Wildfire safety: fire protection building standards: defensible space requirements: The California Wildfire Mitigation Strategic Planning Act.

Becker and Laird frame a comprehensive wildfire safety agenda that seeks to quantify and align California’s mitigation efforts by establishing a Wildfire Risk Mitigation Planning Act. The centerpiece is a new planning framework designed to evaluate wildfire risk mitigation actions with quantitative methods and geospatial comparison, enabling coordinated investment decisions across state agencies, electric utilities, local governments, and private actors. A key opening objective is to direct long‑term mitigation planning through a structured framework that can be used to compare actions and track progress over time.

The act creates three interlocking components to support that objective. First, a Wildfire Risk Mitigation Planning Framework, prepared by the deputy director in consultation with the state hazard mitigation officer, designed to catalog for each mitigation action who is responsible, the targeted risk events and consequences, the cost, methodologies for evaluating risk-to-spend efficiency, geographic scope, and how actions interact with climate change, past fires, and other environmental factors. The Framework is to be updated in concert with the state’s wildfire risk forecast and made available to participating agencies and commissions for review. Second, a Wildfire Risk Baseline and Forecast would delineate statewide and county-level risk with geographic specificity, including current ignition risk, projected consequences, and targets for risk reduction across 1-, 3-, and 10-year horizons, with explicit metrics and projections that begin with ongoing assessments and are evaluated against targets beginning in 2030. Third, a Wildfire Mitigation Scenarios Report, updated annually, would identify a range of reasonable spending scenarios and planned actions by state and federal agencies, electric utilities, municipalities, nonprofits, and other stakeholders, along with quantified risk reductions and cost-effectiveness analyses using the framework. The deputy director would contract with private consultants to perform the quantitative modeling underpinning these components.

Implementation and funding arrangements are woven into a multi-year timeline. The act contemplates annual state budget appropriations to support local implementation of the framework through a revised local assistance grant program, beginning in the near term for projects that align with early ember-resistant zone implementation. In the 2025–26 through 2028–29 period, local agencies may receive grants to fund wildfire inspector positions in very high fire hazard severity zones, conditioned on adopting ember-resistant zone regulations for existing structures. Grants cover incremental inspector personnel and related equipment, with reporting requirements on inspection baselines, progress toward compliance, and shareable data posted publicly. Beginning in the 2029–30 fiscal year and extending through 2044–45, funds would be made available through the same local assistance grant program to support cost‑effective, framework‑consistent wildfire risk reduction projects by local governments, subject to annual appropriation.

Beyond planning and funding, the act revises building standards and defensible‑space rules to accelerate and expand ember‑resistant requirements. It directs the State Fire Marshal, with the Housing and Community Development department, to propose fire protection building standards for roofs, exterior walls, and other elements in fire hazard zones, with the standards applying to very high fire hazard zones and urban wildland interface communities, and with local agencies given authority to modify applicability in designated areas. The proposal to extend building standards to all reconstruction of buildings destroyed by wildfires within perimeter areas is advanced, with staged implementation tied to the standards’ adoption cycle and guidance updates. The ember‑resistant zone—within five feet of a structure—remains a central element, with phased implementation dates and contingencies tied to regulatory updates and local capacity. The act also recasts the local grants to support planning and implementation activities consistent with these ember‑resistant zone provisions and to facilitate early compliance where feasible.

Together, these provisions aim to embed data-driven planning, targeted investments, and stricter defensible-space and building standards into California’s wildfire risk strategy. The bill’s findings emphasize climate-driven risk, the need for landscape-scale treatments, and the insurance sector’s focus on ignition reduction, while the policy design seeks to cultivate interagency coordination, public accessibility to analytical bases, and a clear pathway for local governments to participate in risk-targeted prevention efforts. The approach relies on annual reporting, public disclosure of analytical foundations, and a dependence on legislative appropriations to sustain grant programs and implementation timelines.