Bureaucracy, Red Tape, and a Failed Gavin Newsom Project: Why California Moved Slowly in Wildfire Prevention

The devastating wildfires in California followed decades of slow-moving fire prevention efforts delayed by bureaucracy and red tape. Those delays were magnified by a fire prevention initiative from Gov. Gavin Newsom (D.) that went years without completing a single project.

The Los Angeles fires are already projected to cause up to $150 billion in damage while displacing hundreds of thousands of residents. At least 11 people have died in the fires as of Friday evening, though the County of Los Angeles Department of Medical Examiner said that number is expected to rise.

The disaster has renewed attention on California’s wildfire prevention shortcomings. Experts and lawmakers say wildfires in the state are made worse by multi-year permitting delays on projects that make woodlands and forests more resilient. Those types of projects—such as thinning out dense clusters of trees and prescribed burns to remove the conditions necessary for fires to spread rapidly—have also been stifled by climate groups that regularly challenge them in court.

Fire prevention projects located on public lands are often required to receive approval under the California Environmental Quality Act or, in the case of those on federal property, the National Environmental Policy Act. Those two 1970s-era laws, in addition to a handful of others, implemented a series of burdensome regulations that gave legal ammunition to activists seeking to block forest management projects.

The California law also frequently forces years-long environmental reviews on fire prevention projects. An independent state commission issued a report on the law in May, recommending reforms that allow "beneficial projects to proceed more rapidly, without sacrificing necessary environmental protections."

"We have too many fuels on the ground, too much vegetation, too many trees, grasses, that burn and go up in flames and lead to these catastrophic wildfire conditions," Property and Environment Research Center policy director Hannah Downey told the Washington Free Beacon. "We know we have a problem. We know what's causing it. What do we do? The answer is we need to remove those excess fuels."

"A major roadblock to achieving forest restoration and wildfire reduction goals is the environmental review process," she continued. "This environmental review process can take about a decade for stringent reviews. When we're talking about a crisis of this magnitude, waiting a decade is irresponsible."

The state has known for years that the plodding pace of its fire prevention efforts is a problem. Early in his term, Newsom launched the California Vegetation Treatment Program, an initiative designed to speed environmental reviews for forest management projects. But two years after launching, the program had zero completed projects, local news outlet KQED reported in 2022.  

A Free Beacon review of the program’s latest data found that of the 525 approved projects spanning 666,450 acres, only 231 projects spanning just 6,000 acres have been completed. There are only two projects located in the Los Angeles metro area spanning 130 acres—a fuel reduction project proposed by the Los Angeles County Fire Department and a nonprofit watershed project—but both remain incomplete.

In fact, a separate interagency database created by Newsom’s California Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force shows that state and federal agencies have completed forest management projects across just 54,647 acres in Southern California between 2021 and 2023. For context, the Angeles National Forest alone spans more than 650,000 acres.

In 2023, nearly all of the land in the Los Angeles area that was treated for fire involved roads and highways rather than wildlands and forests. The state transportation agency coordinated the efforts on more than 21,000 acres of the nearly 30,000 acres treated last year, which primarily consisted of urban weed spraying and roadway clearance.

California has, in the past decade, doubled its agency budget for firefighting and prevention to nearly $3.8 billion. Yet in the six months leading up to the Los Angeles fires, the agency treated just 45 acres in Los Angeles for fire prevention, primarily through weed spraying and goat grazing, and didn’t conduct any prescribed burning.

Chuck DeVore, a former Republican state representative for California who works for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, noted that not only do local air boards put fire agencies and property owners through burdensome permit processes to conduct prescribed burns, but doing so also opens people and officials alike to lawsuits from environmentalists or other property owners if the planned fires do any damage.

"The problem, as I see it, is you have the administrative state accreting all of these rules like barnacles on the ship of state so that eventually nothing can move," DeVore said.

Fire prevention efforts on federal land don’t fare any better. 

The United States Forest Service, which is responsible for overseeing much of the nation's forest management projects, takes an average of more than three years to begin a mechanical thinning project and nearly five years to conduct prescribed burn projects, figures that rise to more than seven years if additional reviews are needed, the Property and Environment Research Center concluded in a 2022 study.

A coalition of environmental groups led by the Sierra Club, in one of the latest examples, filed a lawsuit against the federal government last year, arguing that it violated the National Environmental Policy Act when approving forest management projects aimed at protecting sequoia trees in Northern California. "These projects are dubious at best," Sierra Club forest campaign manager Alex Craven said.

A database of federal forest management projects shared with the Free Beacon by the Federal Forest Resource Coalition, a timber trade group that advocates for the responsible management of forests, shows that the Forest Service regularly takes years to approve projects. The agency also assembles environmental review documents that are thousands of pages long, according to the database.

"They say, 'if we don't do a full-blown [National Environmental Policy Act] analysis, we're going to get sued.' It's like, I got news for you guys; you're going to get sued anyhow. You're not actually saving any time off this," Federal Forest Resource Coalition executive director Bill Imbergamo said in an interview.

Imbergamo noted that Congress has authorized special exemptions for the Forest Service to proceed more quickly with projects it deems necessary. The agency, though, rarely uses that authority.

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