California Construction News staff writer
California is launching a new online permitting process to fast-track state-level approvals for critical wildfire safety projects across the state. This new streamlined process builds on historic investments and nation-leading actions that cut red tape faster.
Gov. Gavin Newsom also signed Assembly Bill 100 (Gabriel), which allocates over $170 million in accelerated funding to conservancies for forest and vegetation management across California. The bill also allocates $10 million to support wildfire response and resiliency.
“With this latest round of funding, we’re continuing to increase the speed and size of forest and vegetation management essential to protecting communities,” Newsom said. “We are leaving no stone unturned – including cutting red tape – in our mission to ensure our neighborhoods are protected from destructive wildfires.”
Funding includes:
- $30,904,000 to the Sierra Nevada Conservancy
- $23,524,000 to the California Tahoe Conservancy
- $31,349,000 to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy
- $30,904,000 to the State Coastal Conservancy
- $30,904,000 to the San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy
- $23,524,000 to the San Diego River Conservancy
The new approvals process will accelerate critical wildfire safety projects builds on statewide efforts to move fast to prepare communities ahead of peak wildfire season by promoting key safety measures such as hardening homes and creating defensible space.
Projects across the state will move faster without compromising important environmental protections. A new Statewide Fuels Reduction Environmental Protection Plan (EPP) requires applicants to comply with best management practices and measures to minimize impacts to environmental resources while completing fuels reduction projects, ensuring the safeguarding of water and air quality, tribal cultural resources, and special-status species and their habitats.
New, moves to streamline state-level regulatory processes builds long-term efforts already underway in California to increase wildfire response and forest management in the face of a hotter, drier climate. A full list of California’s progress on wildfire resilience is available here.
Changes include:
- doubling spending in wildfire prevention and landscape resilience projects with an additional $1.5 billion to be allocated from the 2024 Climate Bond.
- more than 2,200 landscape health and fire prevention projects are completed or underway – the State and its partners treated 1.9 million acres, including nearly 730,000 acres in 2023.
- Interagency Treatment Dashboard displays wildfire resilience work across federal, state, local, and privately managed lands across the State, tracking progress, facilitates planning and firefighting efforts.
- executive order to further improve community hardening and wildfire mitigation strategies to neighborhood resilience statewide. Since 2019, CAL FIRE has awarded more than $450 million for 450 wildfire prevention projects across the state.
