The Liberal Gun Club Forum

Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to declare a state of emergency in California on Friday and waive environmental regulations to expedite nearly three dozen local forest management projects to protect communities from the deadly wildfires that have decimated communities up and down the state. A preview of the governor’s order, obtained by The Times, shows that Newsom plans to suspend environmental laws and rules that would otherwise apply to the projects. He also would halt the state’s competitive bidding process for work and direct the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to team up with the California National Guard to immediately begin reducing trees and shrubs in and around 200 cities and towns.

Critics voiced concern about the governor’s decision to suspend guidelines put in place to protect the environment and the precedent his executive order might set. Some argued that regulations do not pose a problem and the state should have prioritized the projects earlier. “This is like deferred maintenance on a building,” said Char Miller, professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College. “We just kept putting it off and putting it off and putting it off.”

California’s forests have become a hot-button political topic, with President Donald Trump fueling assertions that poor management practices and environmental laws have made wildfires worse. Experts have refuted the notion that heavy timber fueled the state’s most destructive fires in urban areas and say much of the millions of dead and dying trees reside on lands controlled by the U.S. Forest Service. The Camp fire in Paradise, for example, burned through a region scorched and logged a decade earlier. Ironically, Miller and others said, Newsom’s decision to walk back regulations co-opts the president’s message.

Newsom signed an executive order in his first week in office that directed Cal Fire to develop recommendations to prevent wildfires. The agency published a report in late February that said forest management efforts by the state, federal government and private landowners were “inadequate to improve the health of millions of acres of forests and wildlands” that require maintenance. The agency reported that up to 15 million acres of California forest need some form of restoration. The report recommended that the state waive and streamline regulatory requirements and direct Cal Fire to immediately begin 35 fuel reduction projects, such as the removal of dead trees, brush clearing and prescribed burns to create fuel breaks, defensible space and safe travel corridors on 90,000 acres of land around cities and towns vulnerable to wildfires.

Newsom’s new order does just that and waives laws that fall under the jurisdiction of the California Environmental Protection Agency and the California Natural Resources Agency and would typically apply to the projects. The laws include the California Environmental Quality Act, which requires state and local agencies to identify and mitigate the environmental impacts of their work.

Most of the 35 projects are in Northern and Central California and would be completed over the course of the next year. Cal Fire worked with its local fire units to determine which projects to prioritize, assessing risk and socioeconomic factors, such as age of the nearby populations, poverty and access to vehicles.

The work includes prescribed burns and tree and brush removal over 26,500 acres of land in Ukiah. Other projects would establish fuel breaks, or areas of reduced vegetation to slow or stop wildfires, around Crest in San Diego County and 393 acres of treatment along roads in Fresno County, according to Cal Fire.

Some of the work would create safe “ingress and egress corridors,” or exit routes to escape blazes, after Paradise residents became trapped in bumper-to-bumper traffic when they tried to flee the flames on congested roads in November.

The only project in Los Angeles County calls for more than 400 acres of prescribed burns to clear brush and chaparral in the coastal region near Malibu, where hundreds of homes were destroyed in the Woolsey Fire that killed three people in November. But the burns, like many of the projects, would do nothing to prevent wildfires this year.

Porter [Cal Fire director] said the governor’s intervention will help expedite the plans, which are in various stages of approval. His agency has been struggling for the last 15 years to certify a sweeping statewide environmental impact report, which once completed later this year, will allow them to move forward with individual wildfire mitigation projects more quickly.

“In lieu of having that document for environmental clearance purposes, this is the means to get these 35 emergency projects done to help protect these communities,” Porter said.

shinzen wrote: Fri Mar 22, 2019 12:13 pm I'm actually not wholly opposed to this. The fact that we haven't taken it seriously for so long has killed people. Further clarification on exactly what environmental laws and regs are suspended for this would be good though.