you’re first.
CARY LOWE, Ph.D.:  Thank you very much.  I appreciate being invited here today.  I’m primarily a land use lawyer and I work with landowners, developers and people who are interested in these kinds of issues for professional reasons.  And I’ve been doing this for about 
30 years and what’s interesting to me is how much greater a role these issues have assumed in planning decisions and land use regulatory issues in recent years.  
But we’re seeing fires now that are on a scale and intensity that are very different from what we expected a decade ago or a couple of decades ago, so much so, that it’s really time, and I think your committee’s presence here kind of reflects this, that it’s really time to start re-looking at some basic assumptions about land use as it affects fire issues.  And the reason that I think it’s easy to say that is, that wildfires are so different in nature from other kinds of catastrophes that we encounter.  We compare them to floods and earthquakes and so on, but after having been out in the field with fire officials in the aftermath of the most recent fire, especially in the area affected by the Witch Creek Fire, and seeing how especially under Santa Ana wind conditions these fires leap huge areas; they may start in a canyon over here from a downed power line, but in a matter of hours they’ve spread miles and miles beyond there.  They are affecting communities that nobody would have expected would have had any hazard associated with them relative to where the fires began.  
Wind blown embers, a wind driven fire front, I mean, these are conditions that are, as someone mentioned earlier, virtually impossible to do anything more than try to defend against.  You don’t really get control over them to the point where, as it was described to me in the field, at one point they were prepared to sacrifice everything east of the I-15 Freeway if necessary because there was no way to get it under control.  The 500 houses or so that burned, well, it was lucky it wasn’t several times that.  The fire jumped the I-15 Freeway.  What is that?  About a 
12-freeway lane corridor at that point, and swept on toward the coast and ultimately fizzled out as the winds subsided and weather conditions changed a little.  
SENATOR KEHOE:  And, remember, almost zero humidity.
DR. LOWE:  Right.  And as one of the earlier speakers pointed out, the Pacific Ocean is the ultimate fire break and that’s where they were prepared to have to let it burn to.  So with those kind of conditions, you’ve got to look at this differently than we have in the past.
The other important thing to consider, and again it was mentioned earlier, is that we’re having more people and more activity out in what previously had been, kind of, virgin areas.  It is one thing to have a farmhouse or a residence out in a remote canyon or something.  Even if there was a fire, the effects were going to be relatively limited.  But now we’ve got whole communities that are not only at this urban wildlife interface, but as you saw in one of the earlier slides, it’s really become this intermix where we’ve got low density development often on top of ridge lines—very vulnerable spots either down in canyons or up in ridge lines.  But it almost doesn’t matter; when fire gets loose in areas like that it’s just going to sweep through under the conditions that we had last October here.
So the question is, rather than just looking at how you can protect new development, new homes from the effects of a fire today (and I think the next panel is going to address that in more detail), the question for  our panel is more, what do we do in terms of land use policies to try to reduce the likelihood of these fires starting in the first place or having the opportunity to have such great impacts.  And these raise very complicated regulatory issues.  And I’m very conflicted about this from a professional standpoint, because, as I say, mostly I’m working with people who are trying to develop wherever they can develop within the existing legal framework.  And I think it would be irresponsible not to acknowledge that the changing environmental conditions, changing demographic conditions have created a situation where we just can’t keep building the way we’ve been accustomed to into areas where fire hazards are as great as they are.  And more important than just the exposure of the individual homes that might burn in the fire in the area where the fire starts, is this whole question of when you introduce more human activity into wildland areas, you’re generating more opportunities for fires to start to begin with.  
Half of the fires that we had in Southern California last October were started by downed or arching electrical lines.  This isn’t lightening strikes we’re talking about, these are electrical lines that run through where they run because there’s human activity that needs electricity.  Undergrounding them maybe an effective response but the point is today, as we sit here, you’ve got electrical lines all over the place in wildland areas and they pose a tremendous hazard.  When you have a home even adjacent to wildland areas, it doesn’t matter if there’s a 100-foot setback, that it’s going to protect that home.  Or, that individual home has been built to virtually armored conditions the way they have been in some of the newer planned communities, which survived these most recent fires, by the way, very effectively, the point is that someone living in one of those homes might run a piece of equipment that puts out sparks or kids may go play with matches out in the brush, and those are the kinds of things that started some of the biggest fires that began this last cycle.  The Malibu Fire was a ______ campfire.  Another one of the L.A. County fires was kids playing with matches.  So it’s an almost predictable result of people spending more time in and around these wildland areas.  And the more homes you put out there, the more activity there is out there, it’s almost a given that you’re going to have more fires as a result.
So what are the policies going to be that will address this?
Someone asked a question, like Senator Machado asked, about General Plans and whether there’s been any beneficial effect of some of the requirements now in law that require fire agencies to have the opportunity to comment on local General Plan safety elements.  Apparently there isn’t much feedback in on that point, but the emphasis on General Plans, I think, is a good place to start because we already have a requirement for safety elements in local General Plans.  The General Plan, though, on statewide, doesn’t say much about what those safety elements need to include with regard to wildfire.  I think it was just last year that the Legislature significantly expanded the requirements relating to flood hazards and how they’re addressed in safety elements.  Maybe it’s time to do the same kind of thing with regard to wildland fire issues, that local jurisdictions can still have lots of leeway in how they address the precise requirements for any given development or how they zone in a particular locality.  But the State can play a very useful role in, I think, at least setting some broad standards, take some minimum criteria for what the safety elements need to say with regard to wildland fire hazards.  There’s already some jurisdictions moving in that direction.  
I was talking to people in Riverside County last week and they’re undergoing the first five-year update of their new General Plan.  And they’re looking at these issues in great detail and trying to dovetail land use restrictions in wildland areas with their very extensive multi-species habitat protection plan and seeing if they can’t couple the acquisition or reservation of land for habitat purposes with restrictions on development in such a way they essentially get twice the bang for the buck.  So it doesn’t always work that conveniently, but it’s the kind of thing that’s worth looking at.
Ultimately, development probably needs to be prohibited entirely in some areas.  The state fire marshal already maps fire severity zones and it’s no mystery where the areas are that are the most susceptible to fire and especially to wildland fire.  
So you have a good database to begin with.  And ultimately, just so we don’t let people build houses on fault lines or in floodplains, there are going to be places where they just shouldn’t build houses because of fire hazards.  And not just houses, the same thing would go for any other kinds of structures that not only would be in peril in fire but that would introduce activity into wildland areas that could be the source of fires, so it’s really a two-part issue.  
But then, you also have to come back again to the electrical lines.  They have been such a major factor in the wildland fires we’ve experienced both this last time in ’07 and previously in ’03.  That whether it’s your committee or some other body, the PUC or somebody, I think, has got to really take a very serious look at this.  And if the cost of undergrounding transmission lines is great, well so be it.  Then the question is just how you got to figure out a way to pay for it.  But the benefits of doing that are so enormous that I don’t see how you can avoid getting into the issue.
It’s tougher to do…
SENATOR KEHOE:  Dr. Lowe, on that point, just because there’s….that local distribution lines _________ owned by SDG&E, the local utility, we’ve ask the PUC to look at the downed lines as the cause of the fire.  And SDG&E has asked for a review of the safety rules around the distribution lines in the back country; their vegetation management and other things that they’re already required to do.
And then also, there is a suit going forward here in Superior Court by some property owners that were damaged by the fires, those fires that were attributed to downed power lines, just so you know.
SENATOR MACHADO:  We’re talking about downed power lines for distribution on the transmission lines?
SENATOR KEHOE: Correct.
DR. LOWE:  And I’m really talking about both categories, so they certainly have different levels of hazard attached to them.
SENATOR MACHADO:  But transmission lines are usually governed by FERC regulations in terms of what the cleanup should be…
DR. LOWE:  Right.  That’s why I say this may not all be within your purview to address but you can at least stimulate discussion about it and refer it to other agencies that may be more appropriately equipped to deal with it.
But what I hear from the utilities more often than not is that their complying with current law.  They’re doing the maintenance that’s required.  Now, maybe those standards aren’t good enough standards so that’s something to think about.
The one _____ thing I wanted to touch on with regard to planning considerations and how we approve and develop in these interface or intermix areas, is when you go out to places like Poway, Pomona, Rancho Bernardo, places that were really impacted by these recent fires, one of the most interesting consistent things you see is how fire raced into urbanized or suburbanized areas following streambeds or other natural corridors that were purposely left in place because it was thought to be the environmentally sensible and sensitive thing to do.  And yet, those pristine corridors became like tentacles into these residential areas carrying the fire to homes and businesses that ultimately burned.  
Scripps Ranch was another good example in the fires _________.  We have huge corridors of wildlands that are laced through this major planned community and that simply brought the fire right to people’s front doors and burned their houses down.  So this requires a real shift in perspective on land use planning and whether you want to try to preserve natural areas within developing areas or not.  But from a fire standpoint, it’s really worth reconsidering.
So jumping to one last area; who is going to be responsible for the cost of all of this?  And this was talked about a little bit by the previous panel.  Certainly there’s an element of fairness here that dictates putting more of the financial burden on the people who are either already living in or carrying out activities in and around these wildland areas and if there is going to be a fee of some kind or if there is going to be surcharges on insurance policies or whatever, it’s probably fair to put a greater part of that burden on them.  It’s complicated, because when I think you start talking about property-based charges you run into legal issues as to what’s a fee versus a tax and who can approve it and who you can make subject to it and whether you can impose it on people in the aftermath as opposed to at the time the development is approved.  It gets real complicated.  And I know that’s outside of the scope of this hearing but I urge you to think through those issues and maybe have staff look at those more before you go too far in any direction and settling on financial solutions.  But in any event, while it seems fair to put more of the burden on individuals who are, let’s say, getting the greatest benefit from being in those locations and from the services that have to be provided to protect them, still it’s a community-wide issue too.  And I think the gentleman from the Analyst’s Office that the cost needs to be shared in some way was actually on target.  Because if a fire starts here that spreads to here, well, everybody in between is impacted, not just the people who were in that immediate wildland area, so there is a community-wide benefit here.
The one thing we know is we can’t keep going on the way we have been.  This last round of fires, by itself, cost us close to a billion dollars in direct firefighting costs; burned over a billion dollars worth of property; burned hundreds of thousands of acres of wildland, a lot of it valuable habitat land, a huge cost to private interests and public interests here.
So let me just leave you with a final image, if I may.  
You know about the Witch Creek Fire, which was our largest recent fire here, and I described to you what some of the comments I got from local fire officials about how out of control that fire got so quickly and how much worse it could have been had conditions not proportionately gotten a little better.
In Los Angeles, at about the same time there was a fire that started in Griffith Park in the Hollywood Hills.  They were extremely lucky because in the days that they were battling that fire they didn’t have the kind of winds that we had down here and they had a higher level of humidity.  If they hadn’t, that fire could easily have swept right across the Hollywood Hills and made it all the way to the coast through the Santa Monica Mountains.  And if we just picture that notion of Los Angeles burning from downtown to the ocean, that is so horrifying a picture and yet it was so possible.  If they had had the same conditions there that we had here, there was a very good chance you could have had that.  
So as someone who has lived for many years in a high fire hazard area (which I did and I’m never going to do again), I’ve learned something from my past experiences and from seeing what’s happened in this last round of fires.  I think it’s time for a fundamental policy shift and hopefully this hearing can be a start of that.
Thank you very much.
SENATOR STEINBERG:  Thank you very much Doctor.  We appreciate the excellent testimony.
Dr. Moritz.
MAX MORITZ, Ph.D.:  Well, I, like Jon Keeley, tend to speak through pictures, maps.  And I appreciate the opportunity to be here, first of all.  And I want to say a little bit about the fire hazard severity zone maps, which I think we’re all interested in.  And we’re talking about basic fees or surcharges on them.  And I was actually involved, a little bit, in the updates to the new versions.  
This is an old version right here.  This is from 1985.  And I guess I show this for a couple of reasons.
One, to make a point that this is an old map and it should have  been updated as science and development patterns changed.  This needs to make its way into the fire hazard severity zone maps. 
