Multifaceted Approach to Reduce Fire Risk Advances out of Committee

The following is a submission from the office of State Senator Ben Allen.

Senator Ben Allen (D-Pacific Palisades/Santa Monica) celebrated the passage of SB 894 and SB 1297 out of committee this week to reduce fire risk across California. Both bills received bipartisan, unanimous support.

“Too many lives are being lost, homes destroyed, and public resources wasted to more frequent and destructive fires over recent years,” said Senator Allen. “The fire risk we face is driving an affordability crisis through rising insurance premiums and utility bills. It’s clear we need a more holistic approach to building community resilience.”

Home hardening and defensible space improvements have been shown to reduce a structure’s fire risk by nearly 50 percent when integrated together. However, these structural upgrades can be expensive, preventing many residents and business owners from taking these steps that can better protect their lives and livelihoods.

SB 894 will lower these financial barriers by providing low-interest loans for homeowners and small businesses to pursue these risk-reduction projects. The financing program is modeled after the successful GoGreen program that provides low-interest loans for clean energy upgrades that can face similar financial barriers.

“As we support fire resilience for more individual structures, we also need to consider the benefits of community-scale efforts that can efficiently improve fire resilience across broader regions,” added Allen. “Home hardening and community hardening go hand-in-hand, and it is not only possible, but necessary that we prioritize both efforts simultaneously given the many beneficiaries when we minimize damages across California.”

Different public and private entities face major financial stakes influenced by the fire risk of a community. Beyond the risk of an individual structure, insurers’ underwriting decisions are substantially guided by community-level risk. Utilities face liability when their infrastructure causes damage, and local governments stand to lose critical infrastructure and public resources when a wildfire strikes.

Despite this shared exposure, there is little-to-no coordinated effort between these entities to collectively target mitigation work where it will result in the greatest avoided losses. This status quo that siloes efforts costs us the opportunity to pool funding, data, and resources that would most efficiently improve mitigation. Additionally, communities are currently concerned that siloed mitigation projects may not improve the insurability of the area and reduce risk from utility-caused fires due to this lack of collaboration.

SB 1297 establishes Regional Wildfire Public Private Partnerships to coordinate mitigation efforts between beneficiaries of risk reduction, such as insurers, utilities, public agencies, and nonprofits. The partnerships will be able to work on community-scale mitigation and structural hardening improvements that directly reflect their risk reduction priorities, in turn improving insurability and reducing risk of damage from utility infrastructure.

Both SB 894 and SB 1297 will be heard in the Senate Appropriations Committee in the coming weeks.

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S.M. Next

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