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Agencies tell senators home hardening must scale but federal delays and limited funds slow delivery
Summary
Cal FIRE, Cal OES and the task force said community wildfire preparedness—home hardening, defensible space, neighborhood mitigation—works but costs and FEMA approval delays hinder progress; pilot programs have hardened modest numbers of homes and national bond funding (Prop 4) is only partially allocated.
State agency witnesses and task force officials told a Senate joint hearing community-level mitigation is effective but underfunded and hampered by grant processes.
Daniel Berlant, identified in the transcript as California State Fire Marshal, said "home hardening" (ember-resistant vents, class A roofs, noncombustible siding, tempered-glass windows and enclosed eaves) is a proven way to reduce ignitions and that "embers are responsible for a majority of the home ignitions during wildfires." He told senators there are roughly 4 million homes in the wildland-urban interface and that 90% were built before today's wildfire building standards.
Robin Fenig of Cal OES described the Community Wildfire Mitigation Program (CWMP) pilots created under AB 38. She said the JPA has hardened 155 properties to date, has 19 in active construction and 370 with assessments completed and awaiting work. Fenig gave average per-property costs: about $12,000 for defensible-space work and roughly $49,000 for structural retrofits. She warned that FEMA environmental and historic-preservation (EHP) reviews and recent DHS-level policy changes have slowed hazard-mitigation grant approvals in some cases from months into years, limiting the ability to start retrofits even where funding was allocated.
"The simplest answer is to get the federal grant flowing and to get it flowing more quickly," Fenig said, citing long review timelines and constraints on federal match. Cal FIRE and the task force described efforts to prioritize maintenance and regional plans to avoid "random acts of mitigation," including new modeling tools that combine AI, geospatial data and wildfire science to select mitigations with highest returns.
Witnesses and lawmakers flagged workforce and contractor capacity as additional barriers to scale-up; several senators pressed for a common parcel-level dataset so agencies can target the highest-risk homes and neighborhoods. Lawmakers asked agencies to return with options to align metrics and funding to community safety and to identify workforce and delivery requirements so one-time bond dollars can be turned into durable protection rather than ad hoc projects.
The hearing did not produce a final plan but set the direction for follow-up work on grant-flow reforms, parcel-level data collection, funding stability and contractor capacity.