And secondly, fires and fire probabilities of fire hazard doesn’t pay attention to administrative boundaries.  I see some very sharp boundaries here along county lines or whatever, and that’s not the way fire hazard behaves.  And so, that’s something that we might want to be careful of….the political wrangling that can lead to that is something, I think, is worth thinking about.
So the structure I want to talk about is just the complexity of the problem a little bit.  We don’t want to hear too much about how horrifying it is, but just to set the backdrop.  The mapping effort itself for the new fire hazard severity zone maps; what went into them?  I do want to spend a little bit of time talking about some of the methods and where some of the advancements were and where some of the uncertainties or refinements could be, and then, something a little more comprehensive to get us forward.
So no surprise, a basic complex growing problem, right?  I mean, this map right here shows us the last 50 to 100 years of fire in, kind of, reddish/orange over these different bioclimatic eco regions of California.  We could say a lot about what fire ___ has or hasn’t done in different parts of the state and how fire behaves in different environments.  And somebody mentioned….actually, I think you brought it up, Senator Kehoe, the flame zone outlets.  This would be the basis for a first crack at a flame zone outlet.  And I’ve actually spent a good part of my career trying to find support and develop methods to do something like create flame zone outlets for California.  So there’s varying fire regimes;, fire weather, fuels differ, topography differs up and down the state, and the sensitivity of vegetation throughout…
SENATOR KEHOE:  Dr. Moritz, by support you mean what?
DR. MORITZ:  I mean, you’re going to hate hearing it from researchers, but there’s no funding to do research on some of these basic questions.  A lot of funding on fire goes to very specific needs, and I don’t deny that those are important, but there’s not a lot of fire research going to address…
SENATOR KEHOE:  Okay, thank you.  I wanted you to outline that.
DR. MORITZ:  So the fire varies up and down the state.  Our development patterns vary.  There’s a different age housing _______; there’s different vulnerabilities up and down the state; there’s different degrees of build-out and open space and new development, which is probably less vulnerable, but this varies up and down the state.  
A fire hazard and how we measure it and how we characterize it actually is kind of a linkage; it has a role to play in a whole bunch of different issues that we face and was one of the problems I wanted to go into—one of the scenarios I wanted to lay out.  So I picked an area that’s not far from here—it’s in San Diego County.  And I want to just show, for a second, how fire and mapping fire hazards and fire probabilities and getting a handle on this affects a whole bunch of different issues.  
We’ve been focusing on newer housing or older housing and that’s certainly an issue because it drives building codes; it actually does and we’ll talk about that a little bit in a second.  Evacuation planning, you would want to understand hazard and fire probabilities for that reason.  Wildlife habitat, endangered species, these come together in dictating what we can and can’t do sometimes to address fire hazard.  Air and water quality, all of these are linked by fire and fire probabilities and fire hazard.
Something you don’t hear much about during the 2007 fires, the military was actually restricted or worried about planes taking off due to smoke.  So, actually, this kind of has a security implication of understanding this a little better.  
Landslide after fires; we’re going to want to talk about that.
Financial issues; budgets.
The elephant in the room, I think, the insurance industry and how that’s going to play out.  I have a little bit of information about that, or, opinion about that.
And something else you don’t hear….I hear it a lot because everybody is talking about AB 32 and carbon accounting and caps on C02 emissions.  There’s all kinds of issues with respect to fire and forest carbon sequestration or emissions reduction credits for doing hazard treatments.  Everybody is talking about this and it all comes back to how we map fire hazards.  Where and why do we see different fire hazard levels up and down the state?
So the new fire hazard severity zone maps; that’s what we see here on the left.  This is the new addition.  The color scheme is a little bit hard to see but yellow is moderate, orange is high, and red is very high.  So this applies to the SRA lands, the state responsibility area land for California.
As an aside, this was also done for LRA, or local responsibility lands.  So it does exist for local jurisdictions to use in updating their General Plans or making their decisions.
Why is it important to do this right?
Well, obviously we care about reducing losses both in structures and financially.  This is something that now I’m hearing you guys talk about; getting this right is going to lead to a more fair or more equitable assessment of how we’re going to deal with it.  And so, I think getting this right is part of doing this fairly.
Now, I think that there’s the potential, anyway, for insurance crisis.  If we don’t ______________ uncertainties in this whole thing.  There’s talk amongst insurance companies about what to do.  Do we want to start pulling policies?  We don’t want to see that, but I also know that some of the insurance companies use the fire hazard zone maps in some of their analyses.  So reducing uncertainties in this whole process is important for any number of reasons.
So how do we reduce structural losses?
Retrofitting existing vulnerable housing is a big part of this problem.  And we’re going to hear some talk about that from the next panel, I believe.  This has everything to do with wood roofs, wood shake roofs, vents in attics that aren’t screened, etc, etc—lots of components of existing housing that are vulnerable. 
New fire resistant building codes are going to be in effect and they’re going to be guided by this map and that’s part of the solution.
Defensible space:  So if there is a fire, the firefighters have a place to do their work.  I would agree with Jon Keeley, that I don’t think we have really good information on just how wide that has to be in different situations.  There are some guidelines that seem to be good rules of thumb, but by no means do we have that worked out.
And then, constrained development:  Just fundamentally constraining development to the safer areas of the landscape.
I think as much as people may complain about the new maps, if they are, this is such a huge improvement over the old ones that it needs to be pointed out and the praises need to be given to the CDF for doing this.  It links hazard on the landscape based on physical principles of prior spread and fire probability to building codes, and that’s important.  It’s kind of like we have a floodplain map and we now think we have some ideas on where we should restrict building or how homes might be engineered to do better there.  It’s consistently applied across the State, unlike the old versions, and it’s based on the best available science and data that we can get our hands on for now.  There are some uncertainties and some areas for refinement, but it is based on the best available data.
Now, I would argue that this also should probably apply to existing housing.  We’re talking about a new development when we’re talking about the fire hazard severity zone maps in general.  But there are methods.  And just as an aside…
SENATOR STEINBERG:  Can you go back to the….you’re saying that the…
DR. MORITZ:  Sure.  So this is the old 1985 version.
SENATOR STEINBERG:  That’s the ’85 version.  But that is looking only at new development areas or that considers existing development?
DR. MORITZ:  So the new fire hazard severity zone maps are done for the whole State but they usually break it out into the SRA lands and the LRA lands.  And then the LRA, the local jurisdictions, they can take the assessment of hazard for what they want.  If they want to override it and say “no, it’s higher,” “no, it’s lower,” they can because they have the local jurisdiction on their own building.  But they should make a case to CDF and the State Fire Marshal to, “Hey, we’re going to override it because we think it should be different for this or that reason.”  But in the State responsibility areas, the new building codes are….I think they’re law.  
SENATOR KEHOE:  But, Dr. Moritz, you’re also working on another layer of data.
DR. MORITZ:  Yes.
SENATOR KEHOE:  You’re going to talk about that?
DR. MORITZ:  I will.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Okay, that’s fine.  
DR. MORITZ:  Because I want to go into just how these were made and, sort of, what’s some of these other things that might have been left out or could be refined.  Because I think this is a huge step forward from this old one, but there are some areas for improvement.  
I think this idea of applying a methodology consistently and using the best available science is important, too, for existing structures.  And we’ve actually built some assessment tools to do this kind of thing for existing structures that I think is worth thinking about too.
So how are these created, the new ones?
They’re based on some very simple but good science about potential fire behavior under bad conditions, so it’s kind of a worse….it’s not a worse, but it’s supposed to be a bad case scenario for potential fire behavior in a given location.  Then, that’s combined with this notion of urban burning ability.  Areas that are more or less urban but they’re close enough to wildlands that they could be subject to fire or they have, kind of, in-holdings of vegetation within them that can pose a threat.  
Now, this is almost a ridiculously preposterous and complex diagram of….but this is the diagram for how the new fire hazard severity maps were created.  My team participated in a few of these boxes in mapping the urban burnability section.  To simplify it, these are stolen straight from a CDF graph presentation.  Dave _____, their fire scientist, who’s  a very bright guy, had a lot to do with this.  You can break this into two zones—the wild side and that is based on slope, fuels characteristics, burn probability and fire ______.  Now, this is where we’re getting into some questions about our Santa Ana frequencies and spatial patterns and mapping those issues.  Right now, this is handled through assumptions based on the past fire history maps.  So that’s one thing that’s an issue worth possibly updating and I’ll show you how that might work.
This is on the urban side.  You map out the urban footprint; how dense vegetation is within it; how close it is to wildlands; and then combine them. 
I’ll walk through an example really quickly; and I can come back to it if anybody wants to talk more.
On the wildland side, aggregating polygons into 200 acres or more based on a slope designation and a life form;, so grassland, shrubland, forest, woodland, etc.  Then they get a score based on the potential fire behavior that could be observed in that location—topography, fuels, etc. goes into this for each pixel.
SENATOR KEHOE:  This is a steep slope issue?
DR. MORITZ:  Yes.  And then, across those polygons they get averaged—the scores get averaged and they get assigned a value of moderate, high, or very high.  So this is a cartooney example of a place.  That’s the wildland side of the process.
On the developed side (which is a part of that fire _____ that I work at did), aggregating up to 20 acre parcels or larger.  And in-holdings of natural vegetation have to be at least 20 acres to show up.  So if you aggregate up as a first step, mat vegetation densities within those urban areas (and they get kind of a ranking of their danger), then there’s this buffer that’s applied which basically says “this is kind of how far embers might travel in from the burning wildland area into the urban area,” and then these two are combined and you get the fire hazard severity zone map.  
So it’s a huge step forward in our view.  We’re getting closer to thinking about the way we plan to live on earthquake faults, floodplains, where are the uncertainties?
Well, as I said, fire probabilities in this process are based on fire history amount, which is not a bad assumption.  This is a good surrogate for fire weather patterns; it’s a pretty good surrogate for emission patterns.  But fire probabilities should probably look something more like this.  We’ve developed methods actually using fires and the environments in which they occur to produce a much more refined version of what fire probabilities should probably look like.  These buffers, as important as they are, they have nothing incorporated into them about the direction of the wind.  
What if in this particular case Santa Anas tend to come from the north or the fire weather in question comes from the north?  Well, you might want those buffers to look a little different and reflect the direction from which embers might most likely be coming from.  So these are possible refinements.
Can we do this?
Well, I worked with some people to try to develop methods to actually do Santa Ana wind mapping and overlay many events on top of each other and to come up with parts of the landscape that are sheltered from Santa Anas and parts of the landscape that get hit over and over, and this is one rendition of that.
Again, an incredibly interesting and important research question ________.  So, this is possible though.
So then focusing on newer housing (with respect to the fire hazard severity zone maps, anyway).  And I guess I would argue that even if we had some funds to address this issue, it’s not really clear where we would start yet.  Even if we assessed the fee fairly, based on the maps or some other data, I don’t know that we would know yet whether we should spend some money on chippers in these neighborhoods or retrofitting wood roofs with rebates, or refining the maps themselves, or building a evacuation plans.  I don’t think we have a great strategic idea of what, kind of cost benefit-wise, where the biggest impact would be, even if we have the map.  
And then to zoom way out, I would argue that we really don’t have a good plan strategically upon how fire probabilities, fire mapping, and fire, in general, touches all these things in how if you reduce some issue that might improve habitat quality it might backfire on some other side.  All these are linked, yet, we’re not looking at this in any sort of comprehensive…
SENATOR STEINBERG:  How do we get there?
CROSSTALK
DR. MORITZ:  So I would argue that in addition to using some fees, there are models out there for how we address earthquakes.  There’s a public interest energy research group that the UC manages, that looks at energy related issues.  There are other objective third party bodies that exist.  There are other models.  
Right now, the Board of Forestry, which has limited authority and no funding to assess which questions are important and help figure them out, I think that we need a way to fund and do this comprehensive planning.  We don’t have an objective mechanism to do it right now, but we have plenty of smart people in California to throw at it, to refine the next version, anyway, of the fire hazard severity zone mapping products and to use the interim ones as wisely as possible, and, ultimately, to result in a more fair and equitable way to deal with all these problems.
