As the summer heats up, California residents should remember: Newsom’s priorities have left them more vulnerable than ever.
, in the aftermath of LA’s devastating wildfires. Newsom issued an emergency proclamation to “cut bureaucratic red tape” and “fast-track critical projects,” including brush clearance, forest thinning, prescribed burning and other forms of fuels reduction.
“These are the forest management projects we need to protect our communities most vulnerable to wildfire,” Newsom said last spring. “e’re going to get them done. ”fuels-reduction work on roughly 87,000 acres of land. But internal records we obtained from state fire authorities indicate that state-approved organizations had completed projects totaling about 781 acres — less than 1%.
These numbers are disastrous. The governor’s office insisted that these projects, which are part of the state’s larger wildfire-prevention efforts,The documents we obtained, which concern the fast-tracked projects, reveal that the Newsom administration has failed to protect the state.review , a vegetation-management project typically requires an initial study, an Environmental Impact Report, a public comment period, alternatives analysis and agency certification. That process can take several months for simple projects, and a year orlast month.
Now, despite the governor’s declaration of war against “red tape,” it seems that the red tape has won. The same story is unfolding around the state. In the San Ramon Valley, east of San Francisco, the local fire district recently sought to conduct wildfire mitigation work on California State Parks land in areas that theas “Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones. ” The local district had developed a mitigation plan, secured local funding and was ready to start working.
But according to the district, California State Parks imposed “regulatory and procedural barriers” that slowed and narrowed the project, including restrictions on treating protected manzanita species, mandatory cultural and habitat monitoring, as well as oversight fees. But internal records we obtained from state fire authorities indicate that state-approved organizations had completed projects totaling about 781 acres — less than 1%.
As a result, the district says that it was able to complete wildfire mitigation work on only 22 of the 300 acres planned — and wasted about 75% of the project budget on state-mandated compliance costs. The Newsom administration suggested that the fast-track initiative would avoid such catastrophic failures.
Earlier this year, the governor’s officeinclude a 0.24-acre tree-pruning project near Camp Nelson; a 0.36-acre project that will fell trees near Thousand Oaks; and a six-acre effort to manage vegetation along a transmission line in Sonoma County. And as we have seen, approved projects are not the same as completed projects. Despite stacking the list with small projects, only about 13% had been completed as of last month.
We sent a comment request to the governor’s office, which directed us to the California Natural Resources Agency . Using updated data, an agency spokesperson told us that the state had “fast-tracked approval of over 400 projects, across nearly 100,000 acres,” and claimed that about half of those projects, “spanning over 35,000 acres,” were either “underway or completed.
” When we pressed CNRA about the acreage total, another official admitted that only “798 footprint acres” had been completed, and that the agency couldn’t “anticipate how much progress” had been made on the rest.a press release about the emergency declaration and related actions, which didn’t mention how many fast-track acres had been completed. The fundamental role of government is to ensure the physical safety of its people.
In fire-prone California, that means allocating enough resources to reduce extreme fire risk and making sure approved mitigation work is completed.
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