Incarcerated individual hand crew members: wages.

Assembly Member Bryan, with principal coauthors Flora and Reyes, advances a package that would pay incarcerated inmate hand crew members $7.25 per hour for active-fire assignments and extend the same wage to ward and youth hand crew participants at Pine Grove Youth Conservation Camp, while also expanding the time-credit framework tied to firefighting work.

The measure adds a new provision that establishes the $7.25 hourly wage for inmate hand crew members during active-fire incidents, with the rate reviewed annually. It also amends the existing credits regime to provide two days of credit for every day served for county jail inmates assigned to conservation camps and for inmates who have completed firefighter training or serve as inmate firefighters. In addition to these credits, the bill introduces wage and administrative adjudication/remedy provisions for disputes over sums owed, applying separately to state facilities and to county conservation camps, and it adds a credit reduction for inmates who have completed firefighter training, with eligibility for the enhanced credits limited to those eligible after October 1, 2011. The Pine Grove Youth Conservation Camp provisions extend the $7.25 wage to ward or youth hand crew members, with the same annual wage review and a CDCR-maintained dispute process.

Implementation is framed as urgent to support wildfire response readiness, with the act taking immediate effect. The administrative framework requires regulations to govern the adjudication and remedy processes for sums owed, applicable to both state facilities and county camps, and to Pine Grove’s program. The text notes that there is no explicit appropriation, prompting anticipated fiscal analyses and budgetary considerations, along with questions about how wage payments interact with the broader credits system and how funding will be allocated across state and local entities.