I think that’s it and so I stop talking.
SENATOR STEINBERG:  Excellent.  You know, if you can just follow-up on my leading question just a second ago.  I mean, as policymakers we have a particular function here, which is to draft legislation, to make budget decisions, to determine how state monies should be allocated.  What public policy recommendation or budget recommendation can you put forward to us here this afternoon to develop that broader, strategic plan which you have just talked about?  I mean, the basics; what would it cost; what would it take; how long would it take; how do we get to that goal, because, we need roadmaps?
DR. MORITZ:  We need them yesterday.
SENATOR STEINBERG:  We need them yesterday, but, you know, we can only go forward.  So how do we….what’s our suggested work plan here?
DR. MORITZ:  Well, I think we can think of relatively near-term improvements or changes, and then we can really go out long-term and think about, you know, 20, 30 years down the line; what do we want for our wildland/urban interface to look like?  Do we want an interface that has the urban side that’s pretty resistant and pretty solid and it’s not going to burn up and on the wild side we can have more or less fires depending on the ecological needs?  I would say that that level is something that’s a hugely difficult problem that would require _______.  But to get at the near term things, we do have, I think the earthquake model is a good one, or the public energy research group; that small amounts of money are taken off and then some UC or some objective party has RFPs (request for proposals) and then the best research team applies and says “I can fix that problem.”  And, you know, that is going to result in solutions on the order of years, not decades.  But we don’t have anything even close to that right now.  
SENATOR STEINBERG:  Again, is this a, in the short term, 
$5 million project?  Is this a $100 million project?  What are we talking about here?   And in what form would you suggest we get started?
	DR. MORITZ:  Well, for example, I know that the group that’s trying to come up with fire probability maps and methods to link carbon accounting together for all the caps for AB 32, that’s on the order of millions—one to ten million dollar questions.  I think it depends on what we’re trying to do.  If we’re trying to figure out a very focused question like which roads need walls around them and is that going to be effective, that’s not tens of millions of dollars.  If we’re trying to figure out which places get hit by Santa Anas more often, that’s not tens of millions of dollars.  We have methods to do that now that would be implementable tomorrow with relatively small amounts of money.  You could run a research lab (I don’t know about Jon Keeley’s lab) on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and get huge benefits.  We’re not talking about millions and millions and millions of dollars here.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  And we’re talking about damages of billions of dollars.
	DR. MORITZ:  So I would argue that a very small fraction of that needs to go back into answering some of these questions.  I don’t have a good answer for you as to how much.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  Senator Kehoe.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  I’d like to go back to Dr. Lowe for a minute, if that’s all right.  Just on the community planning side of things (noise interference)….I guess it’s sort of a two-part question.  As a land use attorney and community planner, what’s the role of community planning in designing more fire safe communities and figuring out how to either, if we’re going to build or development is approved in fire prone areas, what we can do to make it more fire safe?  And then, also, as a community planner I’m sure you have struggled with fees at some point in your career—sewage fees, water fees, school fees, facility benefit assessment; what advice can you give us on how a fair fire fee could be implemented?  And, with the complications of a fire starting in the back country but then blowing into the cities, and you know, it is a shared responsibility across the jurisdictional lines.
	DR. LOWE:  Well, you’ve given me some broad topics but I’ll try to answer them briefly.  From a local land use planning perspective, you have to start with balancing a few things.  On the one hand, the extent to which fire hazard conditions impact entire communities, and, therefore, how far we’re willing to go in order to address those _________ (inaudible) evolution, I was thinking myself over the last couple of years in that most people in the development industry, historically, and in local government too, I should say, __________ focused on simply making any new development more fire resistant—clear zones, fire resistant vegetation, building codes to better protect new construction.  And a lot of that has been going on for a long time and it’s getting better and better all the time, which is why in these last fires here in San Diego County, for example, you have a lot of the new master plan communities, like Forrest Ranch and a number of projects further north of the county that have been planned and approved in recent years that were essentially armored against fire hazards and they survived very well—no question.  But what that didn’t really address is, sort of, the larger question whether you want to allow or encourage that level of activity (residential and otherwise) into these areas where wildland fires can start in the first place.  And so, I think it’s incumbent on local planners, maybe with some guidance from the State through the General Plan Law, to look more closely at what’s a reasonable tradeoff.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  So would a good first step be for California to require local jurisdictions to have a much more detailed fire safety element than in the General Plan?
	DR. LOWE:  Yes, I think so, because right now there’s just this very, really, loose requirement in the General Plan Law that the safety element of the General Plan address wildland fire in some fashion, but it provides no guidance at all.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  And then, a little advice on fees if you care to.
	DR. LOWE:  Sure.  Well, the notion of fees, impact fees especially, is that the people who are creating a need for a new service or facility or whatever are supposed to be carrying the financial burden for that.  But that in practice often gets coupled with the unfortunate notion that some people are greater targets of opportunity than others.  It’s hard to go back and impose impact fees on people who are already there even if they’re going to also benefit from new schools or fire stations or whatever.  So I like the idea of a broader based fee in general because it spreads costs in a more equitable way.  And if you still can target it at those areas that are, say, the source of the problem, and I don’t mean to overstate that, but the localities or the neighborhoods, the areas that create the greatest hazards in the first place, which then give rise to these huge public costs, if the fee can be applied, maybe, disproportionately to them but not exclusively to them, I think that’s a fair way to do it.  Now how you actually strike that balance is going to be a very political question.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you.
	DR. LOWE:  Sure.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  Thank you very much.  Other questions?  All right, thank you very much to the panel.  We appreciate it very much.  I’m going to turn the hearing over now to Senator Kehoe.  I have to leave.  I want to thank everybody.  I learned quite a bit today and look forward to getting a report on the last…
	SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you very much for being here, Senator Steinberg.
	SENATOR STEINBERG:  Thank you.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  We’re going to move onto panel-3, Tonya Hoover from the Fire Marshal’s office; Augie Ghio, our Fire Chief from San Miguel; and Dr. Anne Fege, from Botany Research Associates, San Diego Museum of Natural History.  Tonya Hoover, you’re first.
	TONYA HOOVER:  Thank you very much.  Good afternoon, members of the committee, community citizens, and guests.  If I could just take a few moments and read something that I received from Chief Dargan this morning at about 6 a.m., before I get started.  She was thinking of everyone this morning and she would like me to read this on her behalf.
	Thank you for including the State Fire Marshal in your discussion in considerations of the wildland/urban interface fire problem in California.  This issue is one of significant public and environmental safety.  
I wish I could be with you today in San Diego but I am in Lake Tahoe, chairing the Fire Commission’s work, trying to address the same problem and provide specific recommendations for solutions.  
	I look forward to working with you on these issues this year, as policy legislation and funding are focused specifically on mitigating wildland fire’s negative impacts.  
	The main idea I would like to share today is that these large wildfires are a significant type of fire, rapid spread with multiple structural ignitions in the early phases of the fire.  This is a fire that is causing California so much loss and cost.  This is the type of fire that we must now prepare and mitigate for ahead of time.
	Assistant State Fire Marshal, Tonya Hoover, represents us well and will provide much information.  Her experience from a local government perspective is valuable to you.  And I hope to see you all soon personally.
Kate Dargan, State Fire Marshal.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you.
	MS. HOOVER:  Again, thank you.  My name is Tonya Hoover and I  am the Assistant State Fire Marshal.  Before I start my brief presentation I’d like to take a moment to introduce myself because I’m fairly new to the Office of the State Fire Marshal and to state service.  
	I’ve held the position as the Assistant State Fire Marshal since my swearing in ceremony on September 4, 2007.  Prior to September 4th, I was a local fire marshal for a fire district located in the San Francisco Bay Area, east of the Oakland/Berkeley Hills, and served the communities of Morongo, Orinda, and incorporated Contra Costa County for nine years.  Over the 20 years of my career in fire prevention, I’ve been a deputy fire marshal for a UC campus, worked for two local fire jurisdictions as an inspector and plan reviewer, and spent a few months employed for a large fire sprinkler contracting firm.  
	I’m a graduate from Oklahoma State University with an associate degree in fire protection engineering technology; a bachelor’s in technical education, specializing in fire protection and safety engineering technology; and holds an MBA from the University of Phoenix.  I’m also an Executive Fire Officer candidate, a Type I/II PIO Trainee and a certified State Fire Marshal from the Office of the State Fire Marshal.  I’ve also served on several national fire service committees that promote fire safety and firefighter training and education.  
	That’s a little bit about me.
	I’ve been asked to speak to you all today on the topic of improving fire prevention for existing development.  I would like to take a brief moment to describe CalFire and the Office of the State Fire Marshal.
	About 10 years ago, the integration of the State Fire Marshal into CDF (California Department of Forestry) took place which set the stage for what we now know as CalFire, Office of the State Fire Marshal.  When Chief Grijalva became Director of CalFire, he continued that integration by bringing the fire prevention side of CDF over to the Office of the State Fire Marshal.  This provided all state fire prevention activities to sit under one umbrella within the Office of the State Fire Marshal under Chief Dargan.  Those areas brought into the State Fire Marshal’s office included law enforcement, the CDF law enforcement, wildland fire engineering, and fire and resource assessment program (FRAP), and you heard a little bit about FRAP earlier, and I encourage members of the committee to call FRAP directly and speak with those scientists about the mapping and the work that they’ve done in the very high fire zone severity maps.
	This integration enhances and increases the fire prevention throughout the organization by providing a program that blends and addresses both interior and exterior fire prevention.  Currently reporting to the State Fire Marshal with responsibilities in fire prevention, risk mitigation, and law enforcement is two Deputy Assistant Directors, the ASFM and myself and a chief executive administrator, Chief Hillman.
	With the moving of CDF fire prevention staff into the Office of the State Fire Marshal, there have been the development and implementation of the building standards that you’ve heard so much about that address the wildland/urban interface and that affects new construction, the revision of the fire hazard severity zone mapping not only for the SRA (State responsibility areas) but also for the LRA (which makes those maps statewide), an increased emphasis on fire safety landscaping and defensible space standards, a new working relationship with building and fire officials by CDF units, and an increased awareness of the wildland/urban interface problems and concerns throughout the state of California, and has brought detailed discussions and relationships buildings with wildland fire experts both at a public and private arena to assist in developing test standards, products, and educational opportunities.  The breadth of knowledge of responsibility has expanded within the Office of the State Fire Marshal and that will continue as we have one premiere fire prevention organization for the State.
	That gives you a brief background on the Office of the State Fire Marshal within CalFire, where we play a role in existing construction.  And I’d like to open it up to questions.
	SENATOR KEHOE:  Yes, could you tell us a little bit more about the fire prevention efforts, and, particularly, what level of fire inspection is taking place across the state?  And if you have (I hope) specific information on San Diego that would be great.
	MS. HOOVER:  I can talk about fire prevention measures within the Office of the State Fire Marshal as it pertains to the wildland/urban interface.
	State Fire Marshal staff primarily is responsible for activities that have a direct impact on fire laws—our interior work with the State Fire Marshal’s Office as well as exterior work on defensible space.  The State Fire Marshal’s office and its staff provide guidance to our CalFire units out in the field.  Those CalFire units prioritize their work based on their communities.  They provide educational opportunities to communities—community outreach.  
	SENATOR KEHOE:  I guess what I’m trying to get at; can you tell us specifically how your fire prevention efforts have increased, say, over the last two to five years?
	MS. HOOVER:  As far as outreach?
	SENATOR KEHOE:  Yes.
	MS. HOOVER:  We continue with increased staffing levels, and more information has been provided and more research—we’re able to distribute that out to a broader audience.  
I can speak to inspections that have been done in the wildland/urban interface.  An example:  Statewide totals have increased from 6,400 inspections in 2004, to nearly 100,000 in 2007.  
SENATOR KEHOE:  Almost 100,000 in-person inspections last year?
MS. HOOVER:  Yes.  And that’s including the CalFire Southern California increases of over 18,000 inspections.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Very good.  And is the prevention work part of the training that the Fire Marshal offers to firefighters, part of your fire training regularly?
