Wildfire Safety Advisory Board elects chair and vice chair, adopts FY26-27 priorities and committee slate

The California Wildfire Safety Advisory Board voted on March 5 to confirm leadership, adopt a budget priorities statement for the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety's (OEIS) FY26-27 budget consultation and approve committee assignments tied to the board's work plan.

Board business in brief: Jessica Block was nominated and approved to continue as chair for a one-year term; the board also confirmed a vice chair. The board voted to approve a statement of priorities for OEIS's FY26-27 budget that requested continued support for existing staff and training, additional subject-matter staff (particularly engineering and vegetation experts), and funding for quarterly in-person meetings and site visits. The board also adopted committee assignments aligned with the office's work streams.

Why this matters: The board is statutorily charged with advising the Office of Energy Infrastructure Safety on utility wildfire mitigation. The adopted statement of priorities will inform OEIS's budget request to the Governor and Legislature as agencies prepare requests later in 2025.

Elections and formal votes - Chair: Jessica Block was nominated for a one-year term and approved. The tally recorded in the meeting record was six ayes and one abstention (motion carried). The motion was made by Vice Chair Porter. - Vice chair: The board nominated and approved a vice chair; the tally recorded in the meeting record was six ayes and one abstention (motion carried).

Adopted statement of priorities for FY26-27 The statement sent to OEIS focuses on three priorities: 1) Maintain and train existing staff who support the board's work. 2) Add staff resources with technical expertise (utility engineering and vegetation management) and a senior adviser to help process the board's workload. 3) Fund travel and meeting costs to support continued quarterly, in-person meetings and necessary site visits across Northern, Central and Southern California.

The motion to adopt the statement of priorities was moved by Chair Jessica Block and approved by the board (final motion result: adopted; public record indicates the motion carried).

Committee assignments and meeting logistics The board reorganized its standing committees to match prioritized work streams: an Executive Committee (chair and vice chair), a Publicly Owned Utilities (POU) Committee, a Strategic Planning Committee, a Safety Culture Assessment Committee, a Risk Modeling Committee, a Past Recommendations Review Committee, and a Vegetation Management Committee. The board approved the committee slate by vote (motion carried). Members will use committees to divide review tasks, with particular attention to the POU review process and Bagley-Keene public meeting-law constraints discussed at length by members during the meeting.

Other procedural votes - The board approved meeting minutes from December 5, 2024 (motion carried).

Context and next steps Board members discussed the limited staff resources available to support the workload and emphasized prioritization: statutory mandates and high-impact topics must be the first focus. Members flagged the practical difficulty of reviewing all 50 POU wildfire mitigation plans in a single year and discussed options including rotating in-depth reviews, targeting POU reviews by geography or risk characteristics, and clarifying which efforts require staff resourcing.

Board members asked staff to return with refined prioritization criteria and to propose how the board's work streams should be sequenced against available staff resources. The board indicated it will revisit work-stream prioritization during committee meetings and at the next full board meeting.

Ending: The board adjourned after completing votes and set its next full meeting for June 5, 2025.