Gov. Jerry Brown Vetoed Bipartisan Wildfire Management Bill in 2016

This might have helped had it been passed.  

Make no mistake, the recent fires in California are made much worse because they've happened at the end of the classic hot dry summers we have, and very windy conditions, but knowing how this is the situation every year, it would only be prudent to prepare properly.  Governor Brown did his part to prevent that, and now he has the gall to blame the politicized "science" of anthropogenic global warming instead.

Naturally, that imaginary problem requires expensive government intervention in all aspects of our lives, and the confiscation of even more of our wealth.

It's like it's a political game, or something.

At the request of the City Council of Laguna Beach, Sen. John Moorlach (R-Costa Mesa), authored SB 1463 in 2016, a bipartisan bill which would have given local governments more say in fire-prevention efforts through the Public Utilities Commission proceeding making maps of fire hazard areas around utility lines.

Laguna Beach went through four fires sparked by utility lines in the last ten years, and has done as much in the way of prevention as they could afford. The bill would have allowed cities to work with utilities to underground utility lines, and work with the Public Utilities Commission to develop updated fire maps by requiring the PUC to take into consideration areas in which communities are at risk from the consequences of wildfire — not just those areas where certain environmental hazards are present.

Gov. Brown vetoed SB 1463, despite being passed by the Legislature, 75-0 in the Assembly and 39-0 in the Senate.

After SB 1463 was killed by Gov. Brown, Sen. Moorlach and his brilliant staff had an epiphany: Redirect the state’s accumulated cap-and-trade funds into wildfire prevention.

Authored in 2018, the new Senate Bill 1463, aptly named “Cap and Trees,” would continuously appropriate 25 percent of state cap-and-trade funds to counties to harden the state’s utility infrastructure and better manage wildlands and our overgrown and drought-weakened forests.

“In an effort to reduce the state’s highest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, curb the impacts of future wildfires and prevent unnecessary damage to life and property, Senate Bill 1463 will continuously appropriate 25 percent of cap and trade funds to counties to harden the state’s utility infrastructure and better manage wildlands and forests,” the new SB 1463 fact sheet reported.

However, SB 1463 was killed in the radical Senate Environmental Quality Committee by Democrats, even though there was no opposition to it. 

It is estimated that “for every 2 to 3 days these wildfires burn, GHG emissions are roughly equal to the annual emissions from every car in the entire state of California,”  USA Today/Reno Gazette reported in 2017. Last year, there were more than 9,000 major wildfires which burned over 1.2 million acres. Several of the large fires were caused or exacerbated by sparking utility lines.