MS. HOOVER:  The interaction that our unit chiefs have with their firefighters that our chief officers, our staff chief officers have within the Sacramento office back out to the units, we do address defensible space inspections—what is a good defensible space inspection; what needs to be looked at; why is it important?  What is nice, the folks that are doing those inspections are firefighters.  They are volunteers that have been trained and they have an understanding of fire behavior and fire risk.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Excellent.  Senator Machado.
SENATOR MACHADO:  We’ve had some policy discussions about the fees.  There would be no increases actually made available to the property owners for any fee assessment that’s made?
MS. HOOVER:  I can’t address that.  That would be a policy question and I’m not quite sure I understand…
SENATOR MACHADO:  You’re not looking at trying to answer ______________ ?
SENATOR KEHOE:  You’ll have to speak up because we’re having some trouble.
MS. HOOVER:  If I understand the question correctly, you’re asking about a fee increase and will that offer an enhanced service?
SENATOR MACHADO:  Yes.
MS. HOOVER:  That would be a policy discussion that I’m not prepared to answer.  I can take that question back.
SENATOR KEHOE:  I’ve just had a little note handed to me relative to the inspections, which I like the improvement from 6,400 to 1,000…
MS. HOOVER:  To 100,000; more zeroes.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Speaking of more zeroes, we have more than a million homes in the state responsibility areas.
MS. HOOVER:  Yes, we do.
SENATOR KEHOE:  So I think Senator Machado’s question goes….whether you care to make the policy decision, and it may be not your place, clearly it’s going to take more revenue to get inspections up to a level where they’ll be more effective.  And it seems as though when counties, where we’ve got strong inspection programs, it’s a lot of effort at the beginning ( and I think Chief Ghio can talk to this) and then as the inspections get more regular the homeowners are more familiar with what they need to do and the numbers of homes that are out of compliance drop dramatically—that’s what we have to aim for.
Senator Hollingsworth, any comments from you?
SENATOR HOLLINGSWORTH:  Well, I made a comment that it takes more revenue in order to increase the number of inspections …
SENATOR KEHOE:  Would you like to put anything on the record about that?
SENATOR MACHADO:  He was reiterating what you were saying.
SENATOR HOLLINGSWORTH:  It takes more funding but I’m not sure it takes more revenue on the State’s part _______.  
The point I would like to make is that when we talk about CDF’s or CalFire’s funding being $500 million, that’s less than one-half of one percent of our State’s budget and from my perspective, we need to make it a priority and fund from the existing resources that we have.  These people in the SRA already are paying assessments to their local fire districts ________ and we’re recognizing that and not trying to hit them twice for something they’re already paying for.
MS. HOOVER:  Senators, if I could add something.  Senator Kehoe, you bring up a good point; is that once you go out and do an inspection once and you continue to do that inspection and engage the public in sharing the responsibility for fire protection and fire prevention, you set the stage for a dynamic fire prevention education opportunity.  And the philosophy of every inspection as a public education opportunity is worth its weight in gold.  But you’re absolutely right.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you.  We’ll move onto Chief Ghio.
AUGIE GHIO:  Well, I, too, want to thank you for holding these hearings because one of the things that this does is, this keeps everything fresh and it keeps us talking about it and it keeps us, hopefully, getting towards being action oriented in making decisions that will improve the situation.
What we’ve got, and you’ve heard it while here today, is we’ve got a threat, and that threat is that in Southern California we have a year-round fire season.  I don’t think anybody in uniform would tell you otherwise.  And I think all of our elected officials and the communities we serve understand that problem.  
Also, we continue to build, and you’ve heard that from every panelist.  And it’s amazing, we all did our presentations differently.  We’re all saying something similar.  We continue to build in urban interface areas but yet we fail to address some of the legislation that would allow us to do that safely, like open space, defensible space that’s appropriate.  
And just to handle something that was said earlier about flame length; I’m just a simple firefighter but I’ve got 32 years in service and one of my colleagues brought one of these little books that all firefighters carry into the field for reference, because you can’t know it all, all the time, and if you took something like a 200-foot flame length on a topography that had a pretty good slope, even if it was a vegetation or fuel driven fire, you’ve got to have an 800-foot break.  So having 100-foot of defensible space probably isn’t the best in a lot of the areas that we have.
Also, the other threat that we’ve got is amnesia and that’s another reason why I like having these types of forums, because what happens three to six months after a major fire, the public gets amnesia, politicians get amnesia, and so do fire districts and fire agencies because we move on to other issues, especially if there is no funding to help improve the situation.  And then we have in a lot of areas that probably weren’t hit maybe in the Cedar Fire and maybe in this most recent 2007 wildfires, the, “it won’t happen to me” syndrome; you skated a couple of times.
But we do have a lot of opportunity and you heard a lot about that improvement also.  Vegetation management—we’ve adopted new codes that allow us to ensure that we’ve got defensible space.  In San Miguel we have 100 percent compliance of that defensible space because in my district we go after the customer, but we try to do it in that partnership of education.  But, when education fails you’ve got to find another tool and that’s called enforcement.  And whether it gets to the point of putting a lien on the property or not, that’s up to the customer.  But I’ll talk more on that a little later.
But out of 1,032 inspections last year in our vegetation management program, we had 100 percent compliance; only 11 homes had to have a lien put on it; and we still cleaned them up too.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Congratulations.  Good work.
CHIEF GHIO:  Thank you.  And, we strongly encourage our communities, when they do relandscape, through public education tools that I’ll talk to you about a little later, to relandscape with fire resistant, drought tolerant plant life.  It doesn’t look like we’re all used to living in Southern California, but it looks pretty good.  I did it on my house.
And then, you’ve got to enforce our fire protection policies.  And that’s where, when we’re talking about fees….I loved what you said, Senator Kehoe, we’re all in this together; it doesn’t matter whether it’s SRA or LRA, whether you’re in a municipal government or in a fire district.  
And, Senator Hollingsworth, I will say one thing, not all fire districts have benefit fees.  We don’t.  We go straight off of property tax.  We don’t charge our people anything.  So if we do get the fees, whether you’re a city, like the city of Oceanside, whose fire chief is right over there, Terry Garrison, he’s new to the area, about 10 months in…
SENATOR KEHOE:  Chief Garrison, stand up so people can see you; the new fire chief up in Oceanside.  Welcome, I’m glad you’re here.  You’ve been here the whole time.  Thank you.
CHIEF GHIO:  But whether you’re a city, a fire district, or a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire), we all need funding.  We need funding for prevention efforts; we need funding for response efforts, and we’ve got to come up with a formula if we’re going to start charging our customers to where everything improves, because it’s a family business.
The other opportunity we have is new construction.  And in our district we really push….and granted, we’re talking about existing developments but there is new construction in existing developments in those few open areas that we do have, and there’s remodels.  People come in and they want to refurbish their homes.  So when we do that, we really push the ember penetration, because you’ve heard that from a couple of the presentations here—that’s the big threat out there in a wind driven event.  Fuel driven event; not so much, but a wind driven event, you’ve got ember penetration as the biggest threat.
SENATOR KEHOE:  We’ve heard that wind driven is one kind of fire and fuel is another; can you break it down percentage wise?  It seems to me the wind driven ones are the huge catastrophes.  Like vegetation, you guys seem to be able to get out there and put them out.  Is it nine to one; how do you break it down?
CHIEF GHIO:  Well, I couldn’t break it down as far as percentage of what type of fire we have.  Most of our fires are probably not Santa Ana wind driven events; we don’t have that many catastrophic ones.  But when it’s a vegetation driven fire, where the wind isn’t involved and you don’t have all the other things like low humidity, etc, it gives us a chance to get around that fire and put it out.  But when you have a wind driven event…
SENATOR KEHOE:  So you can have dozens of these vegetation ones that you can manage and then…
CHIEF GHIO:  Thousands.
SENATOR KEHOE:  But the big catastrophic ones are the real whoppers where…
CHIEF GHIO:  Are the real whoppers where you outstrip your resources and you just can’t get ahead of it because the wind is driving it.  And what puts most of those out?  God.  The wind stops in a lot of the cases.  We don’t have enough resources to get around it fast enough.  They get out of control.  And, like, the Harris Fire, which was on our end of it, CalFire did a wonderful job.  If it wasn’t for them, I probably would have retired.  But the wind stopped.  When it was coming down Mount San Miguel, the wind stopped and it saved a community of 307 homes.  
But ember penetration is the biggest threat that we’ve got out there.  But it’s an opportunity, because we can teach people how to take care of that by using fire resistant building materials—class-A noncombustible roofs; making sure they’ve got dual-paned windows when they’re refurbishing; protecting their vents; boxing their eaves (the under eaves of the house); making sure that they’re using non-combustible improvements on the exterior of the house, such as their fences, their decks and their stairways.  That way, whether it’s a vegetation, a fuel driven event, or more catastrophic wind driven event, they haven’t got those combustible issues around the house and they better prepared their home for ember penetration.
SENATOR KEHOE:  So the new decks, now, that are made out of the manmade material, are most of them fireproof or fire resistant? 
CHIEF GHIO:  They’re fire resistant to a degree but they’re not fire proof.
SENATOR KEHOE:  They’re not wood, they’re recycled or something.
CHIEF GHIO:  Because even the plastic fences that you see coming up now, when you take a look at what happened in the Cedar Fire and even some areas now, they’ll melt down into a little puddle.
SENATOR KEHOE:  But they won’t help spread like a wooden fence would?
CHIEF GHIO:  Correct.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Okay.  
CHIEF GHIO:  Other opportunities we’ve got are outreach programs and this is where my community, San Miguel, and, I will say, the county fire chiefs in San Diego County, we galvanized several years ago and developed a strategic plan and one of the things we decided to really push was public education community outreach and community preparedness and readiness and that’s what makes the entire community strong.  
We’re going out there and making sure that we’ve got….in San Miguel we developed urban interface guides for the firefighters.  You’ve also got to educate and prepare the firefighters.  We know our target hazard areas.  We know what it takes to get ahead of that fire.  We know the kind of resources we’re going to need.  And, when outside resources come into the area and strike teams or taskforces, we make copies of those and hand them out to those strike team leaders and incident commanders.  And I’ve got free copies of that book for you before the end of this.
We also create partnerships.  You were talking about SDG&E and the potential of fire starts with downed lines.  I’m representing the county fire chiefs now on the San Diego Gas and Electric Sempra Energy Committee that is looking into energy and what are the issues around these wildfires, so that just recently started.  
Also, we’ve got partnerships with the Red Cross; we’ve got partnerships with the Burn Institute.  You name it, we’ll partner with it and provide more community education preparedness out there.
At the local level we put on community fire expos on an annual basis.  Last year we hit 6,000 of our residents in that one community expo.  That covers about four acres of area that has an adult area and a children’s area, so we handle the community education at both levels; we cover it all.  
Then, preparedness seminars; you’ll see some slides on that later.  We try to get into educating our firefighters as well as the community on preparedness and readiness issues.  And then, community evacuation planning; working with local law enforcement in the communities we serve to make sure they understand evacuation planning and what’s necessary to save their lives.
As I said, partnerships with the Red Cross:  We’re going on a multi-year campaign to make sure that every firefighter in our district has a family plan, a family disaster plan, a family evacuation plan because we have to be prepared when it happens so that our people don’t abandon jobs.  They come to work because they know that their families are ready.  
Local fire expos, like I said, 6,000 people last year.  We’re anticipating 10,000 at our expo in September in Rancho San Diego.  And I’ll say, this is a community event; we have fire departments from all over the eastern region that participate in this.  It’s not just a San Miguel event, La Mesa, Lemon Grove, Lakeside, El Cajon City, they all participate in this.  
Preparedness seminars for the communities that we serve; we host these in partnership with the Red Cross to go over that family evacuation planning.  We talk to businesses and encourage business continuity planning, because look at the economic loss that we had in this last fire with businesses closing for days.  How do you recover?  They have to know that.  That’s part of the preparedness quotient.
And then we were talking about enforcement.  We had, in the Harris Fire, a community that has about 50 homes in it; very, very urban interface multi-acre homes such as you see here.  
