It’s OK to bend the rules to make Californians safer from wildfire
By The Times Editorial Board
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While lawmakers have approved billions in new funding in recent years to help with fire prevention, [California Governor Gavin Newsom] took it a step further by declaring a state of emergency, thereby suspending environmental and regulatory review requirements for certain fire-risk reduction projects and allowing the state to hire companies for those projects without competitive bidding.
The governor’s order specifically waives the normal requirements for 35 priority projects near high-risk communities, from Malibu to Big Sur to Ukiah. They include projects to cut down dead and hazardous trees, clear brush, bulldoze fire lines, carry out controlled burns and create additional evacuation routes. The latter was a big issue in Paradise, where residents fleeing the Camp Fire got trapped in traffic. The 35 projects were chosen based on both the fire risk facing the communities in question and the vulnerability of the population; that meant considering whether areas had higher numbers of residents with disabilities, seniors, non-English speakers and households without a car.
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But there’s a big difference between the kind of large-scale logging that the Trump administration has proposed and the targeted “fuel reduction” projects around vulnerable communities that the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has planned. Newsom’s order is narrow and conservative, applying to the riskiest of the high-risk areas. The 35 projects that would be exempted from environmental regulations represent a tiny fraction of the public and private lands that need attention. In fact, the order would affect only about 90,000 acres, compared with an estimated 15 million acres of forest that need restoration, plus the vast stretches of dense and highly flammable shrub lands across Southern California.
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Newsom’s order is really a down payment on the work that lies ahead. Sure, streamline environmental regulations for few dozen fire-safety projects. But if California is truly in a “condition of extreme peril,” then the state needs far more radical interventions, including curtailing housing development in previously undeveloped, high-fire-risk areas and forcing utilities to reduce the fire risk from their power lines.
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