With California facing increasingly destructive wildfires, experts and officials have long urged the strategic removal of dense, flammable vegetation that can erupt into particularly destructive flames from a lightning bolt or the spark of a power line.<\/p>\n
But after years of record investment by the state in such wildfire risk mitigation, two key money sources are drying up, potentially reducing the state\u2019s annual budget for vegetation removal by hundreds of millions of dollars.<\/p>\n
Wildfire resiliency advocates are warning that the loss of these funds will leave the state vulnerable to devastation, and are calling on California\u2019s next governor to take that threat seriously.<\/p>\n
Currently, California relies heavily on two funding sources for wildfire mitigation work: A state program that charges polluters for their emissions<\/a> and a climate bond approved by voters in 2024<\/a>. <\/p>\n Late Friday, however, state officials adopted a new structure for the emissions program<\/a>, called cap-and-invest, that analysts say will likely reduce wildfire mitigation funding by $200 million per year. At the same time, the governor\u2019s latest budget proposal puts the state on track to allocate the majority of the climate bond\u2019s $1.5 billion in wildfire prevention money within just three years.<\/p>\n As a result, California could go from routinely pulling more than $600 million a year from these sources, to just $150 million, according to an estimate from the Wildfire Solutions Coalition<\/a> \u2014 a group of more than 80 organizations representing conservationists, business owners, fire officials and tribal leaders.<\/p>\n The coalition is urging the state to find new sources of funding for the work.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have the scientists, we have the technicians, we have the advocates,\u201d said Michelle Decker, who is on the coalition\u2019s executive committee and serves as president and CEO of the Inland Empire Community Foundation. \u201cWe see this problem. We can get ahead of this problem. It is a revenue issue.\u201d<\/p>\n California wildfires have become increasingly costly. The 2025 L.A. fires alone caused an estimated $250 billion<\/a> in damage and economic loss. Insurance companies have already paid out $22.4 billion.<\/p>\n In attempt to reduce the risk of damage to communities and ecosystems, the state has employed a wide range of tactics. These includes fortifying homes against wildfires, replanting fire-ravaged forests and thinning out vegetation with prescribed burns, goat grazing and manual thinning with heavy machinery to reduce the intensity of potential fires. <\/p>\n Research suggests wildfire mitigation work pays off. A recent analysis of 285 fires in the western U.S. found that<\/a> every dollar spent on landscape projects saved about $3.75 in wildfire damage.<\/p>\n But as funding from cap-and-invest and the climate bond dwindle, the state must increasingly turn to Cal Fire, which devotes only a small portion of its budget to mitigation work.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not an issue that can be pushed off to a timeline based solely on politics,\u201d said Steve Frisch, a founding member of the coalition and president of the Sierra Business Council. \u201cFire happens whether we want it to or not.\u201d<\/p>\n After a series of destructive wildfires in Northern California and the 2017 Thomas fire in Southern California, the state legislature began to explicitly focus on funding wildfire mitigation. <\/p>\n In 2018, lawmakers directed $200 million per year of cap-and-invest funds to wildfire mitigation projects.<\/p>\n As the Woolsey fire in Southern California and the Camp fire in Paradise raged later that fall, Trump accused the state<\/a> of \u201cgross mismanagement\u201d<\/a> of forest lands and threatened to cut off federal funds unless it was corrected. <\/p>\n Gov. Gavin Newsom and the legislature, with a significant budget surplus, began earmarking even more<\/a> funds, leading to a peak of $1.1 billion in wildfire mitigation investments during the 2021-2022 fiscal year.<\/p>\n After the surplus dwindled, the legislature opted in 2024 to put a $10-billion climate bond in front of voters \u2014 $1.5 billion of which was dedicated specifically for wildfire mitigation work.<\/p>\n Newsom has since pointed to this high state funding to call on the federal government to step up its own investments<\/a> into forest management work.<\/p>\n The federal government manages 57% of all forests in the state. While the U.S. Forest Service spent $3.1 billion mitigating wildfire conditions in the state over the last few years, California spent $4.3 billion, according to the California Forest Resilience and Wildfire Task Force<\/a>. <\/p>\n However, the state has already allocated about $600 million of the climate bond\u2019s wildfire mitigation pot for the 2024-2025 and current fiscal years. The latest budget proposal would allocate more than $300 million for this upcoming fiscal year. While many advocates support allocating the money quickly, it leaves little for future years.<\/p>\n Once that money is spent, California has to pay off the $10 billion bond with interest. The result is an estimated price tag of $16 billion, paid in roughly $400 million increments every year, for 40 years, according to the state\u2019s Legislative Analyst\u2019s Office<\/a>.<\/p>\n As for the cap-and-invest funds, a fraught months-long debate at the California Air Resources Board on how to extend the program beyond 2030 resulted in a compromise that will cut the revenue it generates in half, the Legislative Analyst\u2019s Office estimates.<\/p>\n Since other projects get priority \u2014 including $1 billion every year for California\u2019s high-speed rail project \u2014 the new proposal would \u201clikely leave no funding\u201d for the wildfire and forest resilience line item, the Legislative Analyst\u2019s Office found.<\/p>\n Cal Fire still holds a modest annual budget for wildfire mitigation work<\/a>. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the agency had $500 million for forest management and fire prevention that was not directly tied to cap-and-invest or the bond \u2014 up from about $65 million two decades prior.<\/p>\n As for the federal government, independent analyses by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters<\/a> and NPR<\/a> found that Forest Service wildfire mitigation work is on the decline amid federal staffing cuts. The Forest Service claims the decrease in work was primarily due to poor weather conditions for activities like prescribed burns and staff being occupied with firefighting.<\/p>\n Both the state and federal government\u2019s investments pale in comparison to the spending of California\u2019s investor-owned utilities. In 2025 alone, the utilities planned to spend more than $9.2 billion<\/a> on preventing their equipment from sparking the next devastating wildfire, primarily funded by Californians\u2019 electricity bills.<\/p>\n Record heat. Raging fires. What are the solutions? <\/p>\n Get Boiling Point, our newsletter about climate change, the environment and building a more sustainable California.<\/p>\n By continuing, you agree to our Terms of Service<\/a>, which include arbitration and a class action waiver. You agree that we and our third-party vendors may collect and use your information, including through cookies, pixels and similar technologies, for the purposes set forth in our Privacy Policy<\/a> such as personalizing your experience and ads. <\/p>\n Times staff writer Hayley Smith contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With California facing increasingly destructive wildfires, experts and officials have long urged the strategic removal of dense, flammable…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":831968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5123],"tags":[4833,1582,276,341259,69423,341260,12847,2142,5025,25140,341261,2961,224,5337,10999,290,341262,341258,1628],"class_list":["post-831967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-analyst","tag-ca","tag-california","tag-climate-bond","tag-coalition","tag-destructive-wildfire","tag-dollar","tag-federal-government","tag-fire","tag-fiscal-year","tag-funding-source","tag-la","tag-los-angeles","tag-losangeles","tag-million","tag-state","tag-wildfire-mitigation-funding","tag-wildfire-mitigation-work","tag-year"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116662622441238323","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=831967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/831968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=831967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=831967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=831967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}