And my fear when I first came to the district was that in this dense brush area, how are we going to defend this if we didn’t have the resources available?  Well, it happened.  It happened in October.  Fortunately, since I came to the district, we went on a heavy campaign on brush management.  Some homeowners weren’t very happy with us.  One lady in particular, but we used her as a good example and we actually brought a news crew out to her house (with her permission) and we used her as the example and she cleared tons of brush around her area.  After the fire, although she thought we were a pain in the you know what, she credited our program and our enforcement activities with saving her home.  
And because we do a good job and plan check in encouraging people to build as safe a home as possible, you can see here, we’ve got boxed in eaves, dual paned windows, a defensible space, stucco on the outside, no wood in the use of the construction, and even though the fire blew through this area, those homes were saved with some good aggressive firefighting and CalFire with their support.  So it takes a little bit of everything to make it happen.
SENATOR KEHOE:  So the way that home is designed, that’s, sort of, state of the art.  Like, where the propane tank is and all that, that’s all…
CHIEF GHIO:  That’s a good defensible home.
SENATOR KEHOE:  So you can’t put any trees around, huh?
CHIEF GHIO:  Well, I don’t have any trees around my home either.  My wife doesn’t like it, but when she evacuated I didn’t worry about my house.
SENATOR KEHOE:  I think I’m staying in North Park.
CHIEF GHIO:  And then, making sure that we do community evacuation planning.  That’s something that we did do a degree in San Diego County, but we evacuated 500,000 people.  We planned for 50,000 to 100,000.  We’ve got to do a better job of planning like that.
Also in San Miguel, we’re doing a very strong public education planning preparedness partnership with the media.  We use the media in San Diego County.  They’ve been wonderful because they’ve kept these fires and disaster preparedness through the efforts of Ron Lane, at County OES, in the front light on the media.  And, in San Miguel, we partnered with CalFire, we partnered with Cuyamaca College and others and we got a FEMA grant to establish a fire-wise component to the water-wise garden so people could go out there when we educate them and see what a home looks like that’s well built; that’s landscaped appropriately for fire-wise gardening.
And then, with another FEMA grant, last year we sent 10,000 mailers out to all 10,000 urban interface residents in our district.  We’re doing that again this year with a partnership with a large insurance company.  And, we’re putting our website on all of our apparatus this month.  And we’re going to encourage our public, if they don’t know about our website, just look at the fire engine crossing in your neighborhood; dial in and take a look at the preparedness info there.
So many roads lead to Rome.  Many roads lead to fire prevention.  
Again, the media partnerships were phenomenal in San Diego County.
This is a picture of that fire-wise garden where people can clearly see, talking about defensible space is one thing, going out and seeing it, touching it, and tasting it is another.  And tens of thousands of people are going to this garden to see these exhibits.
SENATOR KEHOE:  This is at Cuyamaca?
CHIEF GHIO:  Cuyamaca College.  And then, community mailers.  And in these books there’s several examples of some of the mailers that we send out through San Miguel and we’ve gotten tremendous feedback.  I’ve had people say that in living in the district for 20, 30, 40 years, this is the first time that they’ve gotten anything from their fire department.  What does that tell us?  We’ve got to get more active.
And then, keeping our website up is something that we’re very proud of because they’ve got to be able to go in there and get the information they need—our communities.
What’s our future?
And this isn’t just a future for San Miguel, I think this is a future look for all fire agencies in Southern California.  We have to try to eliminate amnesia in the communities we serve and in our local politicians too, meaning, our city councils, our fire boards, etc.  And we’re going to do that by providing constant community education venues out there all year long.  You can’t do it once.  You can’t do it once every one or two years, it’s got to be every year all year long, one way or another.
We’re developing neighborhood programs where our speakers bureau will go out and talk to neighborhoods and communities that want to get together and learn more about the problems so they can eliminate the neighbor weak link in their system.  I’ll talk more about that in a second.
We’re establishing a volunteer prevention assistant team over this next year that will go out and on an individual basis work with that homeowner in identifying how to improve that ember penetration in their home and the defensible space around that home.
We’ve also, this year, just completed fully funding our firefighters speaker bureau, our fire safety trailer team, and our special events team.  It takes resources to get people out there to do that.
Now, what’s our ultimate goal?  It’s to eliminate the weak link in the neighborhood.  Even though we can build more fire resistive, I hesitate to use the term “fire safe” neighborhoods and communities, we can build more fire resistive communities.  But the weakest link in those communities can also be the neighbor who doesn’t comply, or the neighbor who leaves a window open, or the neighbor that plants the wrong tree or the wrong bush, or the large one pound ember that goes through the double paned window.  Things can happen, so evacuation is still one of the biggest things you can put into your home or your community plan.
And then, we want to make sure, and this goes back to your issue, Senator Kehoe, on funding.  Whatever we do in this state, or whatever you do in the local area with regional consolidation, we are all in this together and we need to help provide local agencies the funding for the prevention and public education efforts.  Because, where we’re going to save more properties and more life is on a very informed community member, very informed neighborhoods, very informed individuals, and to make sure that we’re vigilant in going out there and providing that and enforcing it with the communities we serve.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you, Chief.  Anne Fege.
ANNE FEGE:  Great.  I appreciate being here today.  I’ve lived here since 1991.  And was a forest supervisor on the Cleveland National Forest at the time of the Cedar Fires, and so, have pretty much lived this from learning when I first moved out here, to being immersed in it, to being able to step back, as I retired about four years ago, to really seeing the science side, the social factors, and the economic sides and I was asked to, kind of, bring some of this together today.
We’re not meant to read every line here, we’re meant to, kind of, understand.  And I have a lot of information on these various slides.  
But we know that chaparral is a fire-adapted place.  We know how houses ignite; most of them were in embers this time.  Lots of structures were saved because of what we have done in terms of codes and enforcement.  And, the defensible space is definitely something we’re concerned about in terms of reaching a reasonable balance between risk reduction and habitat quality.  And we know a lot about how to do defensible space.  So I just wanted to point out that we have a lot of information about the science.  
In terms of buildings, we have to keep focusing on how houses ignite.  That’s the important question to this whole issue today; is how do you keep houses from igniting?  We can have side conversations about chaparral and all kinds of other things, but it is from the radiation when you ignite something close enough to the house, that the house actually burns because there’s something hot enough right next to it or it enters on or in the house.  
We have a fair amount of technical information, but I would actually say this is something that we all agree with the research, is we could use some more.  
Steve Corrals(?) has been a real gift to our state with a lot of his product tests.
It’s a system.  I think several people have said it well, it’s a family business; we have to have all parts of it.  And we have to start with a house and then work out.  And I’ll talk a little bit more about that.
And the ignition resistant buildings, the codes are really very good now for the new construction.  And our emphasis needs to be on retrofit and enforcement and I’ll talk a little bit more about that.
And again, my perspective, and I didn’t do a quick introduction, but my perspective is that I am learning and I am teaching in all of these areas and so I can see how all of these fit together.  And many times if you’re in a position, say, as a fire chief, you spend so much of your time in fire that some of these things about landscaping or about the social factors, it just doesn’t come in as a central part.  And as I’m teaching this, I’m seeing so much about how this pulls together, and that’s what I was just trying to share.
Landscaping—we need to teach people what it really means for plants to burn; it’s about moisture content.  We need to teach people how to select plants.  There’s no way in most of California that you can do a good plant selection list when in San Diego County you have three inches to 35 inches of rain.  You have north facing slopes; you have all different soil types, and so, it’s important for us to teach the public (and we’re going to talk about professionals as well) what we look for in a good plant; that you want something that doesn’t have a lot of fuel volume.  If it ignites, it doesn’t create a lot of heat to ignite your house.  And that it has low maintenance requirements.  When you go around and look at why a house is burned, many times it’s that they weren’t maintaining their landscaping.  We also want to avoid creating more problems, so we always talk about what plants not to plant.
Landscape management—the pruning, the spacing and the proper irrigation.  This is a side comment, when we start requiring people to have 100, 200, 300 feet around a new subdivision of irrigated landscaping you’re butting right against one of our other big problems; is that we aren’t going to have water for that priority, and so let’s not design it that way.  Let’s look at other ways to create the protection.  And it’s often not about the number of feet but go back and say, “What do you need to do around this house or around this subdivision so that the house doesn’t ignite?”  So when you go back to that question, then you often look at the 100 feet differently.
In terms of vegetation management, we know a fair amount about it.  And we have codes in place that are pretty consistent.  A lot of it is, of course, we remove the dead and the dying and then it’s important to thin the vegetation canopies.  Sometimes the codes will say “remove 50 percent,” but if you have a really sparse coastal sage scrub and it’s only got 30 percent cover and you remove 15 percent, remove half, now you have 15 percent and you go in there three years later and remove another half.  We need to be careful about how these codes are constructed.  What you really want is to have half of your ground area so that you create the openness so that you don’t have the transmission of fire from plant to plant but you also sustain the value for erosion control and habitat bird….places for birds.
Cut the stumps; that all makes sense.
What I’m experiencing and working here locally is that many of our crews don’t have clear instructions and training.  I think that’s an important part that we could actually work on a lot and get some very fast gains, because they’re not doing a good job mostly because they don’t know or they have crew turnover.
It’s really a high risk and I’ll talk about it in terms of economic externalities.  But, when you remove more than you need to, you have bought maintenance costs in perpetuity and you may have removed more than you need to.  You incur costs but no benefits from it.  So we’ll talk a little bit more about that.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Dr. Fege, a couple of things.  On the 
50 percent cover, you’re not talking about shade, you’re talking about the ground having growing things on it for 50 percent of the land area?
DR. FEGE:  Ideally, there would be shrubs covering 50 percent and then what’s in between…
SENATOR KEHOE:  So drought tolerant, low flammable shrubs?
DR. FEGE:  This one we’re talking about how to modify the natural vegetation in this zone.  This is not the landscape zone.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Oh, okay.  This would be like chaparrals?
DR. FEGE:  This is the question that we’re talking about; should you have 100 or should you have 300 feet and what should you do in that area?  So this is the zone two in most of our city or county code.
SENATOR KEHOE:  All right.  So cutting out the dead and dying; have 50 percent coverage.  And then, we’ve been talking back and forth all afternoon about 100 versus 300 feet, but it seems as though even….what about the steep slope idea?  Do you agree that more area is probably needed?
DR. FEGE:  Yes.  You would need more.  And most of these plans are developed by a fuel model called Behave.  And what it does, is said, if you have this kind of vegetation on the flat or on the slope and it ignites under certain conditions, how long will the flame length be, and therefore, you would then calculate how far you need to have low fuel so you wouldn’t ignite the structure.  
One of the things that we have to be careful on is some of the requirements are for a fuel model that’s actually much greater than you actually have out on the site.  So you might be using fuel model-4, but you should be using one of the new fuel models that are like what we would call a “degraded shrub,” because a lot of our south facing coastal sage scrub doesn’t have the same amount of fuel that a chaparral north facing slope might have.  So in terms of looking at what you would predict as flame length, you can easily over predict what kind of flame length you would have.
SENATOR KEHOE:  You’re really getting into a like micro climate…
DR. FEGE:  Usually within a slope.  Yeah, it’s very important.  I mean, people are paying fire planners good money for this, so let’s make sure we understand the science behind it when they put a model together that actually is a true reflection of what vegetation is there and what risk there is to the structures that are around that.  Yes, it takes more on a slope, but it doesn’t take 400, 300 or whatever feet in order….because remember, the two things you’re concerned about is, if it’s burning is it going to have a flame that’s actually going to on to the house and ignite the house?  Is it going to create embers?  If it’s creating embers you need to go deal with the house and make the house ignition proof, not say that we’re just not going to have any ember generation a mile upwind from the house.  That’s where the system comes in and where we have to talk about all of it at once.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Okay.  Continue.
DR. FEGE:  There’s a good example.  This is from the Tallmadge on the left.  I would say probably a south facing coastal sage scrub slope.  Had a management plan in there and had actually a contractor come in and do removal and that’s what a pretty good vegetation reduction job would look like.
Another piece, and Jon Keeley has covered this pretty well in terms of what happens if we have it burning too often, I also want to emphasize that ours…
SENATOR KEHOE:  You know, actually, I don’t know or maybe I missed it; how much carbon is released in a….do you know, like, in the last round of fires in San Diego?  I mean, it must be tons and tons isn’t it?
DR. FEGE:  Yeah, we could calculate that.  From my selfish perspective, many of my colleagues and my concerns have been more around what the global climate changes will do to the fire conditions here and then what happens to the vegetation in terms of burning more often.  So it’s definitely something to consider, and the AB 32, different projects are looking at it.
But what we’re concerned about is if you do have more drought, more drought years….both the ’03 and ’07 fires followed pretty high drought years as we looked at.  We don’t know what kind of weather changes are going to happen with climate change, but anything that creates more severe weather is likely to not be good for us.  Those two combined could….there are a lots of predictions by scientists that are much more knowledgeable than me that predict the large scale frequent wildfires.  And then we need to worry about our irrigation water if we’re going to set up some of these requirements.
This is a little bit of a fuzzy map but this is….the red is all fires that burned since 2002.  When you look at that, this is between where the houses are and, kind of, where the desert starts.  Look at how much is red; how much burn.  That 600,000 acres is almost three-quarters of that.  The only large spots that didn’t burn in the last six or seven years is Valley Center, which is very agricultural, and the Laguna Fire.  That is such an image for me.  That’s what happened with 600,000 acres.  We burned much of our chaparral and coastal sage scrub in four years which is like burning it all at once.  It’s big.  
And so, we literally have to have really good firefighters so that some of these areas don’t burn again for 20 to 25 years, 30 years.  And that’s that same photo that Jon showed.
Okay, social factors.  A great survey of 700 homes in the Descanso/Alpine area in October 2006 of residents.  Most year-round, most saw smoke, many were evacuated and this is their behaviors:
•	90 percent cleaned things up.
•	65 percent did some changes in their landscaping.
•	45 percent said they got information.
•	20 percent were interested in participating.
So this gives us information about how we do the public outreach programs (This is a research social scientist at the Riverside Fire Lab with the Forest Service that I’ve worked with and continue to work with, Jim Absher).
	When we work with anybody, we need to start with where they’re at.  What do they want in their home site?  Why do they own a house?  And then we can say, “Okay, what would it be like if what you did in your backyard or in your house also reduced your house ignition?”  Because for most people it’s not going to happen tomorrow, so that if we can integrate some of these other values in what we help them with in terms of landscaping or housing, that’s important.
	This is right out of Nevada, but it’s all the excuses that people could have about why.  So what do I got?
1.	Insurance
2.	I don’t like working outdoors.
3.	I don’t have any easy way to get rid of the brush.
4.	It’s against the law to remove vegetation.
So we’ve heard them all but it’s a fun list.
	UNIDENTIFIED:  ____________
	DR. FEGE:  Yeah, you can put it….if you put in Ed Smith and University of Nevada, there’s several versions of it.  
	In terms of social factors, it’s really important to help communities make investments to themselves.  
•	Firewise Councils, we have the most of any county in San Diego.  Firewise Communities/USA has programs to offer.  
•	We’ve trained about 35 master gardeners to be able to answer questions better.  
•	We did about 10 hours of training total.  
•	The Native Plant Society.  I’ll talk a little bit more about professionals.
•	And then all of the information campaigns and several people have addressed that today.
I like your phrase about how it’s got to be constant.
	This is what we did; this is, kind of, what I have been leader of, but we set up something called the San Diego Fire Recovery Network in 2003.  And it was professionals and we had more than 500 people come to one or more all day long training sessions or meetings.  So it was a way for us to share science and learn.
	Out of this came some public education; some research.  We put in a grant and got federal money to look at training professionals because what I was observing was that we yelled at homeowners and then they didn’t have an insurance agent or realtor or a landscape architect who could give them good advice.  And so, we developed a four-hour class.  We have now taught it to a number of professionals who are beginning to bring it out into the community and scheduling it, like, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.  We’ll have it scheduled in every city council district, for example.  We are going to have four in Valley Center.  We’re in the middle of doing three in Del Mar.  And it basically….once you have people being willing to sit down together for three hours they get to learn the system and the complexity.
	The last section I’m going to talk about is the economic factors.  There are responsibilities for private individuals when you own a house.  Let’s not shirk from that.  There are recurring costs.  When you live in a house you’ve got to fix things; you’ve got to take care of the landscaping.
	One of the issues about ignition resistant structures, if you actually have new construction you don’t need as much around it for landscaping or protection.  You don’t need 300 feet if you have an ignition resistant structure.  It’s a waste of money for not any benefit.  And what we’ve done is done a lot of changes in our habitat.  So, again, you’re back to the micro site about what you would look at.
	It’s really important to go over with an individual of the public….you’ve got high cost and low cost things.  You’ve got a high and low benefit.  
I’m just going to cover one of these boxes—high benefits/low costs:  Maintaining your landscape, getting your trash and combustibles out of there.  I was just taking some friends this morning to the West Bernardo area and a lot of those houses burned because they were 30-years-old and they hadn’t done any cleanup around their houses for a while.  That’s where, if you’re going to do home inspections, that’s the first thing you look at.  And most of us have a nuisance ordinance that will cover most of that.
SENATOR KEHOE:  You mentioned palm fronds, particularly, in some of your material.
DR. FEGE:  Yes.  
SENATOR KEHOE:  I took an air tour afterwards and there were homes, perfectly good homes, and the one next to it had burned to the ground and a lot of times it seemed as though the house itself had caught fire, like you’re showing in these other photographs of the house burning and the landscaping is still there except the palm fronds were burned up. 
DR. FEGE:  And they caught from things flying in, yeah.  One of the questions we come up with in these trainings is (and somebody has talked about it) is, what happens if my neighbor has a shake roof; what’s the risk to me?  What happens if my neighbor is a pig pen over there?  You know, what do I do?  So I think that’s very legitimate.  But that’s only through community interactions, will that change.
Just a quick list of things that are cheap.  And I think we need to help people do that.  You can probably reduce 20 percent by just cleaning up around your house; another 20 percent with some of these low-cost things.  Look at the fence there; how many of us, me included, have a wood fence all the way up to the house?  For maybe a couple of hundred bucks….I just had someone give me a quote on actually replacing that at my house—vents on the different openings.  It’s really big, as we talk about what should our vegetation reduction zones be and our implementation?  This is what….the externalities are so huge if we have removed more vegetation than we need to or in a way that does not give us benefit but creates these impacts.  You can’t go back.  Max Moritz showed the picture of all of the boxes around.  You can’t back up and get it back in our drought laden ecosystem.  This is not Michigan, where it rains every year and the forest comes back in again; no.
We think the business sector is really important, and that’s what this grant to create this class was.  Is, we need people who know, that advise homeowners, they do work for homeowners, or they make decisions.  And our preference is, in a class like this, that we have a mixture of professionals in the class, so they actually ask questions and interact.  And, actually, Marshal Larson, the fire marshal at San Miguel, was one of our instructors for one of the classes that we did in the first round.  
The dialogue and awareness among professionals is essential—real estate agents, insurance agents, fire people.  We can shift some of the responsibility and accountability to the business sector.  
Then, it’s not just CalFire that’s responsible, it’s not just the fire marshals that know how to do it, they’re not using outdated practices.  So I think it’s an area we haven’t emphasized very much and together we can make a big difference.
Just a last one; it’s actually a slide I showed before.  But, we do know the science.  We’ve got to meet people where they are.  The social factors are so important and there are ways to apply the economics to make a difference.
So that’s, kind of, the pulling things together.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you very, very much.  You know, it’s been a long afternoon.  I’d like to go to public comment while some of the speakers and presenters are still here because many of the questions that I wanted to pose have been embedded in your comments, I’m happy to say.  So we really appreciate it.  And it’s not just me, because the Chairman’s staff is still here, so the senators that had to leave early because they’re traveling, they’re in northern California, will get all the information that we heard.  So do I have some public comments?
BOB RAMER:  Thank you, Senator.  I’m Bob Ramer.  I’m Technical Director with the California Building Industry Association.  
SENATOR KEHOE:  Welcome.
MR. RAMER:  For the past 25 years I’ve basically represented the California homebuilders in the development and application for building standards.  And today’s focus, one of the questions asked is what can we do to take where we are now and perhaps make things a better place?  And we’ve come up with a variety of suggestions here that are contained in Senate Bill 1231 that was just recently introduced by Senator Correa.
The first one focuses on what you’ve heard probably a half dozen times already today—defensible space.  California already has defensible space statute.  We’ve talked about the 30-foot and the 100-foot.  What we sort of need to help out on, though, is the actual application of this defensible space.  
You’ve heard that in San Miguel and also in Ventura County, the entire Ventura County, has an outstanding program, where on an ongoing basis, the defensible space requirements are looked at, inspected, checked on a regular basis and citations are issued and if necessary, instead of doing the education, as the Chief from San Miguel said, they issue, basically, citations and they do fix-it tickets where if the material is not cleared up, it’s cleaned up and carted away. 
SENATOR KEHOE:  Right, right, we understand.
MR. RAMER:  However, if you look at what our recent fire experience both in 2003 and recently in this last catastrophic fire, we’ve gotten an excellent chance to see that this worked well in the jurisdictions that were enforcing it.  
In Ventura County in 2003, they had about a third of the fires but they had less than one percent of the insurance loss that was turned in.  It was almost entirely due to a good application of defensible space.  And when you build new construction you automatically end up with the defensible space because the building official is checking for that at time of certificate of occupancy.  But if it’s left unabated, within three to four years you have virtually no defensible space.  This has to be an ongoing effort.  
And what we’re suggesting, of course, is that the fire marshal pretty much complete their defensible space model ordinance; basically compile all the work that they’ve already done, put it under one cover and include in that a variety of suggestions for local jurisdictions on how to fund various programs.  Some of these fire districts are much smaller than others; they don’t have the financial resources to handle this. And so,  this document that the State Fire Marshal’s office would create under this bill would effectively provide local jurisdictions not only with a model on how to implement, but effectively a number of suggestions on how to go about funding that.
Secondly, with regards to the building standards, as Tonya has indicated, Chief Grijalva and Chief Dargan oversaw the development of the nation’s first set of urban/wildland interface building standards.  It took us about two-and-a-half years to get that project done, but by the end of it, there were no negative comments.  Industry, the insurance sector, the product manufacturers, the fire service, the building officials, local government, everyone said these are a good set of standards.  They’re not that costly; they’re only about $2- to $2,500 but they do make a difference.  However, one of the things to do this better is to make sure that the rubber hits the road.  Right now the State Fire Marshal’s office has an excellent program of educating and training the subcontractors, the fire service, local government.
SENATOR KEHOE:  You’re getting way over your….I wanted, sort of, a brief summary because we’ve got other people.  
MR. RAMER:  The problem is that….
SENATOR KEHOE:  You want to put a manual together that…
MR. RAMER:  Five years down the road we want to make sure it keeps getting done.  We want to make sure that they effectively update this on a regular basis.
And that concludes my comments.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Super.  Thank you very much.  
TRISH BUTLER:  Thank you, Senator Kehoe.  I want to thank you for holding these hearings today.  My name is Trish Butler.  I’m an environmental and land use planning consultant here in San Diego.  
And I and my firm are preparing a master plan for the Rincon Indian Reservation.  And you may be familiar that the Rincon Indian Reservation sustained substantial fire damage as a result of the Cumacha Fire.  And, basically, about 65 structures on the Rincon Reservation were incinerated and 15 of those were homes of reservation members.
We are working with the tribe now  And it is our intention to prepare a master plan for the Rincon Reservation that makes them a model of land use planning that’s responsive to…
SENATOR KEHOE:  Fire issues.
MS. BUTLER:  Fire resistant land use planning and building codes and so on.
As I listened to the presentations here today it occurs to me that jurisdictions become blurred in the practice of mutual aid assistance.  And you’ve got the SRAs and the LRAs, but you do have federally controlled lands that are participants in the wildland/urban interface here.  And I think there are ways to involve these because, for example, with San Diego County having so many of the Indian reservations, and they’re real poster children for communities, concentrated communities located in the urban/wildlife interface areas, and I believe there opportunities to involve them because, again, we have the situation where a fire started somewhere remotely more inland, where the Cumacha Fire started on the La Jolla Indian Reservation and it ended up threatening the community of Valley Center.
SENATOR KEHOE:  So more inclusion of the tribal leaders and tribal fire departments?
MS. BUTLER:  I think there’s an opportunity there and I just want to offer it.
SENATOR KEHOE:  There is some, but we can do more.  And a reverse 911 is one of those issues.  It’s not complete on the reservations, on the Indian lands.
MS. BUTLER:  So I just wanted to offer that as food for thought.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Thanks, Trish.  Next speaker.
ARNE JOHANSON:  Hi.  My name is Arne Johanson.  I’m a homeowner.  And I lived in one of these communities surrounded by open space.  
SENATOR KEHOE:  Which one?
MR. JOHANSON:  It’s called Bel Etoge-Savenna.  And not only are we surrounded by open space, we even have 110 acres of open space within our community.  We have an excellent partnership with the Rancho Santa Fe Fire Department.  The fuel modification has worked excellently during the Witch Fire.  All of the open space; well, 90 percent of the open space, burned, including our marsh, which burned right to the water line, but we didn’t lose a single home.  
SENATOR KEHOE:  Congratulations.
MR. JOHANSON:  Our fuel modification zone goes from zero feet in some places to a maximum of 100 feet.  We have slopes.  We have low spots.  We have chaparral.  The fire department did a great job of instructing us on how to thin the vegetation to give us a defensible perimeter.  
The problems that we seem to have the most trouble with are trying to maintain our homes in a very safe manner.  If the fire codes change, if the building codes change, how do we, as homeowners, find out what improvements we could make to our homes to make them more defensible?  Landscapers don’t seem to know anything about defensible space in our yards.  We hire landscapers to do landscaping and they’ll put in whatever we want.  It would be nice if they had some requirements to know about defensible landscaping.
SENATOR KEHOE:  A good suggestion.  I do hope that your local fire department, the Fire Safe Garden and things like that, websites, now, there is a lot of information out there.  But I mention, it could be kind of confusing, too, depending on exactly what your lot is like.
MR. JOHANSON:  Actually, I spent the last four years educating myself; going around and finding where the sources of information are.  But quite often, as a homeowner, we get things like, “don’t have a wooden fence,” without having the positive “have this, this, or this.”
SENATOR KEHOE:  The instead, okay.  
MR. JOHANSON:  People that want to retrofit their house and box in the eaves don’t have an example of how to do that.  It’s, like, they feel they have to go out and hire an architect to design it for them as opposed to having some sort of a standard model that they could work from.  People want to do things in a fire save fashion; they just need more information and more guidance.
Thank you.
SENATOR KEHOE:  I’ll take that under consideration.  It seems, with all the things we’ve heard this afternoon about CalFire, local fire, local fire departments, the fire marshal, University of California all have information; so the challenge is, I guess, to get it into some accessible and easily understandable place.
MR. JOHNSON:  I have been to my fire department, ______ the fire land, all those places.
SENATOR KEHOE:  I understand.  If you could give that to him.  Thank you very much.  And you’re next.  And give us your name, also.
NINA FAIN:  My name is Nina Fain, Deputy City Attorney with the San Diego City Attorney’s Office.  Good afternoon, Senator Kehoe.  Thank you for hosting this senate committee hearing on such an important topic.
I’m here to discuss Michael Aguirre’s interest in protecting life and property and preventing the future evacuation of the city.  He has issued, today, Interim Report #29 entitled Fire Prevention 2008.  And this report explains why a more comprehensive and scientifically sound fire risk reduction program is important including, ecological fire risk, land management, increased fire rescue resources, fire resistive construction and landscaping and improved land use planning and community design.  These measures could be implemented through land use plans, guidelines, policies, codes and regulations in this city.  And the reasoning and analysis is more specifically described here.  
And I wanted to give you this document for the record today and also make hard copies available for the public.  It’s also available on the City Attorney’s website at sandiego.gov.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you.  We’ll take this as part of the testimony today.  We appreciate it.  And, also, the city is just now, adopting or updating a General Plan that is supposed to have a fire financing element.  
MS. FAIN:  You’re exactly right.  We have a public facilities and safety element.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Is the financing plan complete yet?  And when will it be available to the public?
MS. FAIN:  The General Plan is going to be heard by city council, I believe, on Monday.  And there is a public facility’s financing aspect and a tool box as far as our strategies for financing our public infrastructure including, fire rescue resources.  If you want to view that document it’s also available on the city’s planning website.  And the hearing on the General Plan will be held on Monday.
SENATOR KEHOE:  My understanding is the financing plan is not yet public and it really should be if the city is going to adopt a General Plan.  So the City Attorney, I’m sure, would be interested in that issue.
MS. FAIN:  I appreciate your comment on that.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you.  And thank you for being here.
MS. FAIN:  Thank you.
SENATOR KEHOE:  You, sir, go right ahead and tell us your name.
MICHAEL ARCHER:  Good afternoon, Senator Kehoe.  My name is Mike Archer.  My company is called Firebomber Publications.  And I write about how technology can be used to improve firefighting.  I also write a ________ firefighting.  And I’m a wildfire consultant for a couple of organizations.  One of those is Wildfire Research Network up in L.A., and another one is San Diego Regional Fire Safety Forum, for which I’m on several committees and am also the webmaster.
One of your questions was how much CO2 is given off by the fires here?  And you basically take the acreage, multiply it by 25 to 80 tons of CO2 per acre.  And the 25 to 80 tons is based upon how thick it is.  If it’s grasses and light fuels, that’s…
SENATOR KEHOE:  Whoa, 25 to 80 tons, you’re saying?
MR. ARCHER:  Per acre.
SENATOR KEHOE:  And we had what burn the last time, 300,000 acres?  Wow.
MR. ARCHER:  And much of that was property, heavy, like chaparral, so you were probably closer to the 80-ton per acre rate.  
And the other item was; you were discussing cleanup; the walls to be fireproofed along the roads, putting the utilities underground.  And as an interim, until such things could be done, if they’re ever funded, I would suggest the __________ chemical called G-75, which is a retardant that can be sprayed on from the air.  They use it on San Clemente Island, where the Navy does some gunnery practice.  They basically just criss/cross across the island; setup a checkerboard there and when the Navy starts to fire an area from their shelling, it burns within that area and stops at the line of the G-75.  It stays active on the plants without harming them.  Whether they’re alive or dead, it makes no difference and it’s something that will stay active until the rainy season comes and washes it all off as fertilizer in the soil.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you very much.  Appreciate your comments.  Ma’am go right ahead.  And your name, first, please.
DIANE CONKLIN:  Thank you, Senator Kehoe.  Thank you so much for putting together this seminar here today.  My name is Diane Conklin.  And I come from Ramona, California.  
And, actually, my interest in fire, and my family’s interest in fire, started with the Cedar Fire.  My husband devised a system to save our home, and our home was saved.  But, of course, our area was devastated in the Cedar Fire.  Following that, my husband became very interested in fire and has become qualified as an expert in embers.  And we are now a team, together, intervening in the CPUC process on the Sunrise Power Link Transmission Line of SDG&E.
The reason we’re concerned about the issue of power lines and fires is that we live in a rural area and we have a lot of power lines in chaparral covered mountains.  It’s a beautiful place, but it also can be very dangerous.  
As everyone here knows, three power lines went down in San Diego last October, including the Witch Creek Fire, the largest fire which traveled from eastern Pomona to Rancho Santa Fe.  And we’re concerned about adding more ignition sources into the back country.
What I would request, is that I would like to know what the state of California is going to do about the issue of power lines as ignition sources in high wind conditions?  And the issue is twofold:  What can be done, and then what will be done? 
So I just wanted to bring that to your attention.
We, in the back country, particularly worry about wind.  And I just would like to end by saying that last Sunday we had a Santa Ana.  It was only about 25 miles an hour and it was only for about 24 hours.  But every time we have a Santa Ana, now, we really worry.
SENATOR KEHOE:  It must be dreadful.
MS. CONKLIN:  It is dreadful and it takes away from the beauty.  And Ramona was particularly hard hit this last time, but so were so many communities.  
So the issue for us is; what can be done and what will be done?
SENATOR KEHOE:  You know, today’s hearing was a joint hearing of Natural Resources and Government Organization, both state senate committees.  But I chair the Senate Utilities Committee, which oversees the PUC and I’m very aware of both the transmission and the distribution lines being perceived as fire igniters.  So we’re monitoring the PUC’s proceeding on the distribution lines and on their new rulemaking on vegetation management and other safety issues.  And as that work goes forward I have to make the determination whether they’re doing an adequate job or whether they need legislative direction, so that’s how we will participate.
MS. CONKLIN:  I appreciate that.  And I didn’t know that.  And I appreciate that.  We are a party to that proceeding for rulemaking.  As a matter of fact, we supported the rulemaking proceeding, the petition by SDG&E.
SENATOR KEHOE:  And I should correct myself:  The PUC has not independently gone forward with a rulemaking or a proceeding on the distribution lines themselves other than the rules they already have in place and if those rules should be revised.  So we sent a letter.  We’ve asked them to look into the distribution lines as a source of fires, as an ignition factor, and we will have to push them to pursue that.
MS. CONKLIN:  May I just say, that we are a party in the rulemaking petition that SDG&E brought to the PUC.  
But I would like to just tell you one other thing.  I forgot to tell you this.  A 230-KV line did go down on Pendleton in December of 2006.  So we believe it’s not just a matter of distribution lines, we believe it’s a matter of transmission lines.  
But I so appreciate what you’ve said and will be in contact with you.  Thank you kindly.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you very much.  I appreciate you attending.  Welcome, sir.  You’re next.  Is this the spray application?
THOMAS LAMB:  Yes, Ma’am.  
SENATOR KEHOE:  I’ve heard of some of these.
MR. LAMB:  Thank you, Senator Kehoe, I’m going to spend about two minutes; one minute on encouraging, from a state level, more support for these wonderful programs that do educate the public, especially people that live in the back country.
UNIDENTIFIED:  Can you state your name?
MR. LAMB:  My name is Thomas Lamb.  The fire safe councils in San Diego County are doing a wonderful job, basically, totally on a volunteer basis.  There are some grants that are obtained, but it’s a shoestring type situation and they’re doing a wonderful job.  I’m familiar with several of these.  And I’d like to see some kind of funding from the state level for fire safe councils.  They do a wonderful job in educating about 100-foot spacing, helping people with chipping programs, all kinds of things.
The second thing I’d like to talk about is a product called Barricade, which is a fire blocking gel.  It can be put onto a structure, any kind of a structure, even automobiles, by a homeowner, by business and by firefighters.  
Firefighters are aware of this product.  It is one of the most effective products there is for blocking embers.  Embers are….being more and more aware that the small to large embers do cause a lot of problems with ignition of houses not just in the wildland area, but in the urban areas as well.
Barricade fire blocking gel is easy, fast to put on.  It can be put on before evacuating.  It’s had a lot of success here.  
I sell this product.  I’ve got three confirmed saves with the Harris Fire with this gel where fire came very close—things melted in yards.
Palomar Mountain, if you’d like to contact Chief George Lucia up there, the volunteer fire department, they had a lot of this product spaced around the community.  It was used by homeowners and by volunteer fire departments.  
Certain embers….and it’s very, very effective.
SENATOR KEHOE:  And you’ve got a website, right, so people can get that information?
MR. LAMB:  Yes.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Any closing comments?
MR. LAMB:  No.  Thank you very much for the time in letting me speak.
SENATOR KEHOE:  I appreciate it.  And thank you for being here.  Go ahead.  And will you say your name into the record, ma’am?
CELIA CUCHER:  My name is Celia Cucher, and I’m representing the Orange County Chapter of the California Native Plant Society and there is a big San Diego chapter here also.  And, first of all, the San Diego County chapter has a really good website (mic off)___________ .  _________ and use them.  We ____________ everybody is talking about doing research, Dr. Fefe and all.  Let’s use native plants because we then not only have fire safety, but we also have the habitat for the animals that are otherwise getting more rare.
We had a fire in Orange County, too.  Proportionately _________ necessarily large for our county.  _____________.  Thank you.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you.  Welcome.
TOM GARDNER:  Good afternoon.  My name is Tom Gardner.  I’m the past president CDF Firefighters.  Senator Kehoe and those lucky staffers get the late night flight home.
Just real quickly:  I mean, I go back, I testified before the Blue Ribbon after 2003.  We go back as far as the Laguna Fire in the 1970s.  And I testified on the record that the after action report was the same thing that we were recommending in 2003.  And we could probably take the 2003 and change the date again and it will be the same story for 2007—nothing new.
SENATOR KEHOE:  And why is that?
MR. GARDNER:  Funding and lack of…
SENATOR KEHOE:  Is it funding or lack of revenue?
MR. GARDNER:  I’m not going there (laughter).  But it takes strength and a will of the legislators, the public, the biologists and the researchers to come to an agreement.  There has to be a middle ground.  The firefighters need their clearance.  We need those fuel breaks of 
100-foot.  We can work on that, but we need that to anchor.  We need that to protect ourselves and protect the structures.  But there does need to be a balance in between.  All the parties need to sit down and come to some agreements.  Just to say “no” is not an answer.  And it’s not something that we can standby and let it go again.  We need to continue the committee hearings and testifying.  And it does come down to funding those sources to continue.  We’re having trouble filling just gasoline and tires and wheels and everything else on vehicles.  You don’t have the money to do the research for the fuel breaks.
CalFire used to do 50-foot clearance on all the highways.  We no longer do that because of funding or revenue.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Good point.  I’ll convey that to Senator Steinberg, because that was his question.  Thank you for being here.
PAUL MASON:  Good afternoon, Senator Kehoe.  Paul Mason.  I’m the deputy director of Sierra Club California.  I represent the club.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Since you are out of your native habitat….I knew I recognized you.  Now I realize you’re the Sierra Club guy on forestry, so welcome.
MR. MASON:  Yeah, and I’m undercover.  I’m not wearing my capitol camo today.
And I want to congratulate your staff for putting together a really good substantive hearing down here; and it’s definitely been worth the trip down here.  And there’s been a lot of content.  I’m just going to hit on a couple of things that I think are most relevant to the big picture. 
One of those is that particularly in the budget situation that we’re looking at this year, which I still have no idea how we’re actually going to close however large the gap is this week, I don’t see any way of doing that that does not involve new revenue.  And, fortunately, the concept that the LAO has put together, put out year after year of assessing a fee on the folks that benefit from CDF’s fire protection out in the SRA, is increasingly well developed and I think it’s a really, really, really good idea.  And I think it has a couple of benefits.  In addition to actually stabilizing the funding at CalFire, CDF (I’m still trying to make the transition in what we call the department) and allowing us to maintain at least the same level of service and assessing some of that on the beneficiary.  
I think that Max and others today raised the points that there are a lot of basic unanswered questions that in order to make smart policy decisions over the coming half decade or decade we’re going to want to have some answers to some of these questions.  And if we have a stable source of revenue on dealing with wildfire in California, I think it might be prudent to consider dedicating some modest portion of that to answering some of these questions so we can make…
SENATOR KEHOE:  For basic research, you mean?
MR. MASON:  Exactly.  So we can make better decisions in the future.  I mean, the other place that I would really suggest that we dedicate some of that revenue is on planning.  
I think the other thing that we’ve gotten out of this hearing today is that there’s only so much you can get out of doing defensible space around your home and that you need to start at the home and it’s going to be the landowners responsibility to do appropriate defensible work directly around their home.  But where we have a lot of gains to be made is on the broader land use planning issues that, frankly, out in the state responsibility areas are largely nonexistent.  
There’s been some good work in the past.  Your bill from when you were in the Assembly on having an element in the General Plan dealing with these issues was a good start.  I think we probably need to revisit that because that’s all being done over at the Board of Forestry where they don’t have any resources to really get into any meaningful level.  But, focusing, now and in the future, on the planning aspect….
SENATOR KEHOE:  Wouldn’t that be more effective if it was in the fire marshal’s office?
MR. MASON:  I absolutely agree.  I think it probably belongs over at the FRAP Unit in the fire marshal’s office where they’re increasingly aggregating their proactive planning and are starting to develop some of those skills in that centralized department.  And then, working with the units in the various parts of the state so you actually have both local expertise and some broader planning expertise, I think that might be something we would want to think about fine tuning there.
And then, I guess, just finally, the one last thing that one of the last presenters pointed out; is that as we’re looking at how we landscape people’s yards and what sort of vegetation condition we maintain there, I think we need to be careful that we don’t fall into the trap of trying to irrigate our way out of these problems.  We’re going to maintain fire safe conditions because we have big lawns or moist vegetation, because that’s just not compatible with the water needs of future California.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Right.  I wish Senator Machado were here to address this, because he’s working on a water bond and we’re up to our ears in water crisis as well, so lots to talk about.
BRAD RAMP:  Good afternoon.  I’m Brad Ramp.  I’m the building official for the city of Chulavista.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Oh, welcome.
MR. RAMP:  Most of the representatives from the California building officials who sat on the taskforce with Tonya and Bob to basically, write the state requirements.
SENATOR KEHOE:  For the new building codes that became law January of this year?
MR. RAMP:  Yes, January 1st for the SRAs.  Now, that’s a very important distinction.  Because the LRAs, the local areas (basically the cities), have a choice to make, coming up here between now and July to talk about to what extent they’re going to embrace it, and even to what extent they might chose to also incorporate it into, as opposed to just brand new construction, if there are additions to existing houses, whether or not they want to impose those requirements as well.
But what I wanted to say is; I really wanted to commend the State Fire Marshal’s office for really bringing that group together, bringing the critical stakeholders together and pointing out how important each of those individual roles were and encourage that to continue.  Because we’ve talked a lot about landscaping, we’ve talked about firefighting and such.  But, frankly, the building official, I think, has been the silent one in the corner.  But I think our role is going to be that much more important in the future, because if you turn off the water, if you stop doing the brush management, you still have the building as a defensible space—a hardened target, shall we say.  So I think it’s very important that the building official continue to be included as a stakeholder in there because I think we have and will continue to…
SENATOR KEHOE:  I’ve heard nothing but good things about the new rules, so I commend everybody that worked on them.  And I’d like to hear more (we can’t do it now) on how the state could incentivize or require or somehow urge the local jurisdictions to adopt the new rules.
MR. MASON:  What I can say very briefly is, I have been part of the teaching group around the state, spreading the word about these new requirements and really encouraging it.  Because for most…
SENATOR KEHOE:  I think we have to bring a greater sense of urgency to it, though.  I commend you for the time you put into teaching and encouraging.  But we need to get to some real regulations or….I don’t know exactly how to do it, but that’s what I would like to discuss with you. 
MR. MASON:  Thank you.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you.
RICK FISHER:  My name is Rick Fisher.  I’m the president of the Carlsbad Firefighters and the president of the newly formed San Diego County Council of Firefighters.  
SENATOR KEHOE:  Welcome.
MR. FISHER:  I want to comment on the important work that’s being done here and the ideas on fire prevention and codes and helpful those will be in preventing fires.  
And as Chief Ghio said, God puts the fires out.  Well, that’s not really true.  God changes the weather and then the firefighters put the fires out.  So I just want to make sure that we do not overshadow the need for firefighters on the ground with the appropriate number and pieces of equipment so that they can put the fire out. 
Thank you for your time.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you.  A good point.
MICHAEL O’GRADY:  Just quickly.  I’m Michael O’Grady.  I am retired; about 30 years in local government.  Most of what I had wanted to talk about has been covered.  But I think primarily is just educating the populous that fires are a natural occurrence; that they’re going to keep coming.  No matter what we do, the idea is to minimize it.  And I think more and more of you will realize that they have to do something.  I think it’s as much having the information out there.  I’ve been on a number of websites both here from the state and other states that are doing stuff.  There’s a lot of stuff out there.  But it’s getting people, really kind of convinced that this isn’t just a, you know, an occasional occurrence.  
SENATOR KEHOE:  Right, we’ve got that.  Anything else?
MR. O’GRADY:  Just with the drought stuff too.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Yes, good.
DAN HERNING:  My name is Dan Herning and I have a local company here and we supply the forest service with the next generation structure wrap material that we’re going to be making available to the general public.  It’s an aluminized, laminated material that they wrap historical buildings and the parks with.  And it defeats fire brands and radiant heat up to 6- to 700 degrees.  But we’ve supplied a lot of it to the forest service.  We’ve come up with a new version…
SENATOR KEHOE:  A wrap is a new concept to me.  I’ve heard of the gels _________.  What’s the name of your thing?
MR. HERNING:  Fire Zap is the company, but fire shields….and it’s essentially the same material that’s in the personal fire shelters that the wildland firefighters carry, only in large sheets so you can rapidly cover…
SENATOR KEHOE:  And you must have a website, don’t you?
MR. HERNING:  Yes, there is a website.
SENATOR KEHOE:  And the website is?
MR. HERNING:  firezap.com, f i r e z a p; just for awareness purposes.
SENATOR KEHOE:  There you go.  Thank you very much and thank you for being here.  
Rick.  Good photographs.
RICK HALSEY:  Thank you, Senator.  Rick Halsey.  I’d like to talk about Swiss cheese here for a minute.  James Reason(?), in the 1980’s, came up with an accident model where a series of mistakes will come along and most of the time it doesn’t kill anybody, but every once in a while, all the holes line up.  And every time we have a Santa Ana wind event, all the holes line up.  
This myopic focus on vegetation clearance has really got to stop and I’ll tell you why.  People, words mean a lot and so when all they hear is clearance, clearance, clearance they forget about the palm trees that are across the street which are incredibly significant in taking out homes in Rancho Bernardo.  They forget about the stacks of wood.  And some of this focus even came out of…
SENATOR KEHOE:  And the decks and all those other things.
MR. HALSEY:  Some of this focus came out of the Esperanza Fire with the reports that came out where we lost five firefighters up there.  Not one of those reports or the commentary that came out of it said anything about why that house was there in the first place.  It all was about the firefighters and the mistakes they made.  And that’s just not right.  We have the ability here to make decisions about where we can put homes so it doesn’t kill firefighters, it doesn’t put civilians at risk. 
And I think really for the first time, Senator, because of you, somebody is actually bringing up the planning issue, because before this it’s always the easy way out.  “Well, we’ll do 300 feet,” “Maybe 1,000 feet of clearance.”  
Other than the Orange County Native Plant Society, there’s no voice for those little plants out there.  But there is a voice asking people to maybe retrofit their decks, change out their roofs; why not some tax breaks for some of those people so they can do some of those things?  Because you can have all the clearance you want, and the guy still has a shake shingle roof.  There’s no program at all to encourage those people to understand…
SENATOR KEHOE:  There are some small things that are being done.  There’s a couple of bills this year, including one of mine, that if the property owner improves their house with some fire safe things; indoor sprinklers, roofing material, etc, that wouldn’t be added to their property assessment, so they get that much of a break.  But we should be more aggressive about trying to get older homes retrofitted in a safe way.
MR. HALSEY:  So one last request:  If we could just eliminate the word “brush” and “clearance” from this vocabulary discussion, because it worries me a lot again.  And if we look at the whole fuel environment, and it’s fuel management including houses, the shrubs and the decks and people say, “Oh, gosh, you mean it’s a whole picture?”  And then we might start saving a lot more homes than we’re doing today.  
Thanks.
SENATOR KEHOE:  Thank you for being here.  Thanks everybody.  We really appreciate San Diego State letting us have this great big room.  And Senator Machado, Senator Hollingsworth and Senator Steinberg, and all of you for being here, thank you.
We’re adjourned